The bathrooms at Batson River in Portland comprise private stalls and a communal sink. Photo by Erin Little

Walking into Batson River Brewing’s Portland restaurant, there’s a lot to gawk at: the ceiling-high stone fireplace, the taxidermy on the walls and the massive, circular bar at the center. But what struck me the most on my first visit, not long after it opened in late 2020, was the bathrooms.

There were the hand towels, for one, so thick and luxurious it felt criminal to throw away after a single use (though since replaced with more standard paper). More significant, though, were the stalls, each with its own full-length door and lock, no noise to be heard coming from inside, nor any sight of shuffling feet with trousers dropped atop them.

It may sound silly to wax poetic about using the potty, but even more absurd is the communal restroom setup we’ve so long accepted without question. Surely, the aliens are taking note of the conversations happening between co-workers at neighboring urinals, on the same planet where unzipping your pants anywhere else in the workplace will get you fired or worse.

But the standard has been changing, with more single-occupancy, gender-neutral bathrooms popping up at restaurants and breweries, offices and institutions. Maine passed a law in 2019 requiring new buildings used by the public to have such facilities, with the bill’s stated purpose being so that people with disabilities could be assisted by someone of the opposite gender. But the shift nationally has more closely aligned with the fight for transgender people’s right to use the bathroom of their choice — which came to a head in Maine when the family of an Orono student (now famous actress and activist Nicole Maines) took her school district to court over the issue and, in 2014, won.

Providing single-occupancy, gender-neutral bathrooms has offered an alternative for trans and nonbinary people concerned about being harassed in communal bathrooms or uncomfortable with either choice, cisgendered folks who can’t bear to use the same facilities as someone assigned a different sex at birth than them, and, as a side effect, anyone who has a shy bladder or simply prefers to use a toilet alone, which, I’m guessing, is most of us.

I know that, in the Press Herald building, having two men’s and women’s multistall bathrooms redesignated in 2022 for anyone’s individual use felt like a consolation prize for some of us begrudgingly returning to the office post-COVID-19, and I’m positive that their popularity has less to do with gender politics than privacy.

The University of Maine began adding the option in 2014 at the request of students seeking “more privacy and a ‘home-like’ bathroom experience,” spokesperson John Diamond said. According to an editorial in student newspaper The Maine Campus this fall, the 36 single-use bathrooms with showers (26 of them installed since 2020) provide both “relief for LGBTQ+ students” (pun intended?) and more privacy and comfort for everyone. At the University of New England, there’s an entire online directory of the all-gender, single-occupancy restrooms on its Portland and Biddeford campuses.

I’m sure I don’t have to spell out all the dirty details about why people might prefer having a toilet to themselves, which is what makes it puzzling that it took so long for businesses and institutions to start opting for them over the communal style, though cost seems like the most probable reason.

The bathrooms at Lenora in the Old Port, designed by Portland firm Barrett Made. Photo by Erin Little

But at restaurants and breweries, there’s also a space-saving incentive, said Brian Knipp, vice president of Barrett Made, the Portland-based architecture and construction company that worked with Batson River on the design and did the same with Old Port restaurant Lenora.

Even though it sounds counterintuitive that building tiny rooms for all the toilets would reduce the facilities’ footprint, by clustering them around a single, communal sink, it does, said Knipp, who added that it also makes for “a little more luxurious experience.”

Whatever the motivation, the result has been a more comfortable world for all of us.

As the latest debate about trans rights rages — this time about sports teams, but again with a Maine student at the center of it — we can look back at the bathroom wars, with all the concerns and fears raised then, and see how, in practice, allowing people to use the bathroom of their choice hasn’t had much impact on most of our lives.

That is, aside for this one very positive upshot, which I think everyone can get behind.