I’ve seen the future of public washrooms — not only seen it, but I’ve peed in it. It’s all-gender. It’s private. It’s clean. It’s wonderful, as far as toilet experiences go.

Way better than your familiar old-school, old-smell, blue-plastic Johnny-on-the-spots. Way better than the trough-style urinals my son and I used at an amusement park in Maine just last week (which were notable mostly for occasioning reminiscences of Maple Leaf Gardens). Dare I say even way better than the line of stalls (and open urinals, for men) most of us have in our workplaces.

These new washrooms are at the CNE, where generations ago people routinely lined up to see the future: my grandparents remembered seeing their first televisions and fax machines at the Ex and going every year to view new home-appliance inventions or futuristic prototype cars. Now the CNE is displaying innovation again, here in the realm of outdoor-event washroom supply.

The first thing you notice about these toilet facilities is the doors marking them gender neutral: the figure displayed is half the traditional standing info-sign stick-man, half the traditional skirt-wearing washroom-door woman. If that doesn’t make the message plain enough, the words underneath do: “We don’t care.”

With all the fuss and bother over which gender people are allowed to use which washrooms that has emerged since transgender people have become more visible in the past few years — and the bizarre and bitter fights in the United States about gendered washrooms (especially in states that have passed laws strictly regulating public washroom usage) — it’s an elegant solution, expressed amusingly in the plain-spoken text.

“The whole debate came up about which gender can use which washroom, the debate you see in the public,” CNE general manager Virginia Ludy says on the phone describing the various challenges her team considered in designing new facilities to replace old ones. “This just solves that problem. Who cares who uses them, right? Men, women, doesn’t matter. You go in, you use it, you do your business, you leave.”

The reason that’s so uncomplicated and uncontroversial here is because each washroom is private: an enclosed room containing a toilet, a urinal, a sink; with walls that go from floor-to-ceiling and a door that locks. This is the revolutionary thing about them that makes them such a pleasure to use whether you have conventional washroom gender issues of any kind or not: they offer privacy. A place for everyone to do their business away from the eyes, ears, sights, sounds and other senses and sensations of their fellow fair-goers.

Perhaps I go on too much, exaggerating the beauty of a simple, utilitarian washroom. But seriously: it is a relief to relieve yourself in a public washroom that doesn’t make you feel so much like you’re in public. I have seen the same private approach sporadically for a decade in trendy bars and restaurants here and there — each time it feels like experiencing a bit of luxury. But bracing myself for the unpleasantness of the traditional fair toilet trailers, these were a revolution. It felt like a breakthrough of some kind.

Ludy says avoiding gender controversies wasn’t even the driving force behind the new toilets. The old washroom trailers were worn out, and when looking at new designs to be built in converted shipping containers by Giant Container Services for the Ex, they started with the old layout where people climbed stairs and lined up for stalls and sinks and crowded around urinals. “These are cumbersome and difficult to get in and out of, and we thought: Isn’t there a better way?”

She says another challenge they considered was the conventional situation where women (often with children in tow) face much longer lineups than men. These private stalls, at ground level, solve most of those problems. There’s one lineup for everyone, and a private room for everyone. There’s not as much jockeying around for access to sinks or unpleasant and time-consuming navigating of lines in the doorway. A couple of larger units designed specifically for families and wheelchair accessibility solve other traditional challenges. Cleaning these doesn’t require shutting down a whole strip of stalls at once, since they can be scrubbed one at a time. And in the off-season, the containers stack atop one another for storage, Ludy says.

Ludy says they ordered just a few units this year — some near the kids' midway and some south of BMO Field — to test how they work, and they’ll buy more, refining the design, over the next five years. One change they’ll make, she says, is to have an indicator showing if a stall is occupied, which is missing from the current models. But she says so far all the feedback has been positive, the lines appear to be shorter and no one has complained about the apathy displayed on the signs.

Those signs, with their split-gender character borrowed from the Internet and their bold statement of apathy — enough to make some people smile all on their own — appear to be making a culture-war statement. (“It is cheeky,” Ludy agrees.) But the design of the washrooms inside actually makes the culture-war argument irrelevant. They’re just a better, more comfortable way to do public toilets.

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The future! Or so we might hope.