It's party season. There are dance floors to dazzle. I've always found it difficult to part ways with a dance floor once we have made each other's acquaintance. And so it was that I found myself in a nightclub but this time feeling, for the first time, unacceptably ancient.

There was perhaps two decades' distance between myself and my average fellow dancer but one of the delights of dancing in the dark is that no one can see your wrinkles.

It was one of my favourite venues but one I hadn't enjoyed in a while. I went to visit the facilities and - ugh. They've done the toilet thing.

The toilet thing? Unisex toilets seem to be the preferred option in certain clubs - or, certainly, the clubs I like to go to.

Creating new bathroom facilities is expensive and time consuming so what tends to happen instead is a quick change to the door signs. The sign for the Women's is changed to one reading "cubicles" while the sign for the Men's changes to "cubicles and urinals".

These set ups are created with good intentions to ensure everyone is catered for, which is right both morally and from a business sense perspective. The more people feel happy in your premises, the more money you make.

What this means in practice - because of our practical needs - is that what were once women-only facilities are now open to everyone while women are generally still restricted to one space given urinals are of no use to us.

Alienating those women who feel uncomfortable in mixed-sex toilets never seems to be factored in to the moral or business case.

What these set ups need is for men to behave in a thoughtful manner, being mindful of how their presence and behaviour might make women feel and policing their less careful brothers.

When the bathroom facilities are laid out in this way - in a way that is designed to be mindful of everyone's particular needs - you would think men would stick to the place specifically designed for them and leave the other toilets for everyone else.

Back to the nightclub. I went to the "Cubicles" toilet and there, in the queue in front of me, was one woman and four men. There were another two women behind me and the room had four cubicles. So, a queue of eight people for four cubicles yet 50% of those people could just have easily used the room next door.

On principle, it's galling. In practical terms, it's irksome. One of the guys started chatting up the woman at the front of the queue and she seemed quite happy about this, though I'm not sure it would be for me. Nothing says romance like a bog romance.

I said to the young women behind me, nodding at the blokes, "Why do we tolerate this?" She looked blank. She probably wondered why someone had brought their great aunt to the disco. One of the guys, the frisky one, said to me, "Do you need something?" in a tone that let me know I was dismissed.

Back on the dance floor and a young woman came over and took my hands, leaning in to my ear to ask me to please stay with her. Her boyfriend had gone to the lavatory and for a smoke break and a creep had appeared to fill the vacuum. I knew exactly who she meant as he'd been creeping at me earlier in the evening (no one can see your wrinkles in the dark) and my male friend had had to tell him twice to back off.

I remember the days when female nightclub toilets were a safe space from men, not a place to be hit on by men, and so there was no sanctuary in the club other than approaching a stranger for support.

At the very end of the night, when the lights had come on and folk were gathering their coats to leave, I went back to the cubicles-only loos. One of the doors opened and who appeared? Super creep, smiling broadly. He didn't wash his hands but he did hang around a young woman at the sinks for long enough that she told him to shift.

And what of any of it? I've just told you an anecdote where nothing really happened. The creep was handsy and unpleasant but very low tariff. The queue for the cubicles eventually went down.

I have always strongly advocated that these specific types of unisex toilets only work if men help make them work. But here was an example of men emphatically not minding their manners but none of the women seemed to mind.

There was a brouhaha very recently about a school in Angus where there are unisex toilets. It's a very difficult subject to discuss because it overlaps with gender identity issues and anything even trans-adjacent spirals into discord almost instantly.

I've said this before and I will indulge myself by saying it again: the comeback "but you have a gender neutral toilet in your house" is not the showstopper you think it is.

It merely shows you haven't given the topic any serious or sensible consideration. Do you allow complete strangers to wander into your home untrammelled and make free with lavatory?

I thought not. In fact, you lock your doors to keep strangers out.

One of the arguments put forward for mixed sex toilets in schools is that they stymie bullying and lead to tidier, cleaner surroundings because the girls have a civilising effect on the boys.

I cover court and you cannot attend sentencing hearings for long before you come across a defence brief telling the sheriff that his client has a girlfriend now and the missus is keeping a tight reign on him. That is, the girl is having a civilising effect on the boy. While there is truth in this, it is frustratingly onerous.

Like, my to do list is long enough, you know? The march towards unisex toilets is well underway. There's a distinction between toilets specifically designed with equality and safeguarding in mind and these mindless sign changes. I've always been vehemently opposed to the latter because they remove spaces for women, ask that only women make accommodations, and make it easier for bad actors to access women.

My festive party season experience have given me pause because the younger women I've been socialising alongside just don't care. Am I pushing against something no one else cares about?

The central, crucial issue to so many things is ensuring that young women know they are allowed to say no. Girls have to be empowered to be able to say they don't want to use unisex toilets at school and young women have to know that they don't need to accept men in their spaces if they don't want to.

If we dilute that messaging or undermine it then we leave young women to fend for themselves and remove the onus from men to civilise themselves. That's an unacceptably regressive step, from whichever queue you're standing in.