Excellent, a toilet question. Perfect for my usual reddit browsing throne! And weirdly on point for my answers here.

A lot of our scholarship on this comes from one person, Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, the Queen of the Latrines (hereafter AOK-O), so if I'm scant on references at any point, apologies, it's from chatting to her over drinks. Also, a lot of her stuff is expensive or paywalled, so I'll be using an interview she did for the Smithsonian for a fair bit. If you want the books the knowledge comes from, they'll be at the end. To business: I'll break your question down into a few sections, as you did.

Were Roman toilets unisex?

Yes. In the sense that women could use them. In the same way that an able-bodied person could use the disabled toilet on the ground floor today instead of the other toilets up that pesky flight of stairs.

However, they were typically built in 'male' spaces, certainly by the second century CE (Jansen et al., 2011, ch.8). They were arranged for where men would be out and doing business. They would also have been unlikely to be safe for many women (according to this interview from AOK-O). So, a woman could go in. But would they want to? Well, that's another matter entirely, and frankly, nobody would want to. Roman toilets were filthy. Typically low ceilings, dark, with lots of shit and piss on the seats. We don't know how often they were cleaned, and the proximity of the seats indicates that pooping was a fairly intimate activity - think a urinal trough at half time. Shoulder to shoulder, but for cubicles, and instead of shoulders, cheeks.

Were women expected to hold it back?

Well, kind of. The differentiation of space between private (women) and public (men) in the Roman world has been discredited of late, particularly by Amy Russell in the amazing The Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome (2015). Elite Roman women, who would be in the spaces that were furnished with toilets would unlikely want to use one of the toilets. Similarly, elite Roman men would not either - Cicero's not going to be hiking up his toga and muttering his latest speech next to you. So what were their other options? Personally, it seems unlikely that they would have nipped into a bathhouse to use the privy - although I have no data on that. Something to look into.

Ultimately, if you don't want to get your toga smeared or your sandals damp, go home. Use the private one. Not to mention, again mentioned in the interview from AOK-O and in the 2011 volume, there were things that bit your bum in the public toilets.

Could enslaved people use the public toilets?

Yes. We think. They were public toilets, and not having to piss and shit in the street is a public health issue, not a status one - everyone walks the streets. And this is evident from the lack of epigraphic evidence. Normally, Romans are champing at the bit to lay claim to their public building projects. They'll plant a flag and scrawl on the door "It was me what built this."

Don't get that for the bogs.

Anyway, I'm done, and I'm also, conveniently, done.

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Bibliography

Jansen, G., Koloski-Ostrow, A. and Moormann, E. (2011 ed.) Roman Toilets: their Archaeology and Cultural History Leuven: Peeters.
Koloski-Ostrow, A. (2015) The archaeology of sanitation in Roman Italy : toilets, sewers, and water systems University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill.
Russell, A. (2015) The Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Zeldovich, L. (2021) 'How the Ancient Romans Went to the Bathroom' Smithsonian Mag.