Because if a transwoman wants to be in women’s toilets the safest design has to then change to one of individual privacy for everyone. It is no longer a women’s toilet. In certain situations this cannot be avoided. If you have a toilet in a small cafe for example it has to be a unisex design.
I collate incidents of when things go wrong in toilets. Most people in any demographic are good people. A man would typically help another man who was in difficulty. But bad men will exploit opportunities. Bad men have pretended to be transwomen for the duration of being in the women’s toilets to sexually assault women. Bad men put hidden cameras in toilets. Male doctors and male school staff are highly represented in that category. Bad men are voyeurs. All voyeurs in prison are men (Upto May 25)
Toilets are vulnerable places. So much so they have their own section in the Sexual Offences Act (2003). When this was debated in Parliament it was argued this would be discriminatory towards men. In fact it made heterosexual sex a crime in a toilet that the public or a section of the public had access to - homosexual sex was already a crime. There are implications for men if women are allowed in men’s toilets. If he exposes himself at a urinal? What about not closing the cubicle door? That’s what women had to put up with at the Home Office. Urinals which are safe, quick and space saving are more likely to go. That’s less units for men.
Sexual Harm Prevention Orders in many toilet cases have been put on men forbidding them to loiter or enter women’s toilets and in some cases unisex toilets.
We have vanishingly few public toilets in this country because they get closed down from the costs and misuse - sex, drugs and vandalism. There’s estimated to be one council run public toilet for every 15,000 people now.
Service providers are more likely to be private businesses. They need to keep their safer designs but in order to do that there needs to be rules that they must stay single sex.
What we actually need is more women’s toilets. Women didn’t use to have public toilets and we’ve been playing catch-up. For equality, women should have twice as many, due to our biological needs, to have equal queues.
Going back to Dolly Parton. If she read my safety report, I would like to think she would agree with me. She also carried a gun. We don’t do that here - we rely on the kindness of strangers around us to keep us safe if we are on our own in the toilet and have a medical emergency, being pestered, or are trapped.
As I said in previous posts, I saved the life of a young woman I didn’t know. Precisely because of a door gap. If the Good Law Project or ‘inclusive’ toilet designers had their way on toilets, we would not have seen her. They design in individual privacy. That’s the stark consequence of my experience and the type of incidents I collate.