Zara - male bodies in female changing room

@Cordyceps.

I don't believe you.

That is incredibly rude @Cordyceps .. just because I work in a shop doesn't make me an idiot ! If I'm at all unsure I won't approach but obviously male species should not be in my female changing rooms ! End of !

So when we’ve trained all the minimum wage staff to police the changing rooms by sex, what happens when my daughter’s butch lesbian girlfriend is sent to the men’s dressing room? Are you ok with that? She is regularly told to leave the women’s toilets and has been threatened by women that they will go get their male partners to drag her out of the toilet by force if she doesn’t leave. I also have a friend who is a tall woman with a large nose (and four naturally birthed children that came from her own vagina) who has been asked to leave female spaces by people who refuse to believe she is female.
I guess these women, who would both feel and actually BE safer in a well-staffed unisex changing room, don’t count. They’re just exceptions after all.

Ah yes... it’s not just hypocrisy, it’s M&S honking hypocrisy...

www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6265665/amp/M-S-accused-oppressing-girls-selling-hijabs-school-uniform.html

Wasn’t it M&S who developed a ‘modesty’ collection (just for women of course) and sold a black headscarf for little girls in the school uniform department? How they square this with unisex changing room I just don’t get.

It's bad enough experiencing the 24/7, every-single-day-of-your-life male gaze/judgement when simply wandering around tesco, or meeting with new clients, or crossing the road.

I absolutely wouldn't tolerate the violation of having unknown men sharing my changing space. Its a step too far for obvious reasons.

Men can't control themselves and they demonstrate this daily all across the world.

Happily, I do all of my clothes shopping online these days. But I feel so angry for everybody who still uses changing rooms.

[quote Cordyceps]@FindTheTruth I'm a woman, and I still think that the SPECIFIC situation of mixed-gender changing rooms in a busy, staffed store doesn't present a real risk of sexual assault to anyone. Because they don't. They may make people uncomfortable and they may be unsuitable for people who are very modest for religious or personal reasons but they do not present a physical danger. I don't necessarily agree with literally everyone else in this thread that a private business needs its minimum wage staff to police the sex of the people using changing rooms when no actual danger is present (and those of you talking about cameras, well, what about the male staff who work there, should they all be fired? Because that's who would be more likely to be installing and monitoring spy cams, not male customers who just pass through).

It's really weird that you're calling me a man.[/quote]
More lack of reading comprehension. Or do you not understand the difference between 'sex' and 'gender'?

Posters on this thread are in favour of 'mixed-gender' changing rooms. In other words, men (no matter how they identify) need to change in the male changing room.

Posters on this thread are against mixed-sex changing rooms. In other words, if you are an adult human male you need to change in the male changing room.

Most women I know don’t what mixed changing rooms anywhere.
Most women I know don’t want self Id
Most women I know don’t want men in women’s sports
Most women I know don’t want men in women’s shelters
Most women I know don’t want a man, how ever they present themselves as CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis.
Most women I know don’t want men in women’s spaces anywhere.
Those women I know are aged from 19 - 85.
Women deserve and need the right to safety, dignity and privacy, and overwhelming women are saying NO it’s really that simple.

Is they are labelled as unisex (I remember all that in the 70s and it didn’t go down well did it?) then you can choose. But now they sneakily call them ‘changing rooms’ so you assume that the one in the knicker dept is ladies until you are standing there in your undies and head a man’s voice. Then you realise is didn’t say ladies/woman and there wasn’t a woman sign on the door...

• The cubicles are protected only by curtains
• There weren't enough cubicles because two of them were occupied by men. So the woman had to change in the communal part of the changing room.

Women have the right to privacy and dignity.

cordyceps Sorry for your experience as a teenager, that sounds truly awful and it is of no surprise that it has left ongoing issues.

I am not overly bothered about unisex changing rooms, though if that is what they are then it should be clear that they are, not 'women and others'

MrsOvertonsWindow
You are right. Companies do not even consult their women customers over this. I went into a branch of M&S where womens fitting rooms were open to men who wanted to go in. The staff said they could not do anything to prevent it as it was now policy. I think it shows complete contempt for their core cusotmer base that this was imposed with no consideration for their female customers (who are the majority I imagine), I won't buy anything from Marks & Spencer now because of this.

I still think though that the women who are unhappy with it may have more spending power, so maybe the only way is to stop spending in these shops, even if they have the most beautiful dress you've ever seen.

And, of course, let them know why. Maybe there might be some power left in declaring that if they go woke, they go broke.

Awful that it might only be finances that change their minds but let's use whatever we can.

gunnersgold good.

And if these women change their minds - then they’ve given it all away. Explain that to your daughters and granddaughters who gasp when you tell them of days out with your pals buying the latest fashions, or to your mum or older self with failing eyesight or mobility issues feeling unsafe when you hear men’s voices behind a curtain as you get undressed.

I work in retail, I tell men to go to the mens changing room . I don't want men in my changing room regardless of what they are trying on!

When I was a teenager, one of the most fun things I used to do with my best friend was go shopping. We saved up our pocket money and spent the afternoon in miss selfridge and biba and Chelsea girl, in and out of changing rooms with armfuls of clothes.

It's so sad that experience is being denied our teenagers because men are being allowed to trample over our single sex spaces. And some women are idiotic enough to let them.

Loads of women and girls don’t like it. So don’t change it. It’s that simple.

It’s not a safety issue, it’s a men controlling women thing.

[quote Cordyceps]@DoubleTweenQueen my point, perhaps badly made, is that people think that a man in the busy Zara changing room makes it unsafe, while a strictly female-only changing room is safe. That perception is wrong. It doesn't mean that someone is wrong for feeling unsafe in one situation and safe in the other - I know, logically, that I'm not at risk being alone on the top deck of the bus with 10 teenage girls. That doesn't mean I'm wrong to feel my illogical fear, but then again, it doesn't mean that it's necessarily the bus company's responsibility to make me feel better about the situation. I don't think that, realistically, any woman is at real risk in the specific scenario of "man in the Zara changing rooms" and I don't think they have any particular obligation to make people "feel" safer by policing their changing cubicles. You may disagree. It'a a big wide world and people have different opinions.[/quote]
Frankly, your phobia has the square root of bugger all to do with either the subject or me: sorry and all that, but in the great scheme of things what it gets is "bad luck, you had a nasty experience at school". So did a lot more people than you, and in most cases if they are female the chances are the person or persons who assaulted them were male.

Your having had a bad experience does not entitle you to anything except a certain amount of sympathy: less than I might accord someone who didn't try to use their experience as a pretext to tell me (and every other woman who has ever been raped) what I am supposed (and they are supposed) to find acceptable or not.

Nor do you get to define what someone else finds to be "risk". Being hit over the head with a rock is not the only thing which causes trauma.

That's just what you made me feel; it's a big wide world and people have different opinions, that one is mine.

Mixed sex provision actively removes all the benefit that women enjoy.