Regulating Access to Single Sex Provision in the Workplace

For places that have one toilet I recommend that it is is unisex (open to both sexes, but single sex in use).

But for bigger companies I believe that "best practice" involves both providing the safest options (single sex spaces) and NOT PROVIDING more dangerous options even though some people might choose to put themselves at risk by using them.

Why on earth should less safe spaces be provided simply because a tiny proportion of men wish to uses spaces with women, and a proportion of women have been gaslit into believing that some men are women and vulnerable when they are not?

Fire brigades give their staff the best, most fire-resistant kit they have at their disposal. They do not give staff the option of using the less effective kit from the 1970s. Why should toilet provision not be held to the same standards?

The judgment in Croft v Royal Mail when discussing where a transexual employee can be accommodated states.

Circumstances could arise in which any employee might reasonably be asked for proof of anatomical sex.

I imagine a medical report confirming biological sex would suffice rather than a genital inspection by HR.

'Protocols have been developed for managing non-compliance (e.g. reminders/ clarification, formal warning, dismissal) and for legally verifying sex, should that be needed.'

I'm curious as to what those protocols are, as I'd have thought that the ability to change passports and birth certificates (with a GRC) would make it very difficult to legally verify someone's sex if they were inclined to lie about it.

Yes. I have spent the last few years listening to views, trying to work out how to solve privacy v health&safety but the traditional, widely used solutions are there because they worked best.

@Keeptoiletssafe I agree with you, the situation I was/am in my workplace is a luxury one, and wouldn't work for more public spaces. I want to expand also on schools, totally enclosed spaces are more risky, at an age when teens are more likely to take risky, inappropriate or violent behaviours. It would only work if heavily checked by adults. In school, even truly single sex spaces are often avoided because of the irresponsible behaviour of a few.

Good case study thank you @Brainworm. Every employer and service provider should be thinking about the best way to implement the SC judgement and the more examples of good practice we have the better.

In an ideal world, everyone would like the comforts of their home loo - privacy, just their own use etc.

Studies show 80% of people refrain from using toilets outside the home. I think it is more subtle and this figure obviously changes depending on location.

Making all out-of-home toilets cubicles completely private will lead to more deaths and more sexual assaults. It is situational but that’s what will happen overall. I track the changes. Making more out-of-home toilet cubicles completely private will still lead to more deaths and sexual assaults because there will be more locations for these to happen.

The most common call out for London fire brigade? A collapsed person behind a locked door.

Designers have tried to find ways of keeping toilets safe whilst completely private. For example, proper building regs mean no public toilet door is truly secure as they need to have a mechanism to open and pull the door outwards so you can get to a body. Stickers aren’t going to work. Currently alarms aren’t pulled when someone is attacked or falls ill in disabled toilets due to several reasons (pull cord doesn’t work or is tied up, people are too embarrassed, person is too ill to reach, person wants harm to come to themselves, consciousness is impaired before collapse, ‘freezing’ response, it’s too dangerous, it does work but no one attends). These are the things that have been tried: heat sensors, weight limits that open doors to prevent 2 people being in the same toilet, intercom systems that send emails to wardens if a person mentions calls out a certain phrase or sound, making the cubicle so small you can physically only fit one person in, doors springing wide open after a certain occupancy time. None of them are as cheap, easy to maintain and reliable as a floor-to-door gap for instantly knowing if someone is in danger.

Going back to your examples, your office loos are like a home situation in that you had the ‘luxury’ of being private whilst ill safely because it sounds like you are a healthy person normally and you weren’t alone - people knew where you were and care for you and would assist quickly. This is the best situation. I think you are lucky to be in this situation at work and I don’t think it was risky.

People with medical conditions and those who haven’t got a person in the actual vicinity who knows they are ill and will check on them, haven’t got those luxuries. Neither has anyone led/pushed into their cubicle where people don’t come to their aid. This can be in surprisingly public places.

If you were on your own in the office, I would recommend the office door being unlocked, having a phone next to you getting as close to the entrance as possible and phoning someone to come and check on you physically. This is the same advice paramedics give people who live on their own who call them.

I think the main provision should always be the safer, single-sex with cubicles with gaps option. However, I agree that offering a private, self-contained, single occupancy option is not a bad idea. There are situations where I am myself happy to use it: when I have a very heavy period, and emptying my mestrual cup becomes a messy process, I like to have a very private space where I can wash my hands immediately. On one occasion, I had food poisoning while at work, and I was glad to have a private space (for myself and for the other people as well). I had alerted a colleague that was checking on me.
I really appreciate the work you are doing, @keeptoiletssafe, as my sister has epilepsy, but I also think that sometimes people might have their reasons to choose something marginally more risky.
It also depends on the settings: what's appropriate in a workplace is not, in my opinion, good for schools, or certain public spaces, like a station.
There could also be campaigns about safety in toilets with stickers inside the toilets :)
Anyway, I'm glad, OP, that your workplace is trying to apply the SC ruling in an appropriate and balanced way.

I disagree. Health and safety should be the most significant factors at play. Safety is an absolute right.

What do you think is extremely low?
There are many people who die on the toilet because it’s where you go when you feel ill. 11% of cardiac arrests happen on the toilet. You can’t mitigate for that.

There is at least one rape per school day in a British school. These happen in private areas.

The more I investigate, the more incidents I find. WRN found horrendous levels of abuse in hospitals (locations unknown). BBC journalists were the ones finding the figures in schools.

Absolute privacy is not a friend of safety.

That's a fair point and I don't disagree tbh, but that is already true and I don't think that extending the user pool to transpeople makes that particular problem worse.

There is certainly a good case to increase the provision of accessible facilities across the board, but that is a different battle.

Many work places have just one toilet.

No one is being forced into mixed sex toilets. There are single sex female, and male, toilets as well. Having the unisex provision as an extra option is the right compromise.

Imagine an incredibly high-risk role dealing with HIV positive mentally ill drug users. Anti-retro-virals are available for anyone who has an incident which risks HIV infection. Imagine someone, based on no evidence at all, came along and said "I don't want to use those retro-virals, I want to use those other ones that we used to use until 10 years ago - you need to supply the old ones and make them available to staff who prefer them to the new ones".

The old retro-virals were only half as effective as the new ones, which is why we have moved onto the new ones.

If you were the boss would you provide a choice of retro-virals to your staff, even though the evidence was clear that if the staff used the old ones they were twice as likely to end up with HIV?

Can it ever be acceptable for a boss to give staff two choices, one which is much less safe than the other?

If they are going to provide single use occupancy toilets then SURELY the safest place for them is in single sex spaces?

We have two sets of toilets, based on sex, for reasons of privacy, dignity and safety. There is literally no need to provide any more, not least as every single person can use their correct sex space, and if they can;t then surely they have a right to use the disabled because they have a debilitating mental health issue.

Yes!

Single sex disabled facilities are definitely something that needs to be done more.

That assumes people are going to use the accessible toilets for the reasons they were intended. These toilets are used for lots of different things already which is why they are left in such a state for the people that have no other options.

If there is any excuse to misuse a toilet people will take it. Some public toilets don’t even last a day before they are closed down due to vandalism etc.

It’s a difficult balance but I find people constantly overestimate how nicely toilets will be treated.

Accessible toilets really need to be respected more.
https://www.euansguide.com/campaigns/safer-toilets/

I disagree with this when there is no option for a fourth space.

I understand the frustration linked to the perception that those who need accessible facilities are being edged out because the pool of people using the facilities has been extended, but given the small number of transpeople involved, I think the impact will be negligible. In an imperfect world, I think extending the use of accessible facilities to transpeople is a reasonable solution which balances the needs of all of the user groups.

It’s interesting to see how this will all pan out.
Disabled people don’t even get to call their loo the third space and have the benefits of a single sex loo.
Now they’ll have extra wait times too if more people go in the accessible toilets.

Because of the designs differences, it isn’t a ‘neutral’ solution. This is because of the dangers of a private space leading to a public area. It’s worse if that private space is mixed sex.

I think these are unisex facilities so a room for single use occupancy and to be used by either men or women.

I think it's difficult to argue that they don't have a place, because they will be the only option in many small workplaces.

If you want to be up on a disciplinary, possibly looking at dismissal and police intervention it's very easy to do too.

Make a choice.

Did the Pride Network argue that the policy was unenforceable because it is impossible to know somebody's sex and that there is an Article 8 right to conceal sex?

If so, how did the organisation respond?