Brighton is always going to have the last Japanese soldiers standing.

https://pshebrighton.org/pshebrighton/flawed-and-confusing-brighton-hove-council-confronts-the-new-equality-code/

It's as bad as you would expect...

No I thought everyone above was just being critical of the ‘well we have them at home’ excuse. No offence taken whatsoever. I was oblivious!

And yes to water danger - especially the bath.

Obviously the other harm I didn’t touch on with home v non-home is that is very different who has legitimate access to your toilet compartment at home and the area in front of it. That becomes a big component of why door gaps are a necessity for best health and safety in a non-domestic environment compared to at home.

I hope by reading these threads more people see why toilets are designed and regulated the way they are and think of everyone’s safety when they are at their most vulnerable.

One little thing I do is to make sure the pull cord in accessible toilets is untied. They can be tied up out of reach. And I may have been known to complain that an accessible toilet was being used as a store cupboard!!

Maybe one good thing to come out of this is that people will really place value on the accessible toilet. It should be respected more than it is.

@Keeptoiletssafe
I'm sure you didn't think I was being sarcastic vis-a-vis you. Just at the idiotic your-home-toilet-is-gender-neutral-so-all-public-facilities-can/should-be argument.

Thank you for this new post about the question of bathrooms at home - and even raising that people should keep their antennae out for family members disappearing for prolonged periods (though that's rather a male trait, I understand). It's not just if you think someone might keel over - a toddler locking themselves in a space with lots of available water isn't great either, and happens, as you will know.

I thought you were all being sarcastic and it went over my head. But the ‘like home’ comments did prompt me to add some more academic stuff I don’t normally discuss.

I have all this data, evidence and case studies and actually it does take a lot of patience when people say their home loo is the same. It really, really isn’t.

ETA: have edited original post as mistakenly thought this actually was a 'the loo in your house is gender neutral' post.

Apologies!

Yes my home bathroom is like everyone else’s. I don’t talk much about home toilets because I want to raise awareness of the limiting factor for health and safety in non domestic toilets - to reduce preventable harm.

One easy thing you can do in home toilets is to make sure the lock you have can open the door from the outside. You are more likely to be able to get to a collapsed person in a home bathroom as the space is usually bigger.

Remember lots of public places (including all secondary schools) have a defibrillator. Designs can also open doors from the outside in case someone collapses against the door. You have all the components to help someone except knowing they have collapsed in the first place.

For obvious reasons, the following may be upsetting so bit of a trigger warning for a few of you who have discussed toilet incidents with me in the past.

A few days ago I was reading a story about a Radio 1 DJ who was ill, went to the bathroom, fell unconscious and hit her head. She was saying thank goodness her husband was there at the time. When it’s on your radar, you realise how many people have a toilet story.

After I started researching, a family friend felt ill, went to the bathroom and had a stroke but his wife was out. She found him much later unconscious when she came back. As everyone is aware, you need to act fast with strokes and our friend has died.

An Japanese academic study showed the frequency of return of spontaneous circulation was highest in those who collapsed in the presence of caregivers and lowest in those whose collapse were discovered later by family members being worried that the patient stayed in the toilet “too long.” The rarity of long-term survival among individuals sustaining cardiac arrest in the toilet is mainly due to the delay in discovering the individual who collapsed. The results were 70% in the presence of a caregiver, 55% if the caregiver heard them collapse and 30% if they were wondering why they were spending too long on the toilet.

Whilst there’s no accessible data to show the exact location where people in the UK collapse, the British Heart Foundation states that cardiovascular disease causes over a quarter of all deaths in the UK, or around 170,000 deaths each year – an average of 460 deaths each day or one every three minutes in the UK. There are more than 8 million people living with a cardiovascular disease in the UK. It's the single biggest premature killer (before the age of 75) in the UK. In the UK there are around 100,000 hospital admissions each year due to heart attacks: that's one every five minutes. Around 1.4 million people alive in the UK today have survived a heart attack. More than a million people in the UK today have heart failure.
There are more than 40,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in the UK each year, with a survival rate of less than 1 in 10.

Strokes cause around 34,000 deaths in the UK each year and are the biggest cause of severe disability in the UK.
Another Japanese academic study from 2017, concluded the toilet is a closed space where stroke occurs disproportionately frequently. They stated less than 40% of patients could call for help by themselves, and recommended efforts to reduce the incidence of toilet-related strokes is warranted, as early patient detection is not always feasible.

In many situations in a non-domestic environment, no one is clock watching you on the toilet or aware of which toilet you went into.

When Dr Michael Moseley died, there was a story about how he was at the BBC, and a young woman had collapsed in the corridor. He saved her life. No one would have seen her in one of the BBCs ‘gender neutral’ toilets.

There are several reasons more toilets open to the public are being enclosed. Men’s voyeurism and encouraging a mixed sex environment play a big part in what is ironically called ‘inclusive’ design.

Enclosing non-domestic toilets is not good for health and safety. We need to keep the numbers as low as possible. Design, regulation and legislation wise, that means keeping the numbers of toilets in a mixed sex environment as low as possible.

All single sex toilets are gender neutral so joke’s on you.

We’re not interested in so called ‘gender’, biological sex is the only relevant factor in these spaces.

You really are arguing at such a childish level. Perhaps you are quite young? You don’t seem able to engage at all, but just repeat trite slogans and “ner ner ner” playground talk.

It isn’t worth engaging with you in any seriousness.

Where they actually, you know, know the people with whom they live.

Agreed! @Keeptoiletssafe

😅

I trust that's a properly configured bathroom, with the correct signage. Cos, you know, people have [gasp] gender-neutral bathrooms in their houses, therefore...

I am putting off a load of cleaning today. What you are seeing as patience is more like me trying to avoid housework by doing something more interesting and using my knowledge for better use 😂. I kid you not, I am now off to clean the bathroom…

Indeed! Her patience astounds me, and her work is so incredibly useful.

👏

💐for @Keeptoiletssafe for her work and information - and patience!

Thank you both. That did actually lead very nicely into my post. It wasn’t planned because it took me a while to write it.

So earlier you said:
Where I live some people complain about the leisure centre having mixed sex changing but I don’t see the issue because everyone has a lockable cubicle with high walls and walls and door going to the floor.

I am not an expert on changing rooms. However there are crossovers with toilet cubicles. When I have chatted to toilet manufacturers and cleaners, a big thing is maintenance. Toilets literally get everything thrown at them, and they can need a thorough clean of urine, faeces, vomit, blood and semen. If you use a mop with lots of chlorine to disinfect, it starts rotting panels that go down to the floor and it’s difficult to get rid of detritus that builds up along the edges and behind the door as you have to get into the toilet and shut the door behind you. In a leisure centre I have never come across cubicle partitions that are touching the floor of a swimming pool because of chlorine rotting the base and the water expanding the door so it sticks. The humidity in them must be bad. Another poster and yourself were talking about proper walls between each cubicle which I can imagine wouldn’t be so much of a rotting problem. The cost of doing this is much more substantial.

It’s good to be talking about design but there’s been many experts that have been doing this for decades and there’s rules and regulations to follow if you want to be compliant with building control - which I know a lot about regarding toilets.

You also talked about safe unisex spaces and said:

However, I think it is possible to build and manage safe unisex spaces. The economic reality is that unisex spaces usually cost a lot less to create and run. It’a both a question of what level of risk we are prepared to accept and also what level of cost.

You said that with such certainty about unisex spaces, as if it were fact. I know that the economic reality is that unisex toilets cost a lot more to create and run per toilet unit. For instance you need mechanical ventilation, a separate VAD device in each toilet room, a dryer and washbasin for each facility so the plumbing and electrics are more expensive to connect. You need 25% more units in total to achieve the same turnover because of the time spent washing hands (though men are scientifically proven not to wash their hands as often) inside the compartment. The positioning on unisex toilets is paramount too as universal toilets, with outward or inward opening doors, must open onto a well-lit corridor or circulation space. You can’t retrofit them into a single sex toilet block, behind a door. The layout when entering, exiting and using a toilet room or cubicle should cater for the safety, privacy and dignity of users. Toilet cubicle doors should only open into single-sex toilet accommodation.

I know that risks to anyone at their most vulnerable are much greater. In toilets, the most vulnerable groups are anyone having a medical emergency, women and children. As well as the extra cost, those are the demographics that you have to be prepared to risk by making everything private. Even in the case of an emergency evacuation from a building, ensuring everyone is out is harder.

There was an article about the joys of ‘gender neutral’ toilets by Adrian Chiles. Alastair Campbell also likes them. Men who like a long sit down in private like them. They can’t or won’t see the dangers.

Did you actually read anything I said?

The sentiment they express is also incredibly childish indeed. "Let's make life more dangerous for all women and girls, just to spite some women." Way to show you care about vulnerable people - not!

It feels kind of ironic that the single thing that frustrates me most posting on here is how badly visitors like this make their case. It's sometimes genuinely upsetting - there are vulnerable trans people out there, and these are the voices representing them?! It's doing them damage - the decline in public support shows this.

And that in turn makes us cynical about the motives of such posters in the first place. They surely can't believe they're making a positive difference, so what kind of people are they and what's their motivation for being here? Any new lurker will, at the least, be struck by their tone, and anyone with more time, encouraged by it to ask the difficult questions that brought us to where we are now.

A more measured approach could have got society through this and out the other end by now, with everyone feeling as seen (SEEN!) and supported as possible in a complex situation.

#sadtimes indeed.

Abuse is all they've got left now. Oh... along with coercive control, bullying and violence.
#sadtimes

Or the SC judgement and subsequent guidance.

Honestly, the language used here - it's so childish, it never stops astonishing me.

Tell me you haven't read the thread without telling me you haven't read the thread 😂

They should make all toilets gender neutral. That will piss off all the feminist identifying transphobes types.