UK radical feminists; what to do?

Personal opinion of a biologist no less :)

Classist? Everybody in the working class family that I grew up in knew the difference between a man and woman and a man who pretends to be a woman. Are you trying to tell us the "lower" classes are too dim to work out basic biology?

It really is quite interesting though that the male gaze likes to see the viceral repulsion and fear in the female gaze at the male form in a place where the male gaze is quite specifically barred from.

I agree with you that some very feminine men have been quietly and happy using women's facilities for centuries. I get in a lot of trouble in this forum for stating that opinion.

The bit that's missing from your timeline in an eariier post about when the Terf wars started is that it was when burly males with their dicks clearly present in their skin tight leggings started insisting that wearing lippy and a wig made them a woman entitled to go into women's spaces. And when men started using their physical advantages to steal medals from women athletes. And the trans movement started getting people disciplined and dismissed from their employment for saying people can't change sex and using threats and physical violence to prevent women holding meeting to discuss the issues.

Women didn't start this. Men did.

Mate. Australia has literal Nazis in the streets parading and saluting in front of the police and they just stand by.

I do not think you can pretend that Australia doesn't 'do' harassment!

It sounds like someone steeped in Queer Theory, nothing like letting them speak to show how QT, and all it's subsidiaries (GI, 'trans'), are absolute shite.

Projection and self objectification, I guess. I think there are aspects of some males sexual responses that women just can't grasp. Auto gynephilia is just so fucken weird to most women, its incomprehensible.

You've made the harassment of lesbians who don't want male bodied people in their group that's attracted only to female bodies a legal right.

Don't preach to us about harassment.

Yes I would say Gretel has this upside down. It's an elitist class that facilitated the whole TWAW bollocks.the oh so clever intellectuals and academics that sneered at the working class saying the issues are too complex for them to understand. When in reality it's far more simpler and most people know what a woman is.

“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
George Orwell

I don't think Gretel is an intellectual, tbh, not on the evidence in this thread.

TL;DR or better still just DR.

G’day toileteers
@MyAmpleSheep alerted me to @Gretel346 lack of knowledge about the state of Australian toilets.

I am surprised about the poster saying there is no class system in Australia like the U.K. .I appear to be builder-like in sensibility so would that mean I am working class? I also have an MSc and am a qualified teacher so middle class? I don’t know.

On Australia’s change to 50% mixed sex toilets:
One builder told The Telegraph that the “bloody pointless” change “is the last thing this industry needs”.
“We’re trying to keep things simple, cheap, and functional and some clown from Canberra comes in with feel-good rubbish like this,” he said.

I looked at the reasoning behind the change to 50% unisex toilets in Australia. I went through the minutes. There’s been no risk assessment particularly looking at the effects of what happens in an emergency situation inside a cubicle.

Fair dinkum to Australia - the whole ‘progressive’ world makes mistakes like this. The U.K. and India are leading the way back from ‘progression’ with correcting in it schools and in African countries some don’t need to retreat as they are still in the process of creating more female toilets for health and safety. In fact Aid Agencies like Plan International, WaterAid (and even Amnesty until 5 minutes ago) understand that mixed sex toilets aren’t a good idea. For example, Amnesty ‘..we would expect immediate practical steps to be taken to protect groups most at risk of abuse, such as women travelling alone and female-headed families. At a minimum, this would include setting up single sex, well-lit toilet facilities and separate safe sleeping areas’. https://www.amnesty.nl/actueel/female-refugees-face-physical-assault-exploitation-and-sexual-harassment-on-their-journey-through-europe

Now in Australia, women have exactly the same health and safety concerns as the rest of the world’s women: 87 per cent of all Australians are opposed to gender neutral toilets. More than 90 per cent of women are opposed, citing privacy, safety and hygiene concerns.“If you talk to women on the street, most would rather ‘hold it’ than use a shared facility,” https://www.news24.com.au/politics/half-of-all-new-public-toilets-could-be-designated-gender-neutral-under-proposed-draft-update-to-national-building-code/news-story/29b4ee6a7fdf67185e7871e5098cabd9?amp&nk=33518f824576c7bfdc17ea506a96a8f3-1785392661

Also from the above article: “There (are) also issues with hygiene and many women will talk about the issues they have sharing toilets with men in a domestic situation and they don’t want to be dealing with that in a public situation.
“This is ideology compromising public safety.”

This is scientifically proven, not just that men don’t wash their hands as much as women, but that there’s more pathogens in a unisex toilet:
https://salus.global/article-show/pathogen-findings-raise-concerns-about-move-to-unisex-hospital-facilities

Now Australian women using toilets and changing rooms men have access to are right to be concerned. For example the doctor who got away with filming hundreds of women without much of a sanction this year:https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/courts-law/ryan-cho-doctor-admits-filming-hundreds-of-colleagues-with-bathroom-cameras/news-story/f5f06996471b89d9fb237a2613955b3c?amp The more sordid details have been left out of this report.

And of course, unisex toilet design in Australia is completely private. That’s handy for setting up hidden cameras but not so handy if you have a cardiac arrest in Australia or another medical emergency (all of which have been forgotten in the drive for gender-neutral loos):
Cardiac arrest while using the toilet: not uncommon and associated with adverse resuscitation profile
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40831593/

This above research from Australia is quite conservative. Other reports suggest 11% of cardiac arrests happen on the toilet. Japanese research shows the chances of being resuscitated very much depend on been seen or heard - which doesn’t happen in unisex designs. Hence why bodies can lie for hours or days inside these toilet designs compared to seeing a collapse immediately in a single sex design with a door gap.

Which incidentally I noticed the floor to door gap was much bigger in Australia than England during a scene set in an Australian school where a girl went into labour in a school toilet. That gap enabled her cries to get assistance. Niche scene, but it does happen with other biological processes such as menstruation, miscarriage and collapse due to endometriosis.

In conclusion Australia are just heading into a big mess with their toilets. There will be more preventable deaths, assaults and disease spread because of the change in designs.

The least disadvantages to unisex toilets will be to healthy Australian men.

All this & nary a whisper of grass roots activism? Election issue? Nada.

I guess 'News 24' AKA The Daily Rupert attempting to shed its SKY image of being a right wing propaganda arm might be gilding the lily as per usual.

I don't get it. If "what a woman is in the eye of the beholder", then what's wrong with someone seeing a transwoman as a man and saying so?

Also: how do you know who is a man and who is a woman when you meet them? How do you know how to greet strangers? Do you call them all "mate" or something just to make sure you don't misgender them?

No. I said harm dictates access not 'willies'.

And it doesn't by body policing loos?

Give yourself an upper cut.

So a very long, considered post by @Keeptoiletssafe, with links/evidence, is dismissed by @Gretel346 with this vacuous response:

All this & nary a whisper of grass roots activism? Election issue? Nada.
I guess 'News 24' AKA The Daily Rupert attempting to shed its SKY image of being a right wing propaganda arm might be gilding the lily as per usual.

If you can't reply acknowledging someone else's contribution, then what's the point of you being here?

Oh, I know - a man wanting to be in a women's space. Again.

Nobody wants to body police loos.

It is men insisting on using women's loos (illegally in this country) who are raising the prospect of that being a necessity. If you simply agreed to abide by the law there would be no need for body policing.

No it doesn’t “reduce women to the male gaze”.

”Body policing loos” recognises the reality that male people statistically present a threat to the safety of female people. Not to mention the privacy and dignity of female people.

How can you wilfully not understand the reality of lived female experience?

Surveys of women tell you what you need to know about this. The majority of women don’t want shared loos.

You seem incapable of hearing us.

You are very quick to dismiss the common concerns of the world’s women. Linking it up to right wingers is lazy. Employ some critical thinking skills and at least read the links.
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/serving-all-users-half-of-new-public-toilets-in-australia-could-become-gender-neutral/news-story/337269c9fe455cc1433589a1591b2e6f?amp

I really hope the above doesn’t happen to Australian toilets. It will be an expensive mistake like it has been in schools who have done it over here.

Wishing violence on women. How on brand.

This shifts agency from the male threatening to transgress women's boundaries (men accessing women's services is illegal, as per the Equality Act) to the imagined 'police'. And attempts to shame link to 'body shaming' etc.

Once again, it's just the 'I'll do it, you can't stop me'.

It's the exact same as Laurie Penney advising a woman that if a man masturbates in front of her child, her child should avert her eyes.

Yeah, that surprised me. It's like they are doing their best to make TRAs look bad. Is it some kind of secret terf psy-op?

Possible, Seethlaw, but it's surprising how often these people do things that they just don't realise are beyond the pale. Because they are caught in the grip of an emotional psychodrama.

As usual, I hope my research and logical arguments will at least inform other readers of my mission for safer designs of toilets for everyone. Particularly women, children and anyone medically vulnerable.