Bristol Watershed toilets situation.

This is a really important post. And this statement almost gives me shivers:

Watershed and others are prioritising individual privacy over collective health and safety.

It really only is a matter of time before someone is harmed, or worse, by these toilet designs.

For the record, Clare Reddington, the CEO of The Watershed has made this statement to Bristol City Council:

^”I am submitting this statement in full support and gratitude for the council’s response to the EHRC code and their updated Trans Inclusion and Gender Identity Policy. It is vital that councils like Bristol and cultural organisations like Watershed speak up for the Trans, Nonbinary, Intersex and gender diverse communities of Bristol – lest people are misled that a very tiny, well-funded group of gender critical campaign groups represent the majority of views. The Revised EHRC Code fails to present a complete analysis of lawful routes for
trans+ inclusion and is weighted towards the exclusion of trans+ people. Its adoption strikes fear into the hearts of both Trans+ communities and service providers. Amongst the jumbled advice and conflicting examples, there isn’t much clarity for service providers, but trans exclusion should not be anyone’s default position or first point of call. As the proud guardian of award winning inclusive public toilets, Watershed understands the necessity of ensuring that everyone is able to use facilities that preserve their identity and dignity.

Having consulted with Trans+ people – I have heard multiple recollections of painful and
frightening incidents for Trans+ people entering toilets that staff or public felt didn’t align to their gender. These are not just tuts or looks – this is shouting, aggression and threats.

Translucent’s 2026 report found that there were only four official complaints about trans
woman entering a “single-sex” facility documented across 382 public bodies since 2022. The Trans+ community however face daily harassment, surveillance and questioning. On the other hand, we have faced repeated vandalism of our toilets and signage in the last weeks from gender critical activists - alongside personal and harmful trolling online. All the Trans+ people we consulted spoke of the safety they feel in living in Bristol = whilst the city isn’t
perfect, the city has visible and plentiful places which are proudly trans inclusive. The
number of businesses who rushed to be part of the Safe Space Bristol campaign is evidence of how important we believe this to be. This makes a real difference. I am delighted that Bristol City Council takes Trans+ inclusion seriously and hope as a city we can continue to send a clear message of inclusion to the Trans+ Community. As a steering group member of Third Sector against Transphobia, I invite members of the council to view our analysis of the
code and what it means for service providers and our forthcoming guidance on creating
Trans+ inclusive toilets^”

This statement of hers can be found online in the Full Council meeting papers for tonight’s meeting. PS09

I don’t often talk about individual cases because I don’t think it’s right to discuss but this is very important in terms of design. If Watershed are reading, please note the following:

The design the Good Law Project endorse for schools is the same design that a transwoman was allegedly raped in. It was a unisex toilet with a sink inside. This was not in this country, and a decade ago, and as far as I know there was no trial to ascertain what happened. But it happened in a very famous inn from which Stonewall took its name.

This is what it comes down to. Looking at crime, looking at the design, and designing the crime out. People decades before me came to the same conclusions. It’s just I have compiled recent data of what’s going on in real life in the U.K. I research lots of aspects of health and safety in toilets. Single sex design is safer and healthier.

Watershed and others are prioritising individual privacy over collective health and safety.

edit to say: I don’t think they realise this, but this is the end result

Unfortunately, KTS, the people you are dealing with here are not acting in good faith. Your stats about heart attacks etc will not sway them. But of course, this sort of of info should still be put under the noses of the Watershed bosses.

Hello Twitter!

Yep I go on about toilets a lot. But I really am TERT - Tired of Explaining the Reality of Toilets. Because the only solution to mixed sex environments is to make toilets private, I was delighted that the FWS judgement confirmed single sex environments were that. It meant door gaps could stay or return. I thought I could shut up about toilets. But then toilet talk went stratospheric and I had to talk about my evidence more.

I want non domestic toilets to be as safe a design for everyone. Everyone. That is it.

I look at incidents that happen in toilets particularly when people die (more often than you think) but also other events like getting trapped etc. I look at what happens to every demographic.

This isn’t alarmist, such as when people say people are going to get killed on the toilet (like Victoria McCloud). It’s almost unheard of that people get killed on the toilet. This is about all the times people collapse on the toilet, and sometimes it leads to their death. People are more likely to be saved in time if someone can see/hear them. In your home this will be someone you know (like that Radio 1 DJ recently) or out of the home a stranger (like the actress in Games of Thrones). Both went to the toilet as they were feeling ill as it’s the place you rush to when feeling ill. These two examples I have mentioned as they have a happier ending and you probably didn’t know you will ‘know’ people saved by having someone notice they were in trouble on a toilet.

Take one medical event. One sign of a major heart incident is you have an urge to poo. Up to 11% of cardiac arrests happen on the toilet. ‘Pushing and holding your breath’ also puts pressure on the heart.
There are more than 40,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCAs) in the UK each year.
• The estimated OHCA survival rate in the UK is less than one in ten.
• Every minute without cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and defibrillation
reduces the chance of OHCA survival by up to ten per cent.
• Early CPR and defibrillation can more than double the chances of OHCA survival.

Now I don’t know if Watershed has a defibrillator, but how tragic if it is needed for someone who is hidden from view in the place people go when they feel ill.

Watershed staff have already written drugs and sex have happened in their toilets in the past. Overdoses are one of the main reasons for toilet deaths. Sex, drugs and ‘rockin the bowl (vandalism) are the main reasons public toilets get shut down. One way to try and keep facilities open is to pass laws like it’s illegal for sexual activity in a toilet (2003). Another is to design crime out by creating an environment where crimes can be partially seen/heard. This prevents crime in the first place which surely is the very best scenario.

A young woman I did not know went to a nightclub toilet when she was drunk, threw up and choked on vomit and stopped breathing. My friends and I saw her and we lifted the smallest person over the cubicle, they opened the inwards opening door from the outside by pulling her body away (tricky), we pulled her out and turn her onto her side/front scooping out so much sick, then she made some awful noise and was a bit more sick and finally her skin colour went from blue to pink. She was semi conscious but got taken away by paramedics. I checked the news for a few days and there was no indication she had died so I am sure we saved her life. I don’t want toilet design to restrict lives being saved. I know it already does because of years of research.

It is incredibly difficult to collate info on incidents v design but I now have a books-worth. I have spoken to so many people, got so many verifiable incidents, read scientific articles, foi’s to police, coroner reports etc etc. Why would I stop now?

If you really wanted to prioritise safety, but wanted a mixed sex environment, you would need to change universal designs so they could have door gaps. I know this would not work because of voyeurism. They become no-go areas, especially for women and girls. There are also fire door safety implications in some cases.

The Good Law Project has no idea on toilet health and safety. Their ‘sophisticated’ design for toilets in schools is the universal (unisex) design. Fully enclosed. Where are their risk assessments for this? Where are Watersheds?

When there’s those trans die-ins on the streets it would be easy to demonstrate the difference between single sex toilet design and ‘inclusive’ toilet design. One design you can see a person at their most vulnerable on their cubicle floor. That’s the design I want there to be more of.

I am on the side of safety and safeguarding.

I was thinking that too. There was someone on twitter talking about this thread saying that KTS was obsessed with toilets but that is a whole nother level and I haven’t even read it all yet. I don’t know if they are pieces from different people (because it keeps repeating things such as “I used to work at the Watershed”) put together or the experiences of just one person but if the latter, she seems to have experienced everything and all of it there.

Pass the sick bucket, Alice.

There’s arts and humanities funded toilet ‘research’, based in universities, that are upsettingly wrong in their conclusions. There are some people that are very interested in toilets and their design all for very different reasons to my safeguarding. There’s a few names that pop up that will be familiar to others on this board.

This one discusses, ‘From inside each stall, users can observe their surroundings by looking through a blue, one-way mirror band located at seated eye-level’. Surely this could only be to watch others when you are excreting? The author was influential in ‘inclusive’ toilet designs in America and the U.K. such as ones at Watershed, that aren’t a regulated design in this country:
https://aaa.org.hk/en/like-a-fever/like-a-fever/on-stalling-and-turning-a-wayward-genealogy-for-a-binary-abolitionist-public-toilet-project

@Keeptoiletssafe the article is very strange. Who spends so much time studying toilets and human behaviour around toilets? The trans community seem obsessed with what people are up to.

@TemporarilyCantDoMyself wrt the Charity Commission, I’ve just seen this reply that Sarah Pillimore received from them:

“The Charity Commission has recently published a statement about the requirement for charities to comply with the Equality Act 2010 and review the provisions of the Equality and Human Rights Commission's updated Code of Practice for Services, Public Functions and Associations which came into force on 5 August 2026. We intend to publish further guidance on the Equality Act 2010 to support charities in Autumn 2026.
The Charity Commission advises charities to take steps towards ensuring they can comply with the Equality Act and to review the provisions of the Code, notably the changes regarding the definition of sex under the Equality Act as relating to biological sex. We have clarified that our guidance will not alter the legal principle set out by the Supreme Court judgment that 'sex' for the purpose of the Equality Act means 'biological sex. Charities do not need to wait for the Commission's guidance to comply with the law. It is the responsibility of trustees to ensure their charity is compliant with the law and unreasonable delays in taking steps towards compliance may be considered a breach of those responsibilities.
You can read more at the following link: Charities urged to prepare for compliance with
EHRC Code of Practice - GOV.UK
(I’m assuming this is the link https://www.gov.uk/government/news/charities-urged-to-prepare-for-compliance-with-ehrc-code-of-practice )
Our decision
Taking the above into account, and having carefully reviewed all the information you sent us, we have decided that on this occasion the best way forward is to provide the trustees with regulatory advice and guidance about their duties and responsibilities to ensure that they are complying with UK law specifically in relation to matters under the Equality Act.”

https://x.com/svphillimore/status/2096949019901645276?

I am not sure if that got obscured on not. There was something about adding glass to doors which was confusing. A glass sign possibly? I don’t think glass and toilet doors are a great combination.

So @TemporarilyCantDoMyself if these are now all officially mixed-sex, maybe a whole gaggle of women should get together and conspicuously invade the men's? Done up as gaudily and feminine as at all possible. Perhaps even make it a recurrent event?

To add: it's disappointing. You'd think the least they could have done is create sitting and standing toilets, with splashback paint for enforcement.

I haven’t clicked to read yet but is that a window to the outside?! Just what you want, people outside peering in too!

I used to love going to the Watershed. 😡Not that I'm near it now. But I remember those loos down the corridor to Cinemas 2 & 3. People queue down the corridor to get it. Or they did, maybe it's different now. So now women have to walk past the queue, "Don't mind me, I'm just going to the loo"?

Boasting about their toilets being 'a good place to cruise' while also supposedly family friendly is a bit weird.

Thank you @user91817161.
As I often say, these new unregulated ‘inclusive’ designs (full height private cubicles and then shared sinks, all mixed sex) can be demonstrated to be least bad for healthy men.

I would add I think they are being fairly deliberate in their actions and are going to continue to push boundaries as regards their compliance , going by this part of their statement “” Harassment by visitors and audience members directed at others will be treated in line with our code of conduct and may result in warnings, banning or reporting to the police, depending on level of severity. Policy An updated EHRC’s statutory Code of Practice came into effect on 5 August 2026. We have made a few temporary updates to our signage and provision which centre clarity and inclusion. Watershed's full policy and equality impact assessment will be reviewed by our Board of Trustees at their next meeting in the Autumn. We welcome ongoing legal challenge to the code and will continue to raise our voices with others against the discrimination and confusion it creates. “” ….they are all for inclusion as long as it’s their type of inclusion!

They are so inordinately proud! If they would ,at least once ,stop and consider why there are thoughtful design processes that go into public toilet and changing facilities, as @Keeptoiletssafe has demonstrated for a very long time. I always remember the case of a man who died in a toilet at the hospital I trained in ( he was volunteering as a patient at a learning event for medical students ) and wasn’t found until many hours later . Subsequently I am also rather too aware of cases of people who have collapsed, overdosed or self harmed in toilets on healthcare premises. I went to a leisure complex on a holiday recently, very smart but hugely claustrophobic “upgraded “changing cubicles with floor to ceiling walls and inward opening doors - but I was musing on the number of elderly people I’d met or seen there and what it would be like to first notice, then try and extract someone who’d collapsed behind the door due to eg. a cardiac event or hypo.

And yet, they're so proud of them!

I know. So many questions. So many ways to break regulations.

Do the cubicles all have extractor fans? Floor-to-ceiling doors a really bad idea. if the hinges are on the inside, is there any way of removing the door from the outside in an emergency?

This is a photo of their mixed sex toilet cubicles, during their development, from their website. These do not meet building regs standards.

What risk assessments did they do to decide on private, mixed sex toilet cubicle designs, with doors that rest in the closed position?What about equality impact assessments on private toilets and mixed sex use handbasins?

Watershed have lots of articles about their loos. Read what they spied goes on in them (probably not best to click the link if you are eating). If you’re reading, keep in mind that there’s no longer gaps underneath partitions and doors, and space above partitions and doors for ventilation, cleaning, supervision in emergencies and prevention of misuse:

https://www.watershed.co.uk/inconvenience-zine

How did you get on @TemporarilyCantDoMyself ? From their website it doesn’t sound like they would be complaint from their toilet descriptions unless signage has changed again
“Café & Bar corridor

• A block of six cubicle toilets with baby changing facilities. These are designated as mixed sex. Signage on the door indicates they are suitable for women and they are Trans+Inclusive.
• A block of three cubicle toilets and urinals with baby changing facilities. These are designated as mixed sex. Signage on the door indicates they are for men and they are Trans+ Inclusive.

• One self-contained accessible toilet with baby changing facilities. For disabled people of all genders. You do not need a cinema ticket to use this toilet.

• One self-contained toilet designated as single sex female
• One self-contained toilet designated as single sex male
• You do not need a cinema ticket to use these toilets.

• One block of two cubicle toilets. These are designated as mixed sex. Signage on the door indicates they are suitable for women and they are Trans+Inclusive.
• One cubicle toilet and urinals. These are designated as mixed sex. Signage on the door indicates they are for men and they are Trans+ Inclusive.
• One self-contained accessible toilet with baby changing facilities. For disabled people of all genders

I’ve underlined and bolded the ones that don’t sound compliant in terms of non floor to ceiling design as they are saying they are for women or men but also are mixed sex at the same time.

You make a good point, FanOfGailDines - doing away with women-only spaces also deprives children of safe spaces.

I noticed [but did not read] a thread over on Chat about men bringing their daughters into women's toilets.

The fact is that children are safer in all-women environments - I know there is a stat that women are responsible for more child abuse than men, but if you look closely at the stats, it is to do with physical not sexual abuse [both deplorable of course], includes neglect, and is mostly concentrated on babies and infants - again, deplorable, but facts matter: adults responsible for abuse of children over the infant stage are much more likely to be men not women. [I think I saw those stats on the NSPCC website, sorry I don't have the link].

Children are more than likely to be perfectly safe on their own in a women's toilet.

When I was a little girl, my father used to let me go into the women's toilet on my own. If there was a woman going in at the same time, he'd ask her to keep an eye on me please, and she'd deliver me safely back outside to my hovering dad.

If he was worried that I was a long time, he would have asked a woman to check on me, or maybe as a very last resort opened the door and called my name to ask if I was OK - with many embarrassed apologies to any women there for doing so!

He would never have even considered going in to a women's toilet with me.
Call me cynical, but I suspect the fathers accompanying their daughters into the women's toilets are doing so to make a point against women-only spaces, rather than because of genuine concern.
But if they are proper biological women-only spaces, there is no basis for concern.

Absolutely disgusted with The Watershed. I won’t be returning.