AIBU to think that this has gone way too far?

[dorade]

The Alberta Government in Canada has issued guidelines to schools that essentially allows kids to 'identify' however they want, use whichever toilet/changing room they want and play on whichever sport team they want.

I can't help feeling this is bad for girls.

(PS I'm a long time mumsnetter (2004), just have not posted for ages)

Re the sports thing. I've looked everywhere for the data and will look again but this has already happened.

Clear case of a teenage male identifying as a teen girl and being allowed to compete in female bmx races.

The data is very illuminating. He goes from unknown male racer ranked nowhere to number 1 female racer finishing races minutes before the girls. Can't help but feel for the girls who were racing against him.

How would you feel about a male identifying as female who demanded a place at a womans refuge?

It's already happened:

www.torontosun.com/2014/02/15/shocking-case-proves-tobys-law-is-flawed

YANBU OP. MN is one of the very few islands of resistance to this madness though.

I can't help but feel that the more transgenderism is lauded and allowed for, the more unequal the genders are getting. It seems like a backwards step. Why should somebody have to "identify as female" so that they can wear dresses and play with dolls? Why can't males just do that if that's what they want to do?

Why does there have to be such a big thing being made out of which gender you "identify" with? It shouldn't matter, you should have the same opportunities whatever your gender.

Segregating people on grounds of physical differences, as in sports teams, just makes sense though, and has nothing to do with people's "feelings", in the same way that holding the Paralympics makes sense. You have a penis? Then you get grouped in with the other people with penises.

If they bring out communal toilets in public places, I hope they scrap Urinals.
What woman wants to see a man waving his willy around when she's trying to dry her hands

I don't see how it could work.

I went into a public toilet at a railway station recently and there was a man in one of the cubicles with the door open, doing some kind of repair. He was in the middle cubicle of 3 so if I'd used the toilet I would have had to be next to the one he was in. Now, I expect he was very probably a lovely man with no desire to peep or do anything horrible, however there was no way I could have used the toilet then. I walked straight out again. I was surprised by how strongly I felt about it.
We need dignity and privacy in these situations, and part of that is having toilets etc that are segregated by sex. This is important for both women and men.

I am continual livid at this overwhelming erosion of women's rights. I am NOT anti transgender people, I DO NOT advocate the oppression of anyone but in trying to be inclusive to the minority without limitation or common sense, you exclude the needs of the majority. You could make every single premises wholly inclusive to visually impaired people and in doing so oppress the hearing impaired and sighted. So you go as far as you can to make everyone comfortable, surely.

I have the right to privacy, the right to protection under the law and the right to be heard and I feel that all of those things are being taken away slowly, in an effort to appease a vocal and frankly offensive minority. Its amazing to me how many MtF trans activists seem to actually hate women. How the risk to women is acceptably small and therefore fine and dandy. How the attack in Ontario by a man exploiting the law is nothing to do with Trans people and in saying so I am prejudiced. I KNOW that the guy wasn't a transgender person but he was granted access to facilities via a mechanism that trans people campaigned for, unregulated access to single sex spaces. But that's OK right as it was women assaulted?

FFS

It's fucking ridiculous and a massive step backwards for women's rights.

Exactly. This is crazy.

I saw a news story, a couple of years ago, about a new school in Scotland, where they had abandoned traditional male and female toilets, and had instead unisex facilities. The cubicles were all completely private, and there were no urinals, with hand basins in a communal area, and there was an archway out to the corridor, rather than a closed door.

If I recall correctly, the main reason for this change was to try to prevent bullying and antisocial behaviour in the loos - because anyone passing in the corridor could see into the central area with the hand basins, it was thought that this would reduce bullying - because it would be so much more visible.

The reporter spoke to children from the school, and they were all very positive about the new arrangements. They all felt that the cubicles gave them privacy, and no-one was upset at the facilities being unisex - so maybe in the future, that's how all new schools' toilets and changing facilities will be designed.

I have been in unisex 'Changing villages' at swimming pools, too, and I didn't feel uncomfortable.

The question about competitive sports is really interesting and I can see that being problematic, in years to come. It does look as if sportspeople who are born genetically female will be the ones to lose out - and their rights have to be taken into account too. Maybe we will need more sporting catagories - male, female, M to F trans, and F to M trans - we will end up with some complicated system like the one used in para-sports - which does prove that it is do-able.

What would not be fair or right is a system that allows a male sports person to identify as female and then dominate the sport. If the late Jonah Lomu had decided to identify as female, and had joined women's rugby, it would have been actively dangerous for the women on the opposing team, and unfair for the women who wanted to play the same position as Jonah. It is an extreme example, I know.

The stuff about unisex toilets interests me - how would this actually work?

I work in a large factory. There are over 1000 men and less than 100 women. In recognition of potential safety issues all the women's toilets have a key code access lock which only the women have the code for. In such a large number of men there will inevitably be a proportion who could be sexual predators and they have taken steps to prevent this. Could any man now demand to know the women's access code?

It is a large building with several toilet blocks and even a unisex block could be largely deserted at certain times of day. I would only be happy to share toilets with the men if they were self contained floor-to-ceiling individual toilets with handbasins inside, like disabled toilets often are. But to provide enough of these in an old building would be soace & cost prohibitive. Otherwise the risk of a camera under or over the door of a cubicle is too high. I also sometimes have to use the facilities to change.

In the school I mentioned, the cubicles were floor-to-ceiling, so no risk of anyone peering in - but the hand basins were in the communal area that was open to the corridor, to reduce the risk of bullying/attacks etc.

The cubicles were big enough for people to change in, if necessary and I personally would not mind washing my hands in a communal area.

Your point about cost is a good one, though - I suspect we will see a gradual spread of facilities like these, and I hope that, in the meantime, the needs, wishes and safety of women as well as transwomen are taken into account.

What woman wants to see a man waving his willy around when she's trying to dry her hands

Mildly off topic but, in my childhood, French cafes usually had unisex toilets. Most often the cubicles would be after the urinals - so you'd have to walk past a row of chaps using them. It involved a special kind of 'not looking' on both sides.

I would imagine the fact that this has died out suggests it isn't a popular arrangement.

I'm reasonably (not totally) comfortable with mixed-sex changing & toileting facilities, but this doesn't mean I can't see why most women feel threatened by it. And I'm emphatically opposed to born women & girls being forced to share with penis-owners.

The sports thing is beyond insulting to female competitors. Labelling doesn't eliminate biology.

I agree with Queen and who (and others). OP, YANBU, It's completely ridiculous. Political correctness has gone way too far the other way in many things.

I don't think it's political correctness, really, although it's riding on the back of the desire to be considerate and courteous towards people that is all a lot of the 'political correctness' some people used to complain about really was.

For women to be OK about transwomen in toilets and changing rooms I think we need to be convinced of either of two things. Either that:

• all sex segregation is rubbish and nothing more than prejudice, so biological males changing with biological females is not something women have any right to complain about,

or:

• transwomen are significantly different from biological males, so they're meant to be on the same side of the divide as women.

So far I'm not convinced of either of those things.

I think a common belief until recently has been that the average transwoman is significantly different (thanks to surgery) from biological males, and so the courteous, considerate and empathetic option of being unfazed by someone in the ladies changing room who seems obviously biologically male was relatively easy. That person may still 'read' as very male but the transness implies a safer kind of male.

However, now we have activists broadening the definition of trans to include nothing more than a declaration AND we have more information about the surprisingly high percentage of transwomen who remain surgically unaltered below the waist. Neither of those things do transwomen any favours, because both of them move the way the average transwoman is perceived back towards 'biologically male'.

From the Trans Inquiry report (Maria Miller, MP, chair of so-called Women and Equalities Committee) on sport:

"We recommend that the Government work with Sport England to produce guidance which help sporting groups realise that there are likely to be few occasions where exclusions are justified to ensure fair competition or the safety of competitors."

How come toilets are non-issue in buildings where there's only ONE toilet for all? Or lets say disabled toilets? Most places you have mens, womens, and disabled unisex.

Parachute silk has it!

Yes yes yes, oh local gym has a MtF woman who uses the sauna every night. Nobody I particularly bothered as she clearly lives, dresses and is as close as you can get to woman without being born as one.

HUGE difference between that and a man who just "identifies" as a woman. And I know that accessing treatment to become physically woman is long, expensive and hard to access. But there needs to be more than just identifying.

I would love to see what happened if a female identified as male and applied for male only roles (front line) with the forces.

Natallejah, its the cubicle issue. Camera phones can be shoved under or over the cubicle wall and in many toilets the cubicle walls are low enough to be climbable right into the cubicle, especially by a man as they tend to be taller and stronger than a woman. Anyone who thinks some men won't try this are naive. Lads already do this to other lads as a joke.

parachutesilk - totally agree, couldn't have put it better myself.

Surely this is a great opportunity for a straight boy to pretend to be trans, and get an eyeful of Tit.

Yeah because trans boys are treated with such care and sensitivity by the other kids in most secondary schools...

The gender recognition act does not require surgery or hormones, although those can be used as criteria to support the application. When a gender recognition certificate is issued, that allows a person's sex to be changed officially. The case that was won in Europe that led to the GRA was based on the argument that a transsexual should be recorded as the sex they wish to be and to never have to declare their birth sex.

So, trans sports categories for something like the Olympics would never work.

Besides, validation demands are such that questioning the born sex of someone, even if there would be probable harm to others by not doing so, is a big no no. I feel, therefore I am is the name of the game.