Non Binary Gym Changing Rooms

[NevermindNelson]

I’ve just had an email from a gym I use explaining that their changing rooms are going to become gender neutral. I don’t even know where to start to reply. The email states that they’re proud to do this.

I want to reply with the reasons that I’m cancelling my membership, but all I’ve got so far is, “What, seriously?”

Maybe I should just send this - Just under 90 per cent of complaints regarding changing room sexual assaults, voyeurism and harassment are about incidents in unisex facilities. Because they have made the changing rooms unisex, haven’t they?

Edited to correct the term as ‘gender neutral’

I visited the Old Vic earlier in the year.
There were two sets of toilets - I presume they are formerly the men’s and women’s.
Now the signs on the door reflect the contents:

• cubicles
• cubicles + urinals

From the little I saw, women were self-selecting the former and men the latter. But only after doing an “eh?!” double take at the signs.

I dashed in and out as quickly as I could as I didn’t feel comfortable with men potentially coming in.

It leaves men with 42 facilities they can use (cubicles + urinals) but women with only 24, all of which they have to share with men.

Having googled it the Old Vic proudly announced: “You can choose which one you use, rather than responding to a label placed on you which you may not identify with”.

So in case anyone was in any doubt: the cult of identity ideology does trump all, including women’s safety, privacy, dignity and boundaries.

Perhaps ask them to put the the designs for everyone to comment? You are doing this because you are concerned they do not realise what an impact this will have on their business, financially, legally and reputationally.

This always infuriates me (living on the European mainland for years), as if women in European countries are absolutely fine with stripping naked with unknown male people. Of course not!

Spas and saunas operate on consent. You know if you go, you will be faced with naked male people. If you don't want that, you don't go or you wait till womens day. And then when the spa or sauna let in one of these new type of 'women' all hell breaks loose.

@CraggyIslandTouristBoard

The Old Vic actually fundraised for its toilet "improvements" on the basis of increasing toilet provision for women. Many customers were not impressed.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7532761/amp/Londons-historic-Old-Vic-theatre-gender-neutral-toilet-storm.this

If something happens to someone in those type of toilets there’s no way on getting into them without special equipment and dismantling the cubicle. I don’t understand how they pass risk assessments.

Yes to this. As a German and a forum semi-regular, I'd say we ARE less prudish but that's usually in front of others of the same sex. If anyone recalls the the Ballantyine gym thread - a lot of people were saying they wouldn't walk around a single sex communal space stark naked and might even get undressed under a towel. That's very alien to me. I've used gyms in Holland, Sweden and Germany and nobody has problems doing that. It'salso given me insights into the popularity of Brazilian wax AND adjacent tattoos among Swedish college students I'd rather not have. We do have a restricted number of mixed sex spaces but they're heavily socially controlled - nudism is organized in clubs, often by old fuddy-duddies. Mixed sauna is common on the mainland but anyone remotely dodgy would be reported very quickly - there's always staff around who do all the special steam things. Interestingly though it's my Finnish friends above all to whom mixed saunas are anathema! But many of them have private saunas in their flats anyway as I'm told.

The two gyms I go to - one is council run - have changing "villages" and one has a big room for men and one for women, the other has a female "village", a male "village" and a family "village".
Both have open shower areas (where you are not expected to get undressed) - the above is all for swimming.
The cubicles are enclose but not floor to ceiling but all dads seem to think that having a female child is sufficient to come into the female "village". At the other one mums allow their tween boys to follow them into the female communal area and at the first one I have had to shout at a man fiddling with himself under his swimsuit in the open shower.
It seems to be assumed you won't remove your swimsuit in the shower.

Moving on to gym changing, I have only used the gym changing at one of them which has an open female shower area (I assume also for men) with benches and one cubicle in the female gym changing. The showers have a really flimsy curtain and no hooks for clothes in the shower cubicles (so you have to either get your towel soaked, or exit naked).

There are therefore lots of different variations, some more suited to unisex than others, but anything with open showers or open changing is completely unsuitable for mixed sex.

My swimming pool has a giant unisex changing room. There's lockable cubicles of different sizes and two of the showers are enclosed in lockable cubicles too. It's the only safe way to do it.

It's the men we know that are most dangerous, not strangers in a changing room

Why do people persist in posting this, without understanding that the reason violent men are more likely to attack women they know is simply ease of access!

MISOGYNISTS, THIS IS NOT THE GOTCHA YOU THINK IT IS

All you are proposing is giving violent men more spaces where they have access to women in a vulnerable state. Slow fucking hand clap.

Oh I agree.

My previous gym was open plan changing with 4 corner cubicles with doors. The showers had frosted doors but no locks. Sauna and steam all open. This is the women’s section. It was a Holmes place that became a virgin active.

But yes I agree there isn’t the possibility of doing what I am suggesting unless building from scratch or remodelling :(.

We've got a changing village, and a bank of showers behind doors open at the top and bottom.

I understand they're convenient for families, and carers and are, of course, cost-effective.

But if it was my personal choice, I would have an additional female only provision for all of it.

There are other open showers, poolside, for you to use, before you get in. It's amazing how many men will find a reason to 'surreptitiously' watch women in those.

Obviously, women just put up with it. Personally, i'd much rather not.

Recently went to the Old Vic and experienced the shiny new toilets. As PP said, all women went into the one that used to be the Womens, almost all
men went into the ex-Mens. Except… there was one man in the ex-Womens who was peeing with the door open (surprise). Wish I’d been brave enough to say something to him.

Mine too.

When I first started using it, the cubicles had a gap at the bottom and there was no ceiling, menaing you could look under the door or sides, or stand on the bench and look over the top into the next cubicle. So then they put in doors that reached the floor, then extra panels so there was no gap at all between the walls/doors and floor. Then they put in ceiling panels. Why? Well just Google voyeurism in swimming pools.

If men are going to gawp and/or film in single occupancy cubicles, what the fuck will they do if they are invited into a group changing room?

Not the point but I detest the tweeness of "changing village" it makes me wince not directed at anyone I just irrationally hate it with a passion

@CraggyIslandTouristBoard That ‘you choose’ from them is irritating- I don’t want to choose, I just want to watch the play.

@RavingStone
Thank you. I can say it’s about safety, but it’s really helpful to explain in more depth.

My local pool has huge mixed changing "village". Only showers are open, mixed and poolside so women obviously can't wash properly. This is annoying because chlorine bonds to the skin and doesn't wash off without soap.

Worse, a man was caught sliding his phone under the cubicle wall to film the teens in the next cubicle. When he was investigated it turned out he had also hidden cameras in the female loos at the soft play centre he owned.

It turned out this man had been noticed by the pool staff way before he was ever caught. They observed that his swims always coincided with schools groups and that he always showered for a long time, with the children. But no staff member ever felt empowered to do anything about this. It has become unfashionable to ever dare think the worst of any man.

Oh ffs.

If you are desperate to get your kit off with consenting members of the opposite sex, you go and do you. Your boundary issues aren't my problem, you sort yourself out.

If you feel the need to call women names for not pliantly getting undressed in front of men who are boundary breakers and wishing to enforce this on women with no concern for those women's wishes, feelings, consent, rights, and no interest at all in the women who have been excluded so these men can access women's bodies and reactions for their own pleasure?

Then frankly I've got no time for you. I don't care about other countries and what they do, I do not care if all your friends are doing it, I don't care if those men are going to cry all day because 'no you can't exploit women and make them miserable' is literal violence, I do not care about any of this bullshit AT ALL. I really don't.

If those men were decent ones, they'd be in the mens or asking for third spaces. Men need to get the fuck out of women's spaces, and women need to stop being so bloody stupid as to enable this harm to other women and trying to coerce and pimp them out for bloody brownie points. And yes, that is all it is. Get a bloody grip.

And frankly if caring about women's inclusion, children's safety, and my right to refuse to provide my undressed body to a man who wants it is 'transphobic'

Then colour me bloody 'transphobic'. If that's what that slur really means then I am not the one with the problem.

Well said @Froodwithatowel I'm beginning to think 'transphobic' = knows what appropriate safeguarding is and is unwilling to give up women and children to male fetishists.

@Froodwithatowel Beautifully said. I don’t want to be around the type of man who would take advantage of this.

I’m a member of a budget gym. The changing rooms have 3 toilets, regular doors, a couple of showers, same sort of door ie not floor to ceiling. The actual changing area is open plan.

If they were to go mixed sex, like a changing village, they would have to have a massive refurb.

Where’s that cost going? Onto membership fees. So my budget gym (which has already put its fees up due to cost of living) would get less budget and more unaffordable.

There’s simply no way it could be done with men and women stripping off unless the whole area was redesigned. There is nowhere for anyone to change privately.

My local leisure centre has a changing village. There’s gaps under all the changing rooms and the showers are open so you have to remain in your swimsuits.

The stats are ON THIS THREAD about how risky they can be for women.

Im also old enough to remember when we were sold all day drinking as “they do it on the continent and it’s fine”- ignoring British culture is not the same as other parts of Europe.

How’s that working out?

I’ve yet to experience a born woman use the toilet with such exhibitionism sadly it tends to be born men who want to be women!

@DisingenuousBatshittery I don't think there should be open plan mixed sex changing rooms. I just meant that lockable cubicles are the only safeish mixed sex option. Sadly, single sex spaces don't mean there won't be hidden cameras. It's a huge problem in women's toilets in S Korea.

I don’t know of course - how could I without asking? - that none of the women I know masturbate to the thought or sight of men shitting and pissing, but I’d be very surprised if they did. I’d be very surprised if women have any of the weirder, creepier paraphilias that men have.