Gender Neutral Loos

[LoveCherryTree]

So I went to a restaurant on Saturday with my girl friends. I go to the loo, and a lad walks out of one of the cubicles, ok, that’s ok, bit surprised, I go into another, finish and walk out to wash my hands, another guy also in the “communal” part of the loo….feeling slightly nervy about being alone in a room with two strange men, but try to just do what I usually do, wash my hands, both men come to stand either side of me and ask me if I’m having a good night, try and just be polite and say yes whilst trying to just get out of there, when one says, “do you fancy a better night?”
they both get too close for comfort and start cornering me towards one of the cubicles whilst laughing. I am literally panicking thinking what the hell, luckily another two women walk through the door and the guys laugh and walk out.
I’m sorry, but I’m not a nervous person, but this really scared me, why do we need communal loos, AIBU to ask if we could just stick to male and female separate loos to avoid such incidences and I’m not saying all men are the same! I’m just saying, walking into a communal loo with a stranger or two can be bloody nerve wracking?

Let's try to stick to facts and legal requirements rather than anecdotes about how horrible and smelly mixed loos are versus 'I use them all the time and they are lovely'.

The Building (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2024 and Approved Document T requires separate single sex toilets for men and women; Accessible toilets for disabled people are also a requirement - Section M of the Regs, I think. So that's three spaces required in non-residential buildings.

A fourth space, i.e. gender neutral or 'universal' toilets, is not required under building regs, and is described in the regs as an option, if space permits.

Building regs could of course be changed in the future to make 'universal' toilets a requirement in future buildings, in addition to the men's, women's and accessible toilets, but that's not the current situation.

We all know about the problems caused by using 'Stonewall Law' instead of the Actual Law - there's a danger of something similar happening with referring to 'Trans Building Regs' rather than the Actual Building Regs.

I never mentioned smells?

I was just trying to work out if an employer has several buildings in one site and one of those buildings has loos like I described, whether the fact single sex facilities were available on site on a different building, meant they had met the requirements.

No you're absolutely right, you didn't mention smells at all, sorry if I implied that you did Frowningprovidence!

But there has been a lot of that on this thread so far and I was trying to bring it down to the level of facts and regs.

I hope you can find a definitive answer to your question in the Actual Building Regs i.e. The Building (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2024 and Approved Document T.

edited to remove those pesky random bullet points and asterisks that sometimes wander into posts uninvited!

The state of the toilet matters though.

Men don't have to sit on them in the same way. They don't have to spend as much time in them.

Horrible conditions for toilets are arguably as likely to make women avoid toilets as men in them because they are unsanitory. This means they will self exclude.

Why should women put up with unsanitory conditions?! This matters more to women than men because of (drumroll) biology!

Workplace (Health Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, Section 20. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1992/3004/regulation/20

At work, Workplace (Health Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, Section 20 also applies.

I hate mixed sex toilets and my impression is that I am not alone in this. I don't know a single woman who doesn't complain about them.

There are girls and women who cannot share toilets with men due to having experienced sexual abuse and/or rape. They become terrified and just cannot do it.

Plus, men can easily install hidden cameras in cubicles. This has happened in a public building near where I live.

I agree with previous posters that mixed sex toilets are usually much dirtier than single sex toilets.

I have seen toilets which are like a single space with a toilet, a basin, a drier or towels and sometimes a baby change facility in cafes and so on which are unisex meaning anyone can use them. These are normal in small venues. What I haven't seen are toilets with multiple toilets within small cubicles (full or partial doors) and then other facilities like sinks, mirrors, hand driers and so on outside the cubical being mixed sex. This is just not the norm by a very long shot.

It is also entirely inappropriate to ask women to share such a space with males of any stripe. If they need to make a gender neutral space then make the gents gender neutral and leave the women's as single sex.

There I've sorted it out.

I am not great at reading legislation. But I feel that says these loos are fine.

A few rounds of 'clean your shit up' directed at men in the workplace coupled with knowing eyes about which dickhead was in their last, and men will be BEGGING for single sex toilets rather than reach for the bog brush.

No and no.

The regulation said single sex
Now someone may argue the sink for hand washing is not included in the text "sanitary conveniences"

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1992/3004/regulation/20

If I am reading the section correctly old buildings had to adapt by the late 90s

The old EA had no gender type PC was quoted to allow post op males but that was replaced by the current EA which had 2 class (sex and GR)
The EA says women are female and can exclude GRC (of both sex).

A cublcle, which is made of partitions with gaps at the top and bottom, is not a separate room, so no, these loos are not fine as employee loos.

Sorry mixed sex single unit off a changing room?

If the changing room is not single sex by provision or timing

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1992/3004/regulation/24#regulation-24-2

You need to track the NHS fife case

Yes, did so long before the on here accepted age of 8. But my antennae were set long before.
I was at a family occasion at a public venue. Mixed age family group. A small party had attached themselves to us - middled aged, middle class, white, ordinary but pleasant. My younger male relative aged 10-15 popped off to the gents. Immediately the male of this party decided to go as well. Within seconds 3 different women of different ages and backgrounds just nudged their nearest men into also needing to go to the gents as well. My relative was fine, although slightly surprised at finding his nearest male relatives nearby. Interestingly this party disappeared shortly afterwards. This incident was a good 25 years ago but I have no doubt that man was a predator. Failed that day, but where else.

Yeah we don't have a women's changing room yet at work because it was all male until recently and there hasn't been any spare rooms to turn into one but now we've added on more space I expect it'll get sorted soon. Not in the UK so not sure of the legalities though I expect its not legal here either but I don't change at work so it doesn't bother me and the other woman who works there shuts the door when she changes so everyone else knows not to go in and they absolutely would not dare to. Might bother the men though who I keep walking in on when they get changed, because they never think to shut the door!

Congrats on being a wedge for more women in your work place!

And keep a mental record of who if forgetful because sometimes its not a ooop but a decision based on anything from an objection to a fetish

I think they just honestly don't care about anyone seeing them in their pants (there's no more undressing than that thankfully) rather than there being a reason for it.

I don't know any man or woman that likes mixed sex toilets (where there are shared communal areas).

No doubt there are the more aggressive men that like them, but I don't want this to become a thing to dodge the single-sex toilet debate.

Single-sex toilets are very much built around the different biology of the sexes.

In my view the gold standard is individual cubicles, with big gaps top and bottom, in single sex spaces. In an ideal world men would have that privacy, not just women, and not have to use urinals, but this is not a massive issue, nor is a feminist board the place to argue it.

Unisex, in my view, refers to individual toilets with sinks, accessed directly off of normal corridors. In use, unisex toilets are always single sex.

If toilets allow both sexes in then they need to be marked "mixed sex", not "unisex". Mixed sex should not just be discouraged, it should be resisted. Mixed sex is only mixed sex if women are in there, and women are more vulnerable in mixed sex toilets so we should not allow them. I genuinely see no reason why we need spaces beyond men, women, disabled. We have ten years or more of hard evidence that trans people don't want them, and in my view women should be even more resistant than trans are.

I was in a situation recently where the only available toilet was mixed sex, cubicles and urinals.
I was with DS16 and a few of his friends and they were horrifed at the thought of sharing a toilet with me as well as a bit concerned for my well being.
They waited outside and blocked the door until I came out - I have no idea if they would have actually stopped a man coming in as nobody tried but the thought was sweet.
So in fact some men don't want mixed sex facilities either

Call me an over-simplifier, but I think that complicating existing things that work OK usually ends badly. I'm a fan of Occam's razor, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.”

Some examples:

Stonewall used to be a successful lesbian and gay support group, look what happened when it added TQI+++++ to its remit.

The English language used to use the word 'woman' to represent adult human females, and everybody - including legislators - understood it as such; then it was used to mean women and men, and look at the expensive and divisive mess that it has taken the UK Supreme Court to sort out.

Toilet facilities used to be one for women, one for men, and one for disabled people who need adapted facilities. Those simple arrangements serve at least 95% of the population adequately. What plurality of complications are justified for the 5% of the population who can use the existing facilities, but choose not to?

Other than full-on TRA types (and half of them probably don't believe it either, but they don't want to lose their place on the right side of history, with their blue-haired friends) I don't think very many people at all want mixed sex. If men as a whole want mixed sex more than women do then I would suspect that is entirely down to men who identify as trans women and predatory men.

I have used mixed-sex single cubicle with a sink toilets in a workplace before. There weren’t many men working there and they were fine, though it was in the days before spy cameras were readily available.

I have used mixed sex, shared sinks toilets and was surprised just how uncomfortable I felt when I met a man at the sink. I think he probably felt uncomfortable too as we kind of eyed each other, then quickly washed and left. I did wonder whether I might get more used to it in time as that kind of space only began to appear around 2918 in the country where I was living, but if course that would depend on whether I found myself in a situation like that in the OP, or worse, which I suspect would have happened sooner or later, though perhaps is less likely than it would have been when I was younger.

I really hope that single sex spaces will be retained and society will readjust. I’ve already seem some signs in the UK that provision has been made available. For example, somewhere in the deep south, in a shopping centre, I was surprised to see what appeared to be a single, mixed sex cubicle in the most handy central position at the entrance to two separate, larger single sex areas, which you had to walk further to reach. (Probably there were disabled toilets there too) but I mainly remember the mixed sex space as it seemed like a useful solution.

Nobody could reasonably complain as it was actually the most convenient convenience. Not that that would stop them, of course.😋

I think unisex or gender neutral toilets are a solution for those who don’t know what sex they are, plus all the women who say they don’t mind sharing our/ their facilities with men. Problem is that men will still want access to women’s facilities for a variety of reasons. Which of course are unnaceptable.