Best solution for bathrooms

[feministmom4ever]

I recently posted on a Reddit thread to ask transgender people if they felt that third spaces/unisex toilets for transgender/non-binary/gender fluid were a good solution to the bathroom problem. The answer from most was “no”. Mainly the response was TWAW, and since they seem to truly believe that I didn’t bother to argue. They did make one point which I felt held some validity, which was that biological women with a masculine appearance would be harassed. I know this is rare, but there are instances of it happening. Any suggestions for how to address this?

What is the argument you're trying to counter here?

That if we don't want men who claim to be women in the women's then masculine-presenting women will be questioned in toilets?

Their contention is that masculine women are currently going unquestioned in toilets because we let some men in?

I'd counter that with the answer that it's nonsense. There is no confusion between a feminine presenting man, and a masculine presenting woman. No overlap at all.

I don't believe it's a problem, but if it happens it surely is because trust has broken down and women can't trust men to stay out of their spaces. Once that is re-established any problem goes away.

Even if it were true that masculine women are being challenged - surely they'll be challenged at a lower rate if toilets really are single sex? Compared to the current situation? Because people will have more comfort that they're not being lied to with toilet labels as has been the case up until now (and seemingly still now in some places with all the organisations breaking the law).

And what's worse - your child encountering 6ft 5 male paedophile Kate Dolatowski in the toilets or a butch woman being verbally challenged and then speaking and clearing up that she's a woman (because voices are clear in being male or female) and no-one being more than mildly annoyed?

What about safeguarding? How many sexually harassed, abused or raped women and children in falsely labelled 'women's toilets' is too many before we're going to stop with the strawman arguments that the hurty feelings of adults (and mostly male adults, let's face it) are more important than safety?

I simply don't believe there are any genuinely butch women out there who would rather they not get challenged than have the Dolatowski situation. He targeted two children that we know of.

They have always argued on the same premise. Trans women can look masculine so all masculine looking women watch out if you’re mistaken for a man. Some trans men can look masculine so all masculine looking women watch out if you’re mistaken for a man.

Further illustration that they have less understanding of women than your average man.

The sooner the ludicrous idea that human beings (particularly female ones) can't immediately tell what sex someone is gets in the bin the better.

Shoulder to hip ratio, voice, gait, hand size, foot size, entitled attitude to all around them, all these things are FUCKING OBVIOUS. Jeez. It's a strawman. It's an attempt at coercive control and denying reality. It's abusive.

I can tell you for a fact, I'd be less offended if someone questioned my sex in the toilets (they wouldn't) than with this industrial scale attempted gaslighting and erosion of safeguarding.

Yes. And it's ludicrous.

The risible argument attempt is that because some women have short hair and wear trousers, we should therefore allow men into women's spaces.

No.

Nobody should be harassed. Ever.

We use facilities by sex, as the law sets out.

People present with a wide range of different hairstyles and clothes, and it doesn't affect their sex. That's all.

Questioning someone's sex isn't harassment. It's just a question about facts.

Being attacked or filmed by someone such as Dolatowski or flashed by a man in the women's toilets is harassment.

If your family are swayed by gay rights, you might point out to them that the cohort of people who really nailed it home for the Supreme Court, who were accepted as interveners and who the SC was influenced by IS lesbians.

It was the TRAs erasing homosexuality as a concept which so obviously made a nonsense of the equality act in the first place which did it. Lesbians being unable to gather, in real life, or online without the presence of a man was clearly discriminatory.

Transactivists, apparently, even suggested to the Supreme Court that homosexuals confine themselves to gatherings of less than 25, in order not to come under equality legislation!

It's the fucking height of enough that transactivists are STILL using lesbianism to further their own ends. Except now it's as a means to wedge themselves back in. It's what got them out in the first place!

It really comes down to ‘why is this point relevant to the discussion?’

Also this ^

Really, at the end of the day, if a lesbian gets challenged in a toilet, what's that got to do with the price of eggs?? She gets challenged, either convinces or doesn't, the end.

How is that argument, in any way, shape or form, an argument to make the space mixed sex???

I mean, I know, a lot of people think that women will compromise up their fucking arse until the end of time, spreading empathy and submission everywhere they go, like pink, compliant confetti, but do people really, honestly think that they're going to concede all their spaces on the basis of a more or less hypothetical situation with four lesbians??

What Datun said but also this argument is that we should care about some full grown adult being mildly annoyed rather than protect our children? Ridiculous.

You're never going to get parents to agree to that. Sex matters for safeguarding as the multiple examples of harm to children by sex deception in the name of gender ideology show.

This sort of false equivalence really shows the ideology for what it is.

A bit like when transwomen wail about having private side rooms in the NHS. Shows what they really want, and it's not privacy or space away from men.

If they don't want third spaces it just proves that it has absolutely nothing to do with safety and everything to do with using unconsenting women as props to validate their sense of self. Which is not a right.

There are two sexes, and three types of toilet: male, female and mixed.

If trans women won't use male or mixed sex toilets then what they are telling you is that the only option they are willing to consider is using women's spaces regardless of how women feel about that or the impact that it has on us.

That tells you this is actually a male supremacist movement masquerading as a trans rights movement, and I now feel entirely comfortable saying that if someone isn't willing to use either mixed sex facilities or the facilities for members of their own sex, it is no one else's problem and they can bloody well stay at home.

Exactly. As we've said numerous times, you won't reason them out of it because they're not in it through reason.

Family members are a little different, hopefully.

What makes it tricky, I believe, is having to wade, custard like, through all the sexism that permeates bloody everywhere, in order for people to even listen tho.

I don't think these people really care about lesbians either. The family member type people, I mean. They are still automatically, or maybe subconsciously, just agreeing that women should do what they're told. And lesbians sound like a right on way of doing it.

Once they have exhausted all the possible ways that women can be told to validate men, then they might concede something

@Rubidium What on earth is she on about, I have literally never used the men's toilets in all my 47 years.

Even if third spaces were provided to remove any safety fears, blocking access to women only facilities means they know they are not seen as women by anyone other than themselves, and are faced with this reality every time they have to go out. So I expect a lot of push back from these males on this matter.

This. There is a small but vociferous cohort who believe that excluding them from anything intended for women = Nazism/Apartheid/Jim Crow laws.

(And the fetishists, woman-haters, political opportunists, and knee-jerk underdog supporters come along for the ride.)

I met up with tra friend on Saturday: we discussed it at length, and it was incredibly upsetting, as it became clear that their objective is not just to restore some trans-inclusion but to make it mandatory and thus eradicate single-sex spaces altogether. They considered this to be the pragmatic, compromise solution (no, me neither).

They were also hostile to any negotiation. (I asked why they didn't lobby parliament to re-legalise trans-inclusive entities. (I wouldn't want them to succeed but I support their democratic right to try.) But nope.)

Instead, they favour Guerilla warfare: legal threats, and civil disobedience.

So it's going to be unpleasant.

Please also remember often when designers talk about inclusive design what they really mean is spaces with sinks available to everyone and then enclosed private toilet cubicles off.

Or a completely private cubicle/small room with a sink in it that everyone can use - supposedly one at a time.

Private, acoustically sound cubicles/rooms in a public space (which someone else can let themselves into when you are in there), aren’t safe.

We need as few of them as possible.

To add a point (on the whole women or trans women being harassed in whatever toilets) I saw an insta video of this guy who pretty much looks like a woman and naturally 'passes' better than most TW but he is not trans just a very naturally feminine man. He sometimes gets 'sorry this is the men's' but he still uses it because he says that 'I am a man'. So, if he's fine in there I don't really see why some of the quite large built and still quite obviously male TW feel like they would have a problem in the men's room?

I use the men's and I go to alot of concerts where there's rowdy drunk dudes. Once or twice someone might say something but men generally don't pay attention to whose in there. I've also experienced a man telling another man to 'fuck off' for making a rude comment so 🤷‍♀️

I have only seen a man in the ladies twice in my life. One was a drag Queen (performer in a bar), he was about 6’5” in heels and just obviously a man even though he was in full makeup and costume (and I had just seen him doing a drag performance!).
The other time was recently at a theatre- I walked out of my cubicle and he was walking past to get out of the loos - wearing a dress with long hair but my brain instantly went “man”, it was the way he walked and carried himself I think. The loos were busy and full of women but I still had that subconscious reaction of knowing that’s a man.
I wasn’t scared either time but it’s more that I just knew they were men. I have never had that reaction to a masculine or tall woman because they always look like women.
Although I have seen photos of a few trans men who do look very masculine (whether they would in real life I don’t know), and ok some people might do a double take seeing a very masculine looking woman in the ladies.
The more I hear this argument though the more I think actually I just don’t care. These kinds of women have been using the ladies for years with no real problems, and women aren’t generally a threat to other women so it’s a non issue.
It doesn’t justify not allowing women the right to single sex spaces, sport etc etc
Men stay out of women only spaces, simple really.

The other thing that strikes me is how unlikely it is that most women would question a (supposed) male in a female space.

If you're in a confined space with someone you believe to possibly be a risk, who is probably bigger than you, and you suspect may have malicious intent, the last thing you do is confront them.

If you're in a confined space with someone you believe to possibly be a risk, who is probably bigger than you, and you suspect may have malicious intent, the last thing you do is confront them.

Which proves that it's not merely about appearance (we know that of course) but about thought processes and behaviour. As we've seen time and again on these threads when a trans identifying man graces us with his presence!

@feministmom4ever
I reread your original post again and I get the impression it’s younger people you are speaking to. I thought you might like this quote. It’s from a young person who wants to use the gender neutral toilet in school (one on each floor like the DfE have recently put in their design spec). It shows what happens in reality, I have read a lot similar. I love how frank this account is:

The gender-neutral bathrooms are both horrible and amazing. I am so glad we have them, but they are disgusting, mostly because of the way students treat them. The issue mainly comes from how small and how few they are, and it’s not uncommon that the four small bathrooms are filled with sex, drugs or vaping. We need to address these problems, or the gender-neutral bathrooms will continue to be the most disgusting in the school.
I would like to preface this with the fact that I am never in any building other than the main building, and I have never used the theater’s gender-neutral bathroom. However, I have used the other four gender-neutral bathrooms, so I know which to use and why.
I consider everything in the third floor bathroom a biohazard. Almost every time I make the mistake of going in, I leave trying to purge my mind of the horrors I just witnessed. Whether it is people having sex, poop smeared on the walls, or the toilet being clogged with an entire roll of toilet paper, horrible things have happened in that bathroom.

The young persons solution was to create more toilets so the sex and vaping would be spread out more and they wouldn’t get a late pass for lesson. They said they didn’t like the extra teachers they put on to man the toilets or the cameras as they thought it was embarrassing. And the posters that the school put up to warn people of the dangers of drug taking weren’t going to work as people just ripped them down.

Now put this into real life UK stats of 1 in 6 vapes being spiked so that children are having seizures and stopping breathing in schools, and the fact that in 2015 the BBC investigated and found that there were thousands of sexual assaults and 600 rapes reported inside school premises over a 3 year period. Ofsted in 2021 tried to work out what was happening in schools and they said sexual abuse was so prevalent and going unreported so much that schools should assume it is happening even if they have no evidence.

There are so many problems with these designs, because they are completely private and usually pretty sound-proof and open to both sexes.

@feministmom4ever also it could be that you are American? In which case you may not realise the toilet door gaps I am advocating for are not the side ones or doors that look like saloon bar doors. Some American designs leave very little to the imagination!

@Keeptoiletssafe your posts are so good. You should write a book.

😂 To be honest I just wish the message was getting through to government departments, manufacturers and designers.

It's reached a lot of people, I promise. It would be great to have it all laid out somewhere that you could link to to save copy pasting every time. I wonder if Sex Matters or similar might host a page with the info on it?