Regarding preventing deaths in toilets:
The people most likely to die in toilets are those who have medical problems (11% of cardiac arrests are on the loo), drug users and people who want to end their lives.
The biggest way to prevent more people dying in toilets is not to have gender neutral or mixed sex toilets and for everyone to stick to the toilet for their sex. In that way, toilets designs can get back to having door gaps.
Then anyone at their most vulnerable has the best chance of being rescued because they will be seen through the door gaps that are allowed in single sex toilets when there’s a single sex area in front of them. I know because that’s how I saved a young woman who I saw had collapsed in her cubicle as soon as I entered the ladies. In two recent more publicised events of toilet deaths outside the home, one man was found after 6 days and one woman after 3 days. No one knew they were there.
Privacy is why a lot of deaths (and assaults) happen in disabled toilets too. Children are led into these toilets, women are pushed back into them. Thats why there should be an exemption for children to go into single sex toilets of the sex of their carer.
For a death risk example, a quote from academic US research: ‘Public restrooms are often used as drug consumption sites because of the privacy they offer. However, it is this inherent privacy, especially with single-user restrooms, that invites solitary consumption. And that is also what makes it so dangerous: With no one nearby to call for emergency assistance or administer naloxone, individuals are at a higher risk for death should an overdose occur.’
What should happen is there should be single sex accessible (disabled) toilets so these toilets have the same benefits of single sex design.
If there is really no way someone wants to use a toilet with male or female on it then the mixed sex toilet should be really closely monitored. In my research, this isn’t practical and isn’t liked. But it is why it ‘works’ better (say) in a cafe that has only one toilet space available.
I started looking at toilet safety because of the risks of medically vulnerable people dying in toilets that were private designs. These private designs are said to be ‘inclusive’ and have their origins to transactivists in New York nightclubs. This is not transphobic, it’s just facts that anyone can look up and I have worked back to from researching toilet safety for the last few years. It’s also not anti-men to say that men like having sex in toilets more than women. In fact, it was argued in Parliament it was discrimination against men to make it illegal to have sex in a public toilet (it has been since 2003). It’s not anti-sex to say the conditions that make a toilet cubicle good to have consensual sex in are the conditions that non-consensual sex will happen in (read Rod Liddle’s account of the BBC toilets in the Spectator).
Privacy comes at the cost of health and safety for all at our most vulnerable. It also comes at a cost for any provision at all: the more toilets are misused, the more they cost to maintain and the more likely there are to be shut. It even stops people using an area (such as shops) at all as the area gets a reputation and the ‘good people’ avoid it.
What you think you want and what you need can be two different things.
I have written a lengthy post because I hope the group will look at it and start thinking about what they need. I think it should be their safety (and health). If they really want to be radical and campaign for mixed sex toilets to have door gaps in them to be as safe as the single sex designs then I can help with my research. I am happy to discuss. But I don’t think society is really ready for that. It’s going against building regs too.