The removal of ladies toilets

[Sparks654]

I like many women, have been really dismayed at the removal of separate sex public toilets - and also the lack of discussion and women's voices being raised and heard on this topic. I live in Somerset, and where I live the town hall, and all public toilets are mixed sex. Private businesses also seem to be either refurbishing their facilities to remove ladies and gents toilets, or new businesses directly are making all toilets mixed sex.

This is actually silently excluding women from public spaces, although I know anecdotally of men who've told me they feel uncomfortable with the mixed sex bathroom arrangement and that they are intruding on women's space. In fact recently I was visiting an art gallery and had no option but to use the facilities - which I discovered are now unisex. A man entered and saw a row of women and asked - "this is unisex isn't it?" He hovered awkwardly at the door.

I wonder if other regions are noticing the same thing? Polls seems to suggest that over 70 percent of the population want single sex toilets and yet with public money they are being removed? I feel this is actually silently excluding women and girls from public spaces we might have been able to access. Now I feel obliged to check in advance where I am going to know if there are ladies toilets available, and I am finding something that used to be a given, and a women's health service, is disappearing. Wonder what is happening elsewhere and if there is a free discussion taking place, or - if in my experience - a dose of cancel culture is stopping the question of women's rights being raised?

Are the unisex toilets entirely self-contained rooms with floor-to-ceiling walls and doors including individual handwash facilities, that open out into a general corridor? If so, that wouldn't bother me so long as they are clean. If they have put a unisex label on the door of a room containing cubicles with gaps around the dividers and doors with shared handwashing facilities, that's not acceptable and does not meet existing obligations under the law to provide single sex facilities. Mixed sex facilities are supposed to only be single-user-fully-self-contained. Only buildings where the available space is too small to provide 2 separate cubicle-rooms are supposed to have only mixed sex single-user-fully-self-contained facilities, though any building can have these in addition to single sex facilities.

If the only facilities available are mixed-sex non-self-contained cubicle rooms you may well have a case for sexist discrimination because that's a situation that disadvantages women. Take legal advice.

Some and some. Some you go into a room and then there are the cubicles, and the ones in the park are directly opening onto the park, so not enclosed. Either way the park ones are only used by men and I've seen women taking their daughters to pee behind trees behind the block to avoid using them. We all know that park toilets aren't nice anyway, and sometimes actually pretty seedy -- I actually have on a few occasions happened to be walking past when they are being cleaned and have heard the cleaning ladies sharing some unpleasant observations, shall we say.

For me it's not only about the privacy and safety, it's also about women's toilet needs and those differing. Park toilets as an example aren't cleaned every hour - they are cleaned daily, so there is a long while that women might have to use them in a bad state.

I haven't really got the energy or capacity for taking legal advice, or really battling further with the local authorities, but I did want to hear from others, as sometimes if feels like women aren't being heard.

It's dismal. Nobody wants this (well, hardly anyone, say no more, etc etc), and yet councils and other public bodies continue to defy not just what the public want, but what they are entitled to in law.

It not only feels instinctively wrong, Sparks654 - I'm not an expert by any means, but I have Document T on speed dialand I think removing existing separate provision and replaced it with gender neutral/unisex toilets is wrong Toilet accommodation: Approved Document T

Since the SC ruling, there has been a lot of focus on the Equality Act, but there are a number of other laws and regulations that determine what toilet provision is required - workplace regs, health and safety, building regs etc.

As far as I can see, they all agree that in the first place, the requirement is for separate sex-segregated toilets. Unisex toilets may be provided as an optional extra.
Where there is insufficient space for separate toilets, unisex provision is acceptable.

Older buildings will have separate facilities already; building regs require new buildings to have separate facilities unless there's limited space.
There's really no justification for not having sex-segregated facilities in new buildings, or keeping the existing ones in old buildings.

RareGoalsVerge has pointed out that a gender neutral/unisex toilet is something specific, not just a standard toilet with a different badge stuck on the door.

So unless there isn't enough space for separate toilets - which is obviously not the case in buildings where they already exist - there should be separate men's and women's toilets.

And 'gender neutral' 'unisex' toilets are supposed to comply with detailed specifications, they can't be existing toilets re-badged.

This bothers me strongly. I really want single sex toilets but they all seem to be becoming mixed sex toilets now. It makes me feel extremely uncomfortable and vulnerable.

Both men and women mostly want single sex toilets, not just women. The push for them just seems so misguided but so many are afraid to say anything.
We had unisex in my last school and the boys didn’t want to use them either.

At my work we have mixed sex loos and the rationale is that it allows us to have fewer overall. The set up is a door off the main office space into a little corridor with 12 individual rooms.

I'm a little undecided on them - in some ways it's more privacy overall as each little cubicle has it's own sink and dryer. It'such easier to sort a mooncup for example. I do hate how you can bump into a bloke in the little narrow corridor. My ideal would be the individual rooms with sinks but a set of each for men and women.

A couple of weeks ago, The Guardian published an interview with the managing director of the British Toilet Association, Raymond Martin, who, it says, is ‘on a mission to improve Britain’s loos’. Now he does make some very good points in the interview, but, worryingly, has been putting forward the following to councils up and down the country:

Martin explains one way councils could pay for public loos. “You have a council toilet, but you have a coffee shop on the back of it…the rent [income] will offset the cost of the toilets. You take a block of toilets, cut it in half, you put a shop in one side, and you put unisex cubicles in the other side.”

There is (almost inevitably) no mention of the need for single sex toilets, or, indeed, how these toilets will all be made compliant again after the Supreme Court ruling if there is now only half the original space in the toilet block in the places where his advice has been taken…

www.theguardian.com/society/2025/aug/21/i-dream-about-toilets-i-admit-it-the-man-on-a-mission-to-improve-britains-loos

Yup - agree OP. Occasionally I fire off a complaint but there are so many of them now. It’s unrealistic that women take legal action against all of these places, as they have in other areas concerning discrimination. It really needs government / council leadership and common sense… sadly, both appear to be lacking atm.

The floor to ceiling doors are dangerous for two reasons:

1. if you collapse, no one knows. This is why we have always had the design we’ve had
2. it is perfect for sexual predators who can easy push a girl or woman inside a confined space and rape or sexually assault her

This changeover to a situation virtually no one wants has to stop, for reasons of safety.

There has been a huge growth in mixed changing areas in leisure centres, with a concomitant rise in reports of voyeurism, hidden cameras and exhibitionism.

Separate facilities for women were hard-won, to give women privacy, dignity and safety. What has changed? Why are those things no longer seen as important?

Leisure centres moving to changing villages is about making it easier for families I think rather than any other motive.

I don't think I'd enter a mixed sex block of toilets on my own.

I have however had problems with self contained unisex toilets being absolutely covered in piss. Whilst it's not dangerous as such, it's fucking disgusting and I wish the fact this happens wouldn't be brushed aside.

This is often the problem tho, and the reason I want single sex. Our local train station has a row of these unisex toilets and they’re bloody grim.

I went into a unisex loo when I was on holiday earlier in the year, the bloke who came out after being sat in there for ten minutes had blocked it and left it smeared in shit 🤮

As a man, I think it's really awful that safe clean spaces are being taken away from women and children. I hope this can be fought against.

Anyone been to the spanking new toilets in the newly renovated Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery (London)?

yes, you’ve got it. There are now two sets of enclosed gender neutral toilet facilities, each with just 3-4 toilets and a tiny area outside these cubicles.

Clearly meant to be one for women, one for men. But someone there thought it a good idea to have two GN toilet facilities instead.

I’ll be writing to them.

Absolutely agree. There's a regular poster on here whose name I can't remember (keepsinglesextoilets?) who has done lots of research into this and found indicators as to why mixed sex provision is less safe for women.

Certainly having only gender neutral floor-to-ceiling enclosed loos is rarely appropriate but it's perfectly sensible in small cafés and restaurants whete there is only room for 2 lavatories anyway and nothing is gained by way of privacy, decency or safety if one room has "men" on the door and the othet has "women". There are several places like this that I visit regularly that are much more dominated by women in the day time and have more men in the evening and it's thoroughly sensible that they are gender neutral. Where there is space and demand for more lavatories, there's no reason why a building can't have single sex cubicle rooms for men, single sex cubicle rooms for women AND some fully enclosed single-user rooms. The safety concerns with single-user rooms do not apply if there's plenty of single sex shared rooms too, but there are some mumsnetters on a mission to use those safety concerns to shout down ANY suggestion that the public sphere could ever be allowed to provide ANY facilities for people who don't want to use the facilities for their own sex. That's not a good look imo.

I don’t mind a GN toilet when it’s just one self
contained cubicle in a cafe or similar, where they don’t have space for more.
But all other situations prefer single sex.
My work has just opened a new building with only GN toilets - nobody likes them. I wish they had just consulted their actual staff than decided to try and be all modern and “inclusive”

I realise that there's more to it than just Document T of Building Regs - it is only applicable in England, I believe, and it would be useful if somebody chased up the equivalent regs for Scotland, Wales and NI.
Many of the examples MNers are complaining about have in fact been in England, e.g. the OP is about Somerset.

The Building Regs mostly cover new buildings, but they refer to 'building work'. I've chased up the legal meaning of 'building work':
The legal term ‘building work’ generally includes building new buildings, making buildings bigger, altering buildings and changing what they are used for. It also covers installing a ‘controlled service’ or a ‘controlled fitting’
Manualtobuildingregs-July2020.pdf

IANAEOUKBR - I am not an expert on UK building regsbut it seems to me that replacing existing toilets with some form of unisex provision is 'altering buildings' and 'installing a controlled service or controlled fitting'

The regs were updated in 2024, so they are the most recent regs about toilet provision.

They couldn't be clearer about the primacy of single sex toilets; note the use of 'must' and 'may', and 'in addition to'.
Building regs T1.
(1) Toilet accommodation in buildings other than dwellings—

(a) must consist of—
(i) (ii) reasonable provision for male and female single-sex toilets, or where space precludes provision of single-sex toilets, universal toilets, and

(b) may consist of universal toilets in addition to single-sex toilets.

(2) In this requirement— “single-sex toilet” means toilet facilities which—
(a) are intended for the exclusive use of persons of the same sex, and
(b) provide washbasins and hand-drying facilities in—
(i) either the toilet room or cubicle, or
a separate area intended for use only by persons of that sex.
...
“universal toilet” means toilet facilities which—
(a) are provided in a fully enclosed room which contains a water closet and washbasin and hand-drying facilities, and
(b) is intended for individual use by persons of either sex.
Toilet accommodation: Approved Document T

Removal of required single sex toilets and their replacement with unisex provision which may or may not comply with the official definition of a 'universal toilet' seems to be happening a lot. It looks like it is not compliant with current regs, but that's just my opinion - see 'IANAEOUKBR' above!

What is the motivation for this, when segregated toilets work OK for the vast majority of the population? Why all this unnecessary expense and disruption?

The word I've used for a lot of the TRA response to the SC ruling is: spite.
Women may have won the right to exclusive use of women's spaces, but we can still deny them their rights by physically getting rid of single-sex spaces.

This looks like a spiteful scorched earth campaign against women's spaces

I have a personal hatred of the word "unisex" in a toilet context. It's a word that sounds nicer and gentler than the harsh "mixed sex" truth.

And I suspect that is exactly the reason it's being used so widely, to damp down concerns.

I posted before reading yours, user2848502016, but it's a great illustration:
one self-contained universal toilet where there isn't enough space for anything else is building regs compliant, and everybody accepts that.

But if the new building is in England I suspect that it is not building regs compliant because, as you can see from the quotes from Doc T in my post,

1) Toilet accommodation in buildings other than dwellings—
(a) must consist of—
(i) (ii) reasonable provision for male and female single-sex toilets, or where space precludes provision of single-sex toilets, universal toilets, and
(b) may consist of universal toilets in addition to single-sex toilets.
[my emphasis].

Homes have multi-use loos and I always think about the issues this causes, although minor lol. I've worked in offices with unisex full cubicles, with own sinks and the issue was the state the toilets were left in and, despite repeated complaints, how the company failed to deal with those who were patently not toilet trained or get cleaners to properly clean!! I see this issue increasingly as a 'Urinary Leash', the very issue that Victorians fought against. We have less and less facilities and those we have seem increasingly less female friendly. Why, I wonder are females increasingly being ignored!

Hello!

Thank you x

Yes lots of you are hopefully spreading the message. I never realised I would spend a great deal of my time over the last 3 years campaigning for safe toilets but here we are. I have got so much evidence now where I have researched where ideas have come from, back to the source. This has meant correspondence with DfE, HSE, London Fire Brigade etc. I even have a new laptop to deal with all the articles! I have looked at opinions from people all over the world but concentrated in this country (UK) mostly due to the regulations and legislation here.

I am always listening to opinions as genuinely want everyone to be safe. What is most troubling is that some people who are ‘at the top’ don’t get it. Along the way I have argued with a female lawyer about how safety is more important that absolute privacy, and a transactivist with epilepsy that safety matters more than everyone being able to use the same toilet (therefore it being totally enclosed). The latter was more prepared to listen - the lawyer was not.

To be honest, at some point, reality will win. You will get more people having very bad experiences in toilets and more people will ‘get’ it. I just wish people were evidenced-based and thought about vulnerable people.

We are in a critical point in history for toilet design. We need to get back to health and safety.

I live in a city in the centre of the UK. One of our local museums has unisex toilets (cubicles with wc, basin and dryer and sani-bin) for the public. There are no single sex toilets. I am beginning to think that this is illegal. The museum has space for single sex toilets (it's huge) but only provides unisex toilets. I did complain a couple of years back (mainly on safety grounds, toilets are tucked out of sight), but not since (and am wary as I am a local volunteer...)