Talking about evidence, there’s a huge amount of emotive language used by men who want to use women’s provision. It would be useful to know why. I collect evidence.
Victoria McCloud reckons someone is going to get killed and ‘I hope, not going to be me’ and that people don’t want to be in a callous country where single sex toilets are single sex toilets.
Getting murdered in a public toilet in this country is incredibly rare for anyone. Dying in a public toilet is not rare but usually due to drug overdoses, medical emergencies and self harm. What helps the chances of surviving such a situation is if people realise the occupant is in trouble.
In an interview with Victoria McCloud by Laura Kuenssberg on BBC Sounds in June, is this answer that starts off about a pub that then goes to ‘…it’s dangerous I think, or risky, or at least rather intimidating to have a space for women that is occupied by men if it’s somewhere like a loo or a changing room’.
It goes from dangerous (attention grabbing) to intimidating (‘at least’ implies the standard to which everything else just gets worse).
If you state ‘dangerous’ you need evidence, like I have for enclosed and unisex toilets.
So in this Fife case, would (ex) Judge McCloud determine this room used as a changing room was dangerous, risky or ‘just’ rather intimidating for SP? A synonym for ‘intimidate’ is ‘harass’.
There’s also Robin Moira White who says, when he worked on the railways, there were no women’s toilets (not unusual at that time, we’ve never had equity) so when women started working they used to check the toilets to see if there was a man in them before the woman would go in. The men were doing this presumably because they didn’t want anyone to be put in an uncomfortable situation. I would have thought the men sensed it was possibly intimidating for the woman so they checked for her.
It’s bizarre how we got to this point of a free for all. And worse, the EHRC advocating for adding ad-hoc enclosed unisex provision retrospectively without looking at the health and safety evidence of what happens in these spaces. Or Zoë Leventhal KC, making submissions on behalf of Bridget Phillipson that perhaps single sex toilets could be mixed sex on some sort of ad-hoc basis. It doesn’t work like that. All toilet designs would have to become enclosed and mixed sex unless you ignored all the health and safety legislation, building regs, building standards and possibly revise the Sexual Offences Act. You would also have to ignore doing risk assessments and equality impact assessments.