Good Law Project are now selling "JK Rowlling is a transphobe" stickers

[BambooLampshade]

I think this is really poor. It seems to go well beyond their original remit.
They seem to have turned themselves into a ranty uni-soc type of outfit.

I wonder how JKR will respond, if she does.

https://goodlawproject.org/product/jk-rowling-is-a-transphobe-stickers/

If anyone is interested in where modern ‘inclusive’ toilet ideas came from, here’s a summary:

A work of two American professors is quoted favourably multiple times in a consultation commissioned by the Government for England’s Document T (non-domestic toilets), and many different school design brochures for ‘gender-neutral’ designs. These two professors are transwomen Professor Susan Stryker and gay man Professor Joel Sanders.

Professor Susan Stryker’s interest in design was from when Susan looked at street maps and saw penis shapes in them, in one informative article relating an overhead street map drawing to a diagram of penis amputation. Then moving on in the same article, a discussion on toilet designs to include trans people. This involves making just the toilet cubicle completely private, and then a novel idea of having one way viewing glass at eye level when sitting down so the occupant inside can be watching others. The sinks are outside the cubicle so everyone can mingle together, (presumably whilst being watched by an unknown number of men sitting on the toilet). Stryker is a gender studies professor and has published other works in conjunction with others people may have heard of like Stephen Whittle.

Professor Sanders is Stryker’s business partner in the inclusive ‘civil rights’ toilet design business. Sanders came from a background of writing in Stud magazine, about design elements in toilets that facilitate gay men cruising for sex.

It is interesting that when Sanders discussed his ideas to Harvard students - he says gay men and women objected to them. Gay men (like himself) Sanders dismissed as they have had their time and toilet design should be about trans people now, (presumably not gay sex). Women he dismissed as feminists from a certain generation (readers, if you got this far, here I take a bow). He reckons inclusive toilets are safer because more people will be using them so more eyes to look out for what’s going on (good luck in the completely private cubicles). Again he discussed private cubicles then completely ‘inclusive’ washing stations and grooming stations. Presumably this relies on ‘nice’ men and women milling about keeping an eye on the ‘bad’ men and length of time everyone is in these private toilet cubicles?

I just want to keep toilets safe for everyone. The safest design is one with door gaps so there’s a degree of supervision and it prevents misuse. That can only be a single sex design in regulations, legislation and practice. In that way single sex design is the most inclusive of anyone at their most vulnerable. That includes anyone having a medical episode (11% of cardiac arrests are on the toilet), self harming, drug overdoses or being assaulted.

I have mentioned this to the Good Law Project many times. As this article mentions JK Rowling, there’s more chance they will read it. I will say again to them and the donators: the non-domestic toilet designs you are promoting are more dangerous and less hygienic due to being less easy to clean and ventilate. Regardless, you will never ‘win’ as there is so much regulation and legislation regarding toilets already. That won’t be undone for you.

What you should have been doing with that £500k, is looking at safe ways to incorporate door gaps into mixed sex toilet rooms. This is going to be difficult because of male voyeurism, though I have ideas.

But leave single sex toilets alone - their safer design saves lives and prevents assaults.

Sorry that’s a long post. Just want to emphasise I think ‘inclusive’ as being inclusive for safety and for health, to be the best designs for those who are compromised medically or by being in a more vulnerable group such as women and children.

I've been thinking about the idea of 'inclusivity' a lot recently.

The word 'include' is related to the word 'enclose'.
They both derive from the idea of surrounding, shutting in, fencing off, protecting.
In other words, separating something from something else.
'Including' means including some things in, and by definition 'including other things out', to borrow from Sam Goldwyn, i.e. inclusion implies exclusion.

To be inclusive, a line is drawn around a set of something. By definition, anything outside that set has to be excluded, otherwise it doesn't make any sense.

A group of left-handed people, or primary-school children, or OAPs or six-footers, does not have to be inclusive of right-handed people, teenagers, twenty-somethings or people who are just over 5', respectively.
If they were, they wouldn't be what they are. If you get my meaning😏

That would mean that every group would have to be open to the entire human race in order to qualify as 'inclusive'.

You’re right of course, KTS, and the mind boggles at the ‘characters’ quoted in document T. If anyone stops to think about it for two seconds, toilet design should obviously revolve around safety and hygiene.

Thankyou.

It an attempt to look at it philosophically (!), I looked at Marlow’s needs pyramid in terms of toilets.

The base level is physiological need (being able to breathe, eat, excrete). Somewhere to go to the toilet is that level.

The next level up is safety, which includes health needs. Single sex cubicle designs are healthier for all sorts of reasons. For example, when someone flushes a toilet, the plume particles will cover a distance of 1.5m. So for a universal (mixed sex) toilet, the sink, hand dryer and taps will typically be covered in particles from the previous occupants. Plus the handle to get out will be more likely if a woman is sharing with men as they are scientifically proven to be less likely to wash their hands. A medical hospital study looked at microbes and universal toilets were worst for disease. Then men’s toilets, then women’s. I use hand sanitiser after I use a mixed sex hospital design toilet due to the very long list of microbes found. The NHS in particular should be discouraged from increasing mixed sex toilet provision.

Only the very top levels of ‘needs’ cover esteem and self-actualisation. If toilets are being designed to prioritise the top of the pyramid, the ‘validation’ that people crave, without regard for the base levels, it doesn’t work. The top levels are exclusive if they don’t include what everyone needs further down.

Real inclusivity satisfies the base levels - what everyone needs - a toilet - then a clean and safe toilet. Many, if not most, council public toilets have been closed down due to sex, drugs, vandalism and bad behaviour towards cleaners. All that means they cost too much to maintain. So the most basic level has gone. There are accounts of distressed older, poorer people fouling themselves when they can’t find a toilet, then avoiding going out.

This is why I get exasperated at the Good Law Project arguing in court for the star of top of the tree, when for many people, there’s no tree. They have, and always will, argue for everyone to have private, enclosed mixed sex cubicle designs with shared mixed sex sinks, or universal designs. Even they draw the line at having mixed sex toilets with door gaps - they know men and women are too uncomfortable and of men’s voyeuristic behaviour.

That explanation won’t fit on a sticker for The Good Law Project!

Sorry to break it to you @Keeptoiletssafe but Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs had a penthouse added to the pyramid and it says 'Anything that trans-identifying men demand, they must be given’. 😈

I remember olden days public ladies' toilets with very ferocious elderly women gatekeepers making sure users paid their penny and left the place as they found it.

They kept the users safe too, just by being there. It's all about what society is prepared to subsidise.

Little known fact: at one point women were spending a penny for a wee but men didn’t have to spend a penny - urinals were free to try and stop men weeing in the streets. It was so bad it was corroding buildings.You can still see urine deflectors on The Bank of England building and more modern buildings too.

We have a major health and safety problem in this country with street fouling.In 2023-2024 there were almost 4,200 requests to clean up urine to the City of York Council and also 280 reports to clean up faeces, some of it human. That’s just one city. Many people caught said they didn’t have any toilet to use. It costs an average of £15k to keep each public toilet going per year.

The £500k the Good Law Project raised could have bought more toilets instead going to court to demand all the single sex toilet designs have to be mixed sex. This requires millions (billions?) in investment from councils and businesses to refurnish from safer to more dangerous designs. The alternative is they could argue that we scrap all the years of toilet building regs and health and safety legislation and so it’s a free for all. It would be tricky to alter the voyeurism and sexual activity in toilet offence laws in this new toilet nirvana. Perhaps they’d scrap those too?

Meanwhile, more public toilets are shut down. The Good Law Project are so blind to real life and what’s going on for the majority. It really is like they are up in the air and not looking down from that city penthouse @UtopiaPlanitia!

@DeanElderberry yes that would be great wouldn’t it but of course rarely happens. It’s not a pleasant minimum wage job and can be a risky job. So instead the cubicle door gaps go someway into preventing misuse and helping supervise. Other occupants of the room keeping check. That’s requires the toilets to be single sex in design.

Anyway, enough on toilets. Just hope the Good Law Project read this and realise what a waste of everyone’s time and money it is trying to follow the path they are following. It’s not fair of them getting people to donate on the false pretence that they have a chance of getting what they want.

Are those 4200 requests to clean York possibly largely due to stag and hen parties, do you think, KTS? Are you York based?

At club chucking out time, I've seen men just pissing where they stand. Up against walls, shop doorways, wherever they bloody like. Loads of them.

Literally, right after leaving the club. They could've gone in the club.

I have actually said so, and received a mouthful back in reply.

Of abuse, not piss!

Some deflectors in London

https://londonist.com/london/secret/urine-deflectors

I believe you can also get paint that has a similar effect.

Yep, Datun, seen that too, so many times it becomes normalised (eww). Also men in lay-bys with their willies out pissing by the side of the road in full view, not even hiding in the bushes. I broke down at Scotch Corner once and parked in Sedbury Lay-by to be recovered, and I could barely breathe due to the stench of piss. It was absolutely disgusting.

Gross!!!

But as @Keeptoiletssafe says, the closing down of public toilets is rife. It's only encouraging men to do it in public.

If it was just a question of there being no public toilets any more - which I agree is sadly the case - then women would also have to pee anywhere.

A case in point is the experience of people living near a very large sports stadium in Dublin.
The stadium is state-of-the-art, and has not just lots of men's and women's toilets, but accessible toilets, baby changing facilities, changing places toilets, - you name it!

And yet, nearby residents find that men - only men - don't bother using any of the many toilets available in the stadium before leaving, and use their front gardens instead.

It appears that men pee anywhere because they can, not because they have to.

I appear to have brought this thread round to toilets! No not York based. I don’t know but I collate current toilet stories from around the U.K. and sometimes abroad, in order to work out how to make toilets safer for everyone. I love a good fact and York suffers, like most of the U.K., from not having enough toilets.

This is the York story to show the problems with excretion in public: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y5k9g8wz7o From a FOI someone did, the cost of those Silver Street toilets was the total cost of fitting out the Silver Street toilets: £384,009.98
A chunk of this will be for a very necessary changing places toilet - there are far too few of these.
Three people got trapped in one of the new Silver Street toilets earlier this year. Not sure why. The fire brigade were eventually called after several hours. I also know there were problems recently with the accessible toilet being closed. I really feel for councils spending all this money and toilets get broken.

This is a typical story (this one from Bath) to show how older people, people with medical conditions (and poorer people) are more affected by toilet misuse/closures to the point they don’t go out:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg92nl5w25o

Yes, I agree.

although, edited to add that men appear to need to go a lot more frequently than women.

Just to play devils advocate

That's quite possibly true, fair nuff

But as the local residents point out, they are only a few minutes away from a stadium with loads of toilets, so the lads should be able to go before they leave, and make it past all those nearby front gardens without having to go again😒
It's as if they're doing it on purpose.

They’ve drunk a lot and don’t care enough to think ahead. A few well-publicised fines may help the bladder engage brain before leaving the stadium. After his name-and-shame Peter Mandelson will maybe think twice.
As men get older they are more likely to suffer with prostrate issues as well which will be a problem. Having bins in the men’s to dispose of sanitary wear is good - they are different shapes to women’s sanitary bins.

I will just have to add this because Jolyon made me see red with this absolute nonsense speech which shows he has no concept of toilet provision. He was upset that transpeople may be outed ‘because they stop using the toilets they’ve always used and instead start using the, kind of, disabled toilets in the basement’. Firstly, they are called accessible. Secondly, they won’t be in the basement. Thirdly, the dismissive tone suggests people using accessible toilets are ‘lesser’.

Accessible toilets are absolutely an exemplar of a civilised society. It means almost everyone has a toilet they can use. To sneer at them is despicable.

He doesn’t know what he’s talking about and is wasting everyone’s time and money.

@Keeptoiletssafe "He doesn’t know what he’s talking about and is wasting everyone’s time and money."

Perfectly describes Jolyon to a tee does that 😀

Maybe that will fit on a sticker?

It will.

Thank you xx

It's also typical of the attitude that 'kind of disabled toilets' are some kind of consolation prize for trans IDing men who aren't allowed go where they want to go i.e. the women's toilet.
I've even seen it suggested that accessible toilets should be routinely made available to able-bodied transpeople.
In his rejection of the Good Law Project's challenge to the EHRC, Mr Justice Swift made this breathtakingly ignorant statement:

73 One point raised was that the unisex provision is often labelled “accessible” or “disabled”. That is a current common practice, but it is not a practice that is invariable or need continue. There is no reason why, if only as a matter of sensible accommodation, the labelling could not change.

It is shocking to read a judge describing accessible facilities, which disabled people campaigned for for decades because they need them, not because they prefer them or find them more comfortable or validating, as 'unisex provision that 'is often labelled “accessible” or “disabled”'

I hope he has since been put straight on the facts, and that it has been pointed out to him that his suggestion that accessible provision should be taken away from disabled people and labelled as 'unisex' is shameful.

Do they really need to go more frequently, or do they just not feel they have to hold it like women have to?

I am reminded of an old joke...

Q: "Why do dogs lick their own balls?"
A: "Because they can"