Looking for a gym with female-only changing rooms by sex: a journey

[2021x]

I am trying to find a gym in my city (not UK) that excludes males from the female showering and changing rooms.

I was in my gym and there was a man in the changing room- no attempt to be female other than a sports-bra- and since then I was just stressed everytime I went.

I have emailed a gym who say they are trans-inclusive on a case by case basis and said I should use the accessiblity changing room if I am uncomfortable.

I have also put up a post on Reddit in the local page - that got auto-moderated, and then the same post on the national page that is going through normal moderation.

My post says this

I am looking for XXXX gyms that have female‑only changing and shower areas that are restricted by sex, not self‑identified gender.

I’m comfortable sharing these spaces with other females, but I’m not comfortable changing or showering in areas where males may be present.

If you know of any gyms in XXXX please sent me a direct message.

Wish me luck.

This discussion about domestic violence is not relevant in supporting the need to exclude male people from female single sex provisions. It remains an illegitimate form of discrimination to exclude one sub group of a sex category from a sex segregated provision. People cannot be excluded from the correct publicly accessible single sex provision for them to use on the basis of any other protected characteristic as that would be an illegitimate form of discrimination.

It is also not just about physical risk to safety. There are many types of harms that female people need female single sex provisions to be safeguarded against:

Harms include:
-Rape and sexual assault.
-Violence.
-Sexual abuse that is not rape or sexual assault.
-Sexual abuse that also includes solo sexual acts or using the experience in future sexual acts.
-Any other abuse that may include verbal abuse, intimidation in any way etc, this includes inappropriate questions and comments.
-A male person's presence where female people need privacy and dignity.
-A male person's presence where female people need to feel safe from any male person's presence (over the age of about 8 years old).
-Female people self-excluding knowing that there may be a male person accessing that provision.
-Female people not having the freedom to discuss the issues that cause them distress, concern, or that they need to talk about because a male person is present.
-Female children (and female adults) learning to have no or too low personal boundaries because they have been taught that male people are female people and that they should ignore and overcome feelings of discomfort.

Narrowing the discussion to sex and violence offences does not remove these other harms from consideration for female single sex spaces and vice versa. They are all important.

So back to your question OP - how do you deal with organisations starting to adopt anti women/anti safeguarding policies locally?

’Emily’ has kindly obliged and provided a number of the raging guff arguments from the trans activist side and you can see how easily they accredited. Hopefully that gives you a bit of ammo to get in early and point out the serious issues that allowing men into women’s spaces will cause.

I don’t know which country you are in but if it is anywhere Europe I can’t imagine any of the older ladies standing for it - they tend to be formidable.

I hope you have some useful stuff.

Imagine a person saying how disgusting it is to see old women getting changed in a communal female changing room and thinking that was ever going to prove any point they were trying to make. It really does say a great deal about them and how much they hate women though.

Yep. And that they would be happy with a middle aged AGP cock in their face instead.

"It's like engaging with a toddler. Though not as funny or heartwarming."

And toddlers will grow up.

They do - as women know. It's always slightly depressing to be confronted with that toddler level magical thinking about sex change and women doing what men require if the men tell them often enough.

Well, there is a reason that men spend so much effort in posting false comparisons and outright flawed arguments to bully female people into accepting male people
into female single sex provisions.

Yesterday, I was expecting to see the Williams Institute and Alsop’s work linked up. I can only hope that we are passed those being used.

It is actually just not hard to understand the basics :

Exclusion of male people from female single sex provisions is not just about safety from violence, it encompasses other issues as well.

Where access to publicly accessible single sex provisions are concerned, discriminating within the sex category is illegitimate discrimination. No vulnerable male group gets to use the female single sex provision unless they are children. Safeguarding is about fully excluding a defined population from publicly accessible single sex provisions.

Female toilet usage will typically involve some uses outside of the cubicle at some stage in their life, generally to do something that takes longer time than just using the toilet, so therefore mixed sex only provision doesn’t work well for female people with those needs.

yes.

But on the other hand, surely it must be soul destroying for a bloke to have nothing but obviously flawed logic and weak evidence to try to distract from some pretty clear conclusions drawn about how male pattern behaviour doesn’t change at any stage of transition. Particularly, when a male person is told ‘no’ and they want to ignore that ‘no’. Meaning they know they have nothing but those weak and so often emotionally manipulative arguments.

Your postings are a complete mess. You post links that are incorrect, links that are on your hard-drive and links to papers where only the abstract is publically available. When we are discussing one of your links you start talking about a different paper. You are all over the place.

Your quote above comes from the abstract of https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/019188699090146I
which is a 1990 paper which the public cannot access for free. Nevertheless, that quote does not state that lesbians are more criminal and violent than homosexual males, which is what you claim.

I was looking at this research that you posted: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-024-02902-9?cjdata=MXxZfDB8WXww&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=commission_junction&utm_campaign=CONR_BOOKS_ECOM_GL_PBOK_06YUE_GL_ALWYS_DEEPLINK&utm_content=textlink&utm_term=PID100045542&CJEVENT=c120392e4dd811f181aa00340a18b8fc#ref-CR47 It is more recent (2024), uses much more data and is outside of the US (Netherlands). It repeatedly references the 1990 paper, but does not reproduce its findings on lesbians vs gay males.

Its findings:
These comparisons showed that, between 1996 and 2020, men in opposite-sex relationships were most commonly suspected of crime (22.4%), followed by men in same-sex relationships (14.1%), women in same-sex relationships (8.6%), and finally by women in opposite-sex relationships (6.8%). The same pattern was found for all types of crime except for drugs offenses: women in same-sex and opposite-sex relationships were both suspected of a drugs offense in 0.5% of the cases.

@EmilyinEverton Transgender people are clearly distinct from normal male/female behaviour so its entirely possible that their offending levels might vary from the norm because of this. In any case, we don't actually know their offending patterns nor if we did would they be statistically significant enough to draw meaningful conclusions about their offending patterns.

So you are saying that we don't know, and can never know, the offending patterns of transgender people. Setting aside that this inconveniently ignores the data that we do have, it is hardly a winning argument. It simply means that we will, therefore, contine to treat TIMs as a subset of males for safeguarding and all other purposes where sex matters.

If, in your view, the transgender population ever gets large enough to produce significant stats and repeated high quality research shows that every type of male under the trans umbrella offends at the same rate or less than females, and with the same type of offences, please do feel free to get back to us.

"Your quote above comes from the abstract of https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/019188699090146I
which is a 1990 paper which the public cannot access for free. Nevertheless, that quote does not state that lesbians are more criminal and violent than homosexual males, which is what you claim."

Indeed.

It is almost like someone has stated a conclusion that is far stronger than the abstract of the study they are quoting.

Which, given that abstracts sometimes lie simplify the findings, is quite a reach!

"Transgender people are clearly distinct from normal male/female behaviour so it's entirely possible that their offending levels might vary from the norm because of this. In any case, we don't actually know their offending patterns nor if we did would they be statistically significant enough to draw meaningful conclusions about their offending patterns."

What support's your claim that "Transgender people are clearly distinct from normal male/female behaviour". Male people continue to show a pattern of committing crime in a pattern that is within the male pattern.

"In any case, we don't actually know their offending patterns nor if we did would they be statistically significant enough to draw meaningful conclusions about their offending patterns."

We do have enough meaningful data to support the conclusion that male people with transgender identities do not commit sex offences at the same rate or lower than female people in the UK.

On that basis, it would be a failure in safeguarding to treat that male group as if they were special and that they should not be treated as if they were like all other male people. We have learned this throughout history. No special male groups set aside for special treatment above the age of a child.

All this sparple you are discussing really is irrelevant in the face of the fact that we can support the conclusion that male people with transgender identities do not commit sex offences at the same rate or lower than female people in the UK.

Wow that is an interesting point Emily made about same sex attracted males having lower rates of offending.

I'm forever pointing out the flaws in "transgender brain studies" that only manage to show that homosexual and heterosexual males have a slight difference in some brain structures, which has been known for years.

And I didn't notice that when we talk about offending patterns, we compare transgender males en masse to non transgender males, and they're about the same.

But that's being skewed by a large % of homosexuality in the former, apparently with lower offending rates.
What would happen if we compared ONLY heterosexual males with and without special identities?! Must look that up and see if anyone's done it

Ah, according to @Keeptoiletssafe statistically the least hygienic and most likely to obscure heart attacks, strokes and sexual assaults.

The I'm Alright, Jack nature of trans ideology strikes again.

I think we can assume safely that the poster really doesn't know what female toilet needs are, and / or don't care. As you say, the 'I'm Alright, Jack' attitude really does come through loud and clear.

100%. They're 2 cheeks of the same arse.

This happened in a pub my brother was in just this last weekend. A drug taker collapsed in the gents toilet (yes, it's a salubrious pub!), other men saw his foot sticking out under the cubicle door. That guy is probably alive now because they saw him.

In cafes, planes and shops with a single cubicle, people are going to notice much more quickly if the door is locked from the inside for too long.
In restaurants, bars, pubs, shopping centres, stations etc they're not.

Good luck OP, I do hope you find somewhere. Of course it all very much depends on where you live as to how successful you are, in terms of the legalities, although they get ignored in many places anyway, as we know. I’m in the UK (not a particularly captured part thankfully) and I’ve visited a brilliant ladies’ only gym a few times and I would be tempted to join if it was closer to my home. I’ve never seen a man there, but I must admit I would feel like I was poking the hornet’s nest if were I to enquire if they allow trans-identifying men to join. The owners are young women and I don’t know how they would deal with the iNCluSiVItY question, even though I have seen through personal experience that they seem completely female-focussed.

Ha, I was thinking that. Two cheeks of the same hairy male arse 😆

I see @EmilyinEverton 's vile sexist and ageist post at the start of the thread has been deleted.

@2021x Best of luck, OP. I know you are not in the UK, but hopefully the tide turning here will demonstrate sanity to other countries. A large leisure chain near me has recently removed all the genderist crap from its admissions policy.

@GreyskySexRealistsky thankyou. This ‘near-miss’ incident won’t be reported. Neither was the time I helped save someone’s life. If only more people collated what goes on in toilets (or changing rooms) it would be obvious that what OP is asking for is absolutely sensible for health and safety.

Your ‘campaign’ for locked cubicles @EmilyinEverton is a success. Campaign no more. As far as I know, there’s never been a design that doesn’t lock from the inside. They can all be locked. I like that too. They also need to be unlockable from the outside. That’s very useful if you get trapped, the lock breaks, you are being held against your will or you have a medical emergency. In fact, under regulations an inwards opening door needs to be able to open outwards from the outside because bodies prevent the door opening in a toilet cubicle. Because, although there NO statistics on how often this happens, it obviously happens enough that that’s built into regulations. You go strong but wrong in your arguments that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

There are no statistics on sexual assaults, rapes, deaths, near misses, compared to the toilet design. So if you reckon you have any, do tell. I have built up a database over the years and you will not be able to prove there is a safer non-domestic design than single sex cubicles within a single sex washroom due to their door gaps for health and safety.

There is a connection between domestic violence and ‘inclusive’ design toilets. They are both completely private spaces.

The ‘gaps’ in toilet doors allow the occupant to know who is in the same room as them. They allow a person outside the cubicle to know that too and also to know if that person is in trouble, even as basic as how many are in the cubicle.

As pp pointed out, if there’s only one unisex toilet (like in a small cafe) there’s hopefully someone who will notice, if they are in there too long.

You talk about being locked in, in a private space in a public area. Only a healthy man would campaign for that design and think there’s no problems with that.

Click the picture to see one practical difference of a single sex cubicle and a unisex toilet room. Both are lockable. The number one call-out for London Fire brigade is being trapped behind a door of some description (not just toilets).

I'd be willing to be he wrote it entirely deliberately to piss off or upset Mumsnetters.

Never ceases to amaze me how living a long time is seen in a negative light 🤣

That’s a shame, because it was so revealing (no pun intended).

I'd be willing to be he wrote it entirely deliberately to piss off or upset Mumsnetters.

Of course. He tries to provoke women in the same way that he would try to provoke another man. How little they understand us.