Article on "arguing with a TERF"

[MyAmpleSheep]

I love to keep up with the other side, so here's a lot of words just to say "it's complicated." meanwhile he ignores the obvious answer to his own question.

www.fasttrackfemme.com/p/why-you-cant-win-an-argument-with

100%

The GRA 2004 did not grant same-sex marriage.

This was one of the main reasons for the GRA - to allow same-sex marriage as long as one of the parties obtained a GRC to say they were the opposite sex.

The UK government was forced to pass the GRA to comply with international human rights law.

No it wasn't. It could have fulfilled the 'right to marry' for people like Goodwin and his male partner by passing a law allowing same-sex marriage.

Stop repeating this misinformation. Goodwin was about far more than just marriage; none of the Article 8 findings were to do with marriage.

who said it was? Maybe you missed the word like in the post.

The government introduced civil partnerships a few months after the GRA. The two acts must have been debated at the same time.

Its interesting that the government didnt think the civil partnership legislation could be used for transpeople. They must have needed the GRA to facilitate a marriage rather than use a civil partnership that was between people of the same sex.

But when the EqA was written it was understood that a GRC didnt change a person's sex for SSE.

So the GRA must have been, in part a need for marriage, not just the legal protection a civil partnership would give.

Because same-sex marriage was illegal in 2004, the GRA contained a "forced divorce" clause.
If a trans person was married, they were legally required to divorce or annul their marriage before they could obtain a GRC, to prevent the creation of a legally recognized same-sex marriage.

Thankfully the spousal veto means this is still the case. Why the hell should one party in a contract be able to radically alter the term of the contract? If married a man why the hell should he be able to have on record that I married a woman?

Apparently, the marriage part was a breach of Article 12, not Article 8, but since I didn't mention in my earlier post anything about which article had been breached, it's incorrect to state that this is misinformation.

CHRISTINE GOODWIN v. THE UNITED KINGDOM
103. It may be noted from the materials submitted by Liberty that though there is widespread acceptance of the marriage of transsexuals, fewer countries permit the marriage of transsexuals in their assigned gender than recognise the change of gender itself. The Court is not persuaded however that this supports an argument for leaving the matter entirely to the Contracting States as being within their margin of appreciation. This would be tantamount to finding that the range of options open to a Contracting State included an effective bar on any exercise of the right to marry. The margin of appreciation cannot extend so far. While it is for the Contracting State to determine inter alia the conditions under which a person claiming legal recognition as a transsexual establishes that gender re-assignment has been properly effected or under which past marriages cease to be valid and the formalities applicable to future marriages (including, for example, the information to be furnished to intended spouses), the Court finds no justification for barring the transsexual from enjoying the right to marry under any circumstances.
104. The Court concludes that there has been a breach of Article 12 of the Convention in the present case.

The Article 8 issues are largely irrelevant now. They're to do with a trans person being allowed to hide their sex from everyone. Goodwin complained about not being able to get his pension and bus pass at 60, but since the age for these is now equal for men and women, this is irrelevant. He also wanted to be able to hide his sex from everyone, including his employers. It would be reckless to allow this in many circumstances.

So it comes back to the Article 12 stuff about marriage, now superseded by the availability of same-sex marriage.

The GRA should be repealed.

@MedicalConsensus Thank you for the links. Nothing about design specifics and safety in most. As usual safety and privacy get conflated.

The Australian one is as I recall - Australia are going to have all sorts of costly problems soon because those sorts of biased reports will lead to a huge increase in unisex provision. However, in that document they voted to call them all-gender instead. There is a lot about gender not sex. There have been no safety tests done on the ‘inclusive’ designs compared to what they call ‘standard’ single sex designs.

Come back with the consensus on Reddit. That will be interesting.The fact that you aren’t bothered about safety (either sexual assault or medical) or mention transmen tells me that has never been a worry of yours.

It seems that you want to show your allegiance by creating something visible as a statement, without thinking of needs.

If you are really set on increasing the unisex provision by 1 then there is an American design called the Portland. It’s not my cup of tea because of voyeurism, but it is mixed sex and has been designed with safety in mind. I think you would get less women using it by default. This would be a design that could better fit your criteria. I still wouldn’t paint anything on it. You could have a advert billboard though- that’s often a way to get revenue.

Looked up the price and that's quite ridiculous lol
Would be nice, but it isn't realistic to afford multiple of them wherever needed in a city.

I looked at other alternatives, and found this bathroom design which could replace the single sex design:

ironwood-mfg.com/blog/all-gender-bathroom-partition-layouts/?hl=en-GB

It has been used by Grant High School
share.google/26nAba24xxii2s6Vk

According to Trives, this design actually saves money and building space compared to traditional segregated bathrooms. It also reduces wait time.
trivers.com/best-practices-for-all-gender-restroom-design/?hl=en-GB

As I understand it those don't meet UK reg for mixed sex facilities. The sinks can't be outside if the stalls. I would have hated dealing with period blood at a sink next to a boy when I was at school and that was before mooncups were a thing. I would still hate it now.

Women are not men without a penis we have needs in toilet spaces that are very different to mens unzip pee zip and go.

@MedicalConsensus I have been fascinated by the narrative arc that your posts have followed on this thread. Your opening position was that the thread should remain focused on the actuarial risk of fully transitioned TW being allowed to access female single sex toilets.

We respected your demand and provided the actuarial evidence. While you havered a little, you accepted that there is an increased risk to women if transwomen are allowed into women's single sex toilets.

Since then it has all gone downhill at a rate of knots.

Porta potty loos painted in LGBT colours. Most successful in blue cities (wtf is a blue city?)

Your stubborn refusal to recognise that you are a cultural outlier. You are a septic shouting at Brits. Your language, culture and law is not the same as ours even while it seems similar. Please, please, please read the Equality Act 2010, section by section and then break it down to the slicing between the specifics of the Protected Characteristics and the obligations of duty holders.

I would enjoy engaging with you once you understand UK Equality Law.

Also why is a stall opening on to a room with sinks etc unsafe for transwomen if it is a men only set up but magically safe for transwomen if there might also be some women in the room?

Oh and one more how does doing away with urinals reduce waiting time? It just increases the number of users waiting for a 'stall' from all women and a few men to everyone.

Yeah, you're thinking of Part T (Toilet Accommodation) of the Building Regulations, from October 2024.

What that means is what works for the US, needs to become more private in UK.
The sink and hand dryer will have to be sealed inside the individual, fully enclosed room behind the lockable door.

And then we are back at the safety issues arising from no door gaps.

Round and round and round we go, where it ends nobody knows!

Both American and UK schools have been guinea pigs for enclosed toilets then mixed sex sink area.

We going round in circles at this point and I have pointed this out already but just to repeat: manufacturers have capitalised on the problems of these private school cubicles by selling a new product for them. The voice prompts can be ‘help me’ and ‘stop it’. Look at the attached picture.

At this point I have really said all I can, sometimes twice.

I will leave the final words to some UK school staff who had to deal with these designs:
[Toilets are a challenge in any school, but there were massive issues, definitely made worse by the layout (fully enclosed unisex cubicles with shared handwashing) and being mixed sex]. “There was drug dealing in cubicles – you had no idea how many kids were in there at any time,”
“Kids would go in there to have sex, to drink alcohol. They’d push other kids in and lock themselves in with them. They’d block the drains and flood the corridor.”
“The toilets were really smelly and unpleasant. Because they were fully enclosed spaces they weren’t properly ventilated, and harder to clean.”
“The CCTV in the corridor was only any good retrospectively. The toilets had turn locks, so you could open them from the outside if you needed to, but you couldn’t hear through the door, couldn’t see whether there was one or two people in there, or if someone had collapsed.”
“You had to check CCTV before opening. So you would have a paralytic drunk student, or one who had overdosed on prescription drugs, collapsed and you’d have to go and check the CCTV before opening the door on them. Kids would push up the ceiling tiles and hide stuff up there – drugs or whatever.
Because the cubicle was fully enclosed they could do so without anyone being able to see it.”

And an American pupil who really wanted to use the ‘gender neutral’ restroom:

‘The gender-neutral bathrooms are both horrible and amazing. I am so glad we have them, but they are disgusting, mostly because of the way students treat them. The issue mainly comes from how small and how few they are, and it’s not uncommon that the four small bathrooms are filled with sex, drugs or vaping. We need to address these problems, or the gender-neutral bathrooms will continue to be the most disgusting in the school….I consider everything in the third floor bathroom a biohazard. Almost every time I make the mistake of going in, I leave trying to purge my mind of the horrors I just witnessed. Whether it is people having sex, poop smeared on the walls, or the toilet being clogged with an entire roll of toilet paper, horrible things have happened in that bathroom.’

Off to watch the football…

The safety difference isn't about the gender of the people washing their hands next to you, but about the geometry of the space.

A traditional men's restroom is an isolated box.
The sinks are hidden behind heavy doors walls, away from public eye.
Assault and harassment occur in these spaces because they lack natural surveillance.
If someone is cornered at those sinks, no one in the main hallway can see or hear what is happening.

In the US hybrid models I linked, the sinks are not inside a closed room.
The hand-washing station is pushed out into the main public corridor.
There is no door. There are no blind spots.
You are washing your hands in a high-traffic space which is completely visible to everyone walking down the hall - staff, security, men, women.
While UK regulations now require universal toilets to be fully enclosed rooms to ensure maximum privacy, the fundamental principle remains that we got to design such that we can eliminate the hidden zones that enable harassment.

So tough to the Muslim women who want to adjust their hijab, the women who need to run their top under the tap and drier thanks to baby sick, leaky milk etc the moon cup washer just stick the sinks in full view of everyone? Do you understand why this isn't a particularly great prospect for women?

That’s great youre so invested in making men’s toilets safer for TIM. That’s the change I like to see in the world.

You frame the Smart Sensor Technology as manufacturers "capitalizing on a problem," but this is simply the standard technological upgrade for modern facilities.
These sensors solve the exact problem you mentioned about not knowing if someone has collapsed or needs help, providing automated alerts without breaching visual privacy.

When students vape, deal drugs, or bully someone in a traditional bathroom, they take over the shared communal space (the sinks/doorway). This makes the entire room an unsafe zone for a student who just needs to use the toilet.
With fully enclosed single-occupancy pods, that bad behavior is quarantined behind a single locked door. The rest of the pods remain accessible, and the public corridor remains safe and monitored.

The anecdote about students "pushing up the ceiling tiles" to hide drugs is a failure of the architect who specified the materials.
You do not specify suspended drop-ceilings in high-risk school environments, you specify hard-lid ceilings.
That is a basic design error, which can be fixed in the blueprint phase.

The staff member complained about turn locks, but those locks can be specifically designed to be opened from the outside by staff or emergency services (usually with a coin or simple tool).
Combined with outward-swinging doors and the occupancy sensors you presented, a collapsed student can be reached in time.

Why is it assumed that these mixed sex spaces with sink in the open are always busy?

There's a good chance that a TW could be alone in the the area with a man. Not much different to being in the male toilet, apart from not having safety gaps in the door of the stalls.

For women and girls, the chance of being alone with a man has gone from zero to likely on some occasions.

@MedicalConsensus any thoughts on the problems of sinks in open communal areas for women (actual women the ones who have periods, who might be breastfeeding or miscarrying or carry trauma from male violence assault). Or is it a case of suck it up buttercup a minority of men be less sad.

The "safety issues arising from no door gaps" (such as a medical emergency or overdose) are solved by standard modern building automation, such as smart sensors (like the HALO systems) that detect occupancy times, motion, and aggression.
Commercial privacy locks are mandated to have external emergency overrides (coin-turn or key).
And outward-swinging doors eliminate the risk of a collapsed person barricading the door with their body weight.

So they don't actually save money at all then because they need to be fitted with expensive tech and presumably monitored by someone that can respond. The space saving urinals have gone but hey one less sink.