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

Or we could just have gaps in the door and not have the expensive system and risk that it fails.

Seems to be like these American designs are a bag o' shite. If Americans are happy with them (which I doubt), whoopy-doo, but I think everyone is agreed that we don't want them in the UK. Are urinals even a thing in the US now?

The UK model has no shared sinks because of the 2024 law.
In the US models with shared sinks, the hand-washing station is pushed out into the main public corridor. If the area isn't busy, you are simply standing in an open hallway. Being alone with a man in an open, doorless corridor with direct lines of sight is architecturally no different than being alone with a man in an elevator lobby. There are no heavy doors or walls to corner someone behind.
For women and girls, the chance of being alone with a man in a traditional restroom is not zero. Predators do not care about signs. The danger of a traditional women's restroom is that if a man walks in, the victim is now trapped inside an isolated, acoustically separated box, completely hidden from public surveillance.
Modern designs either give you a fully lockable private space (the UK standard) or put the communal functions directly in the public eye (the US standard). Both of these are structurally safer than relying on a sign.

Fewer

I'm usually a fewer stickler but that sentence wasn't in 'my' voice, it was an American saying it in my head so less seemed a better fit.

The hardware operates on the facility's existing network and simply sends an automated ping to the existing security or janitorial staff's devices if a threshold (like a 10-minute immobility) is breached. It requires zero extra staff.
A smart sensor is a basic piece of hardware. It costs an absolute fraction of what it takes to build redundant square footage for completely segregated multi-stall rooms.
High-throughput facilities simply install dedicated single-occupancy urinal pods (or partitioned urinal zones) alongside the standard toilets, indexing them with a clear sign on the door.
The design saves money because it reduces the physical footprint of the building and how complex the pipework is, while safety is automated.

I don't know about the US but UK schools don't have multiple janitorial staff hanging about, nor do supermarkets or pubs.

Oh and 10 minutes with a stopped heart is game over time.

If you put gaps in the doors, you destroy the absolute biological privacy that other people in this thread argued was essential. Can't have both.
Furthermore, relying on a door gap is a human-dependent safety system, which has a massive failure rate. If a student collapses or overdoses in a traditional stall, that gap only saves them if another person happens to walk into that specific room, happens to look under the door, and happens to intervene.

In a school, an alert routes directly to the front office administrator's computer.
In a supermarket or a pub, it pings the duty manager's device or the main till.
Think about how it works right now: if a customer collapses in a pub toilet, who responds? The existing staff or another customer, but only after they eventually stumble upon them by luck.
The sensor doesn't require new employees to be hired. You use whichever you have available.

Yes, 10 minutes with a stopped heart is fatal. But you have to compare it to the current alternative. In a traditional stall, a person with a stopped heart isn't found in 10 minutes. They are found three hours later when a cleaner comes, because they are locked inside an unmonitored box and people naturally avoid occupied stalls.

"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"

All is forgiven.

Already explained the urinals so:
You make the most of the infrastructure you work with by allowing every user to access every room, rather than having empty men's rooms and overflowing women's rooms.

Do American women not have bodily functions? I care about the dignity of all women and girls not just myself.

Or the person at the sink at the time hears them fall because the sound travels thanks to the gap and comes to their aid.

Which relies on luck and that a person in distress will make enough noise to be heard
We can use a guaranteed automated response instead

Go back and read @Keeptoiletssafe's posts again. She explains why door gaps are important.

You're the one arguing against them. So perhaps you're arguing with yourself now.

Maybe your AI's got a bit confused. Try a reboot. Or better still shut it down for the night.

What, like AI providing safety for people in toilets? What could possibly go wrong?

Great, keep single sex facilities with door gaps and add these systems as a back up.

@MedicalConsensus you really are clutching at straws now. You are now redesigning ceilings, adding alarms, thicker longer doors and partitions. You do know cubicles have to be single sex in Doc T don’t you? Universal toilets are in rooms.

re alarms
this is a bit grim but here you go:
When someone has collapsed, is having a cardiac arrest, a mental health crisis, overdosed, a seizure or a hypo, etc they don’t tend to call out. They can be disorientated or unconscious. The young woman I saved was blue and her hand was sticking out of the cubicle like my ‘signature’ picture. She was silent.

Do you know academics found 11% of cardiac arrests are in toilets? When you have a cardiac arrest every minute undetected reduces your chance of survival. If a child has collapsed with a seizure you need to phone an ambulance immediately. If they have known epilepsy, often the advice is you should phone an ambulance if the seizure lasts over 5 minutes. If they have self harmed you need to know asap. All schools have defibrillators in case of emergencies, they have doors that open outwards if a child collapses on a door, but if the door goes down to the floor they don’t know if the child has collapsed in the first place. It can be really busy in front of the door. Children have been left for over an hour before staff have opened the door.

There’s nothing like being able to save the life of someone to focus the mind on design. And you do know it’s not ‘just’ about collapse don’t you. It’s about all the other misuse in toilets.

What I didn’t say about the alarms is children set them off on purpose to the point teachers turn them off, they raise issues of confidentiality and they cost a fortune to maintain and service. When a staff member gets a push message text they then have to be available to go to the toilets to check it out. They have not been a success.

Who’s manning your alarms? How long will it take to get there? You should also have a VAD in every full height cubicle for deaf people, rather than one on the washroom ceiling. The more you add to a toilet the more there is to go wrong and there’s more places to hide stuff.

file:///C:/Users/safet/Downloads/Technical-Bulletin-VAD%20(3).pdf

Inamasu J, Miyatake S. Cardiac arrest in the toilet: clinical characteristics and resuscitation profiles. Environ Health Prev
Med. 2013 Mar;18(2):130-5. doi: 10.1007/s12199-012-0301-y. Epub 2012 Sep 9. PMID: 22961350; PMCID: PMC3590314.

At least I got you to consider design and why privacy is not the same as safety. Above are a couple more references for you to consider.

Last post.

So we have been subjected to both 'a man has spoken' and an 'American man has spoken'. We have been amused by the stupidity of men in this space for many years but the additional ignorance added by 'American man' has been truly impressive. It takes an exceptional level of male entitlement and American imperialism to totally gainsay the laws, language and culture of a foreign country - particularly one that hosts the forum that our imperialist friend is posting on.

Perhaps now the article's writer might consider renaming it "Don't try arguing with a terf. You can't win."

How about the wild idea… males stay out of female spaces. Money saving as well

I never thought when they built AI that it would be employed to argue endlessly about door gaps in toilets.

But then, if its told to argue relentlessly for men's rights to.do.what they want, this appears to be where we end up.