A TIM in women’s changing room at the gym, how can you prove it?

[NotTodayPhyllis]

Sorry this is so long and has taken so long to write that I have to go out now so will need to read any responses later.
I just wanted to add this in case anyone wondered why I’d start a thread then not engage

I go to a gym that’s part of a hotel chain with a pool and have been going for 15 years on and off.

After some health issues (physical and quite severe mental) I’ve been going 5-7 times a week from being practically housebound so it’s a really safe important space for me.
I’ve made vast improvements on my health and made friends, lost weight and started to change my life.

A lot of my mental health problems stem from childhood sexual abuse and later assault and I think contributed to being in more than one abusive relationship.
Because of this I am very wary and scared of men and even had to leave my last job as it included working with men in a small space and I couldn’t cope because despite telling them to give me space they wouldn’t listen.

The last few days in the gym I noticed someone who is very obviously a man using the women’s changing room which is open plan with benches and lockers except one cubicle.
He wears a one piece swimming costume and gets dressed and undressed either under a towel or in the cubicle so isn’t flashing anyone but I don’t want to get changed in front of him and the other women seem very uncomfortable as well.
No one has said anything out loud but we’ve all exchanged worried looks and I’ve noticed some women changing in the toilet who had no issues using the open space before.
Some hours are child friendly and I go just as they are finishing and I’ve noticed he’s been in the changing room at the same time as the women who have children with them.

I live very close to the gym so I’ve been going with my kit on then after using the gym I’ve been changing for the pool quickly in the cubicle then going to shower at home and just quickly drying off and throwing a tracksuit on.
But now my skin is covered in a really itchy rash from not rinsing off the chlorine and so dry from not instantly putting moisturiser on.
I also have been really panicky and frantically getting changed in case he comes in and sometimes leaving early because the constant state of adrenaline in case of being alone in a space with him is leading to panic attacks.

I went to speak to the gym manager today to ask why this is happening when it isn’t legal and the Supreme Court ruling and further guidance means he should be using men’s spaces.

I know the manager well because he’s been there for years so he was open with me and said he’s aware of this man and trying to deal with it but it’s difficult because he’s registered at the gym as a woman and there is no way of actually proving he’s a man (despite it being obvious) and he’s not sure if he can ask him to leave and say he knows he’s a man by the obvious things like his height, size of hands, gait and most importantly his deep voice!
He said that if this man just says he’s a masculine woman and insists he is then where does he go from there?
The gym is a separate business from the hotel chain and just using the space so he’s asking for legal advice but said he’s angry that this is on him to prove and risk an altercation with a man that’s bigger then him and clearly happy to ignore to the law so he clearly doesn’t have any respect for the staff or women using the gym and is just intent on getting what he wants.

This happened a few years ago when I was taking a break and the gym manager told me the man who tried it in the past just kept coming back and shouting “trans people exist” when confronted.
I don’t even understand what this means because clearly they exist or this wouldn’t be an issue?!

I asked what happened in the previous situation and the manager said most women stopped using the changing rooms and were arriving and leaving in their kit and using a hotel room to change for swimming next to the gym that they were discreetly told about.
The man stopped coming when the women weren’t there for him to invade their space but women had to sacrifice their space in the meantime rather then just getting him to be the one to leave.

The law is clearer now and this should be easier to deal with the previously but how are you supposed to 100% prove someone is a man when their ID says they are a woman and they insist they are? He’s a big man and I doubt any of the women want to challenge him either so we are all going to end up losing our space again unless there is a clear way of dealing with this and preventing it happening again.

The gym manager said he’s going to get legal advice and ask if he has the right to ask someone to leave based on just appearance.
I know a lot of women on here are very knowledgeable about these things and thought I’d ask in the meantime if anyone can suggest what the right approach might be? I’ve been looking online and can’t see any clear answer.
The TRA’s say they know they can’t be properly challenged or forced into “pants inspections” so they will continue to use our spaces and insist they are the opposite sex.

It’s really upsetting and frustrating that the law has been made so clear and yet it seems impossible to enforce.
Even if you ring the police and say there is a man in women’s spaces whilst they are undressing how do they then prove it?
Am I just being very naive over this or are we still in the same situation we were before the Supreme Court ruling only now it’s more frustrating knowing that the law is being broken and you can’t challenge it?

What happens if the person is indeed a female? I’ve seen someone on Facebook, she’s over 6ft, built like an American footballer, but is very much a biological woman. Are you 100% sure???

Yes, pitfalls, I don’t know if that’s the right word, just looking from the point of view how to handle this from company points of view. Considering so many are buying into trans equality / the zeitgeist around the issue. But interesting to read about EHRC guidance & the actual law as outlined by Gerri1992. This is why it’s hard to really understand…

You don’t need any surgery to become ‘Betty’. Surgery is not a legal requirement at all. It’s ‘living as a woman’ whatever than means.

The Rapid Onset Women with Alopecia, Cancer Survivors and Butch Lesbians Concern (or Rapid Onset Everyday-looking Women Concern) tactic: women who look "like men" will be challenged in women's toilets and changing rooms

You don't have to worry about how the service provider follows the law. That is for them to sweat over. And the law and the SC ruling from last year are not in the least bit confusing.

Since you haven’t consented to him watching you as you change he is committing an offence under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and the Voyeurism (Offences) Act 2019

As long as there are cubicles available for women to avoid him looking at them and they willingly change in front of him, then he hasn't committed this offence.

Is this true? From the Op's description (... obviously a man using the women’s changing room which is open plan with benches and lockers except one cubicle ...) the women's changing room appears to be open plan with a single cubicle.

A number of scenarios are put women at disadvantage

• women who don't consent to changing in front of men are in the process of changing when this man walks in. They are now changing in front of a man with out their consent
• the man could try to change in the cubicle (if it is available) but will need to walk through women changing to get to it
• if the man arrives at the cubicle and it is occupied, does he just stand there waiting for it to be become available?
• Alternately, a woman who does not want to see men in a state of undress enters the changing room where a man is in the process of changing. Should this woman walk away? Should she be forced to use the cubicle? Is the cubicle even available?

There are likely cubicles in the men's changing room - by the logic of 'if there are cubicles there is no harm done', why doesn't the man go and use of one of the cubicles in the men's changing room?

If you are pretty certain this is a man, then politely approach him and suggest he is in the wrong space. If enough women do this, and certainly if the establishment management is notified, he'll get the message.

This whole business about "genital inspections' and "proving someone's sex" is a wilfull obfuscation.

Well, then she'll say, re-assuringly, " Don't worry/ I am a woman", and you'll know it as soon as you hear her voice. Then you will say " Oh, sorry!"

It would be the same if a member of the gym were shaving, clipping their toenails, dropping rubbish or taking other people's shampoo. A warning to cease the behaviour, if they don't stop, they get banned.
If they think the gym is in the wrong, they can take the gym to court.
The manager doesn't need proof - the gym is innocent until proven guilty.

And the onus is on the man to "prove" he is female. The gym does not have to prove he is not.

Just asking as person who doesn’t know a whole lot about it. I think plenty of women wouldn’t be sure. Especially in the position the OP is in. I suppose men could challenge women using their spaces in the same way, but there’s so much more to the issue for women.

He could threaten to sue, which might be intimidating but as a man he has no leg to stand on in court, providing it’s communicated to him in a reasonable way.

The women should sue the gym for harassment under the Equality Act for allowing the man to continue using the women's changing room

I'm just hyper aware at the moment, due to other threads I've been on, and clocked it straight away. The emotional backstory also stood out.

Children are with their parents. If there are changing cubicles available nobody is forced to consent to being watched.

Parents can’t consent to their children being viewed partially naked by a voyeur. It doesn’t matter if they stand there and say to him ‘crack on mate and watch my 3 year old getting undressed I don’t mind’ they can’t consent for them and a child should not be expected to insist on using a cubicle to their mothers who may have a misplaced sense of not wanting to offend

If this story is true, which it isn't, the manager would just need to tell him to stop using the female changing room, and ban him from the premises / revoke his membership if he doesn't comply.

Why pretend it's difficult? It's not.

100% this - It immediately looked to me like an attempt to throw everything at us to see what would stick. I would be interested to see what the OP's responses are. If the OP ever returns.

Ask. If it is a woman it's very unlikely she will make any unpleasantness about it; she will understand your problem. Women, on the whole, do. Men, not so much.

My mother has had a double mastectomy and is bald due to cancer. She's never been mistaken for a man.

I have a friend who is 6 ft and solid and female, and know several others socially who are. Nobody would ever mistake them for men. I was in a private meeting with one of them and a veiled Muslim lady. She looked at me, looked at her, and removed her veil to talk. Women can tell who is a woman and who's a man in person.

Not really relevant to the highly unlikely scenario in the OP, but if you have your original birth certificate, you can in fact prove you are female. The certificate issue date will be within a few weeks of your date of birth.

TIMs who have had a new birth certificate issued will never be able to produce a birth certificate where these two dates closely match - the issue date will be years after the date of birth.

Obviously women who have lost their original birth certificate won't be able to prove their sex, but I wonder how many of the 0.0001% of women who could possibly be mistaken for men once they start talking just happen to also have lost their original birth certificate? Not many.

Whilst this is a ridiculous situation to be in, what's done is done, and it seems unlikely they are going to roll back the ability to falsify your sex on birth certificate/passport etc. I think therefore at this point it would be useful to offer an official ID card with a photo and your biological sex, for anyone who wants to carry one voluntarily. For the fourteen women in the UK who look, walk, and talk like men AND who have lost their original birth certificate, this would be very useful.

A service provider can legally exclude from a single-sex facility anyone who looks as if they are the wrong sex, irrespective of their legal biological sex, because Schedule 3 confers an exemption from liability for perceptive sex-discrimination.

So the gym can bar him from the women's changing room without proving anything at all.

The only wrinkle would be that a transman can only be excluded if it's a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. I suspect this would not present too much difficulty in practice, because a passing transman would avoid the women's changing room (and should be offered an alternative).

ETA I like PP's idea of a voluntary sex ID card. This could be useful for trans people in some contexts and people with DSDs.

On this theoretical basis:

because paperwork these days is meaningless and a man can have paperwork that says anything he wants, it's irrelevant. There's no point asking for it.

The service provider/owner has a duty to provide a single sex space and by the guidance appropriate provision for trans users in terms of number of users etc etc. They cannot allow single sex spaces to be used by members of the opposite sex. This is going to obviously need to be very clearly signposted so that no user can claim they 'didn't know'.

IANAL but going by the SCJ: if there is reasonable doubt about a service user/customer, then the onus would be on the provider to restrict them from the single sex space (no evidence needed, no exciting fantasies about 'inspections') as there is the mixed sex provision for them. They're not being excluded, they're not being refused service.

The service user is of course free to take legal action if they wish. A judge would probably request a DNA cheek swab. If it's proven that this person then IS of the sex they said then everyone can crack on happy. But it would be very unlikely I would think that the service provider would be found to have behaved unreasonably as there were alternative facilities offered, and their job was to protect the single sex space for other customers/service users. Who have rights too. In a world where paperwork has become meaningless.

If the service user behaves badly over this, then most places these days have signs up saying if you abuse staff or the premises you're going to be reported and banned. That's normal.

The quick cheek swabs being mentioned on the other thread as being developed would solve a lot of this; a quiet conversation, a swab and a decision for a member would be straight forward. The member can always decline and just go and use the mixed sex if they prefer. This brave new world was forced onto everyone else by people who chose to make their sex ambiguous and some responsibility for that has to be taken by them; if they won't respect other people's sex based needs and rights voluntarily then there's some uncomfortable conversations and challenges ahead. They can choose not to put themselves in this position.

The cheek swab is not an answer, because it doesn’t offer the proof anyone wants, and unless every female-claiming member has to undertake one it would be a legal disaster.

Reminder: sex is - once more, with feeling - (legally) chromosomes, genitalia and gonads where those are congruent, and a court will make a decision in cases where those are not.

For sport, a cheek swab demanded of all female entrants is fair, and if a competitor fails it then they are able to make further representations as to their sex. The cheek swab is the start for everyone and the end for 99.9% of all female entrants, but not the end for a very few.

To answer the (silly made up) initial scenario, the manager doesn’t have to prove anything at all. If she thinks the member has misrepresented their sex then she suspends their membership. If the suspended member thinks that’s wrong, it’s up to them to take the appropriate action.

Job done.

This was the subject of the Supreme Court ruling last year Gowlett. It ruled that, in law, the terms women and men mean biological women and men so, even if someone holds a Gender Recognition Certificate (and not many trans people do), this does not give them access to spaces reserved for the opposite sex. This man should not be in a women’s changing room.

It may be worth pointing your gym manager towards Sex Matters @NotTodayPhyllisthey have a lot of resources on this issue and might have something for this situation. So sorry this is happening to you.

I agree that a cheek swab is not useful in everyday scenarios, because it doesn't answer the question of someone's legal biological sex.

In sport, it's the first step to finding out whether they are gonadally male with non-zero androgen signalling. If so, they can't fairly be included in a female competition class, but they may still be legally biologically female.

A better proxy for legal biological sex is the entry on the main birth register (usually identical to any birth certificate issued before the age of eighteen). The Registrar has this information for all UK-born individuals, so an official sex-ID card is feasible.

It could be useful for a trans person wishing to use services for their own sex, and call upon the protected characteristic of gender reassignment to argue against their exclusion.

And also for women with male DSDs who look masculine, who have always faced this problem, whose legal position was unchanged by FWS, and who don't have the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.

In theory, women could then feel reassured that, at the very least, everyone who had unambiguously male genitals at birth will have been excluded.