Scared of gender neutral bathrooms

[toilettalking]

Hi everyone,

I hope this is the right place to post this.

I have recently seen the news about the change to single sex spaces coming in on the 5th August in relation to toilets etc and I am terrified.

I have been sexually assaulted by a man (in case it was relevant this was not a transgender person) in a gender neutral toilet. It was horrific and I will now avoid at all costs using a gender neutral bathroom unless I am with my boyfriend and he can come and almost stand guard.

I’m really concerned that in light of this new guidance a lot of places may introduce these mixed sex gender neutral toilets as a way of avoiding any headache or potential issue with the new guidance.

I’m just wondering if anyone has any more idea on this than I do and knows if this is likely or not?

I’m so worried that public toilets or even changing rooms are going to become inaccessible to me.

As an aside, I understand that now it will be completely based on biological sex. Due to the above, I’d be absolutely terrified to be in a toilet with someone who was biologically female but presented as very male (eg deep voice, beard etc etc). Does anyone know if this is likely to become common or do you think people who seem to present such a way will continue to use men’s toilets?

I hope this is the right place for support and guidance, many thanks!

TiFs were specifically mentioned in the SC judgement in that those who look male enough to cause women alarm in a single sex space are not permitted to enter a female single sex space.
I doubt most places are going to go mixed sex. Most provision is single sex.

That's simply not the case. It has to be a proportionate exclusion and case by case, which is very unlikely to be the case for normal services like toilets. It's more applicable to things like rape crisis services where a male appearing person could be alarming and triggering to women attending.

Yes, exactly.

"Case by Case" refers to the setting/organisation making a careful assessment about whether it is proportionate and necessary to have separate facilities for males and females. Eg if a business has uniform/safety wear requirements that mean that employees can reasonably travel between home and their workplace wearing mostly their work clothes but just have to put on an additional item of clothing in the changing room and won't be stripping down to underwear then separate changing facilities aren't necessary and it would be disproportionate to have agro about whether a particular person is male or female when no one is getting undressed anyhow. If the nature of the workplace is such that there's only ever one person changing at a time and employees never have to share the changing space, or if there are individual fully-private facilities rather than communal spaces then it's unnecessary. But if changing for work does mean getting down to underwear in the presence of colleagues then single-sex facilities are a clear and unambiguous need. It has been clarified that case-by-case does not mean assessing individual gender-diverse people to decide whether their presentation is sufficiently feminine or masculine to meet an arbitrary threshold. If the case by case assessment of the premises/situation concludes that it is proportionate and reasonable to have separate facilities for males and females then there are no exceptions for males to be allowed to use the female option or vice versa, but the EHRC guidance is clear that it would be discriminatory against people with the protected characteristic of Gender Reassignment to not also provide a parallel unisex single-user option to ensure that people who don't want to use the facilities for their own sex are not thereby excluded.

The one bit that is case-by-case on an individual level is whether a transman has gone so far in their physical modifications as to be likely to cause alarm or distress if using the female facilities, and if they would then it's reasonable and proportionate for them to be asked to use the alternate unisex option whether or not they would personally choose to. That bit can be case by case because the majority of transmen are visibly and clealy female and cause no distress in female spaces, but there are certainly exceptions if they have gone for high doses of testosterone and body-building. To some extent there might be a similar situation for transwomen if there was a significant possibility of male colleagues being distressed or upset by their presence in the male facilities. But no case-by-case assessment can conclude that it's ok for a particular male person to use the female facilities - if that is ok then you do not have single sex facilities, the facilities are mixed-sex and female people will have grounds for a discrimination case if they are thereby disadvantaged by not having appropriate facilities.

Everyone, even people with disorder of sexual development conditions who may have needed some additional diagnosis before it became clear, knows what sex they are. There are no human bodies that produce both eggs and sperm, embryonic gonad material starts to differentiate into either testes or ovaries before the end of the first trimester of pregnancy dependent on whether or not a Y chromosome is present. Even people with a DSD that means they are male but don't have the expected external genetalia have internal testes, not ovaries.

The pp was talking about women, not men, and it has to be case by case there, because not all of these women who identify as men can pass as men, and that’s the sole reason to deny them access.

Proportionality and single sex toilets

I have been collecting data on non domestic toilets for several years. Information like it is extremely rare to be murdered in a toilet but it is much more likely to die in one for other reasons. For example, on average every five or six months, a person dies in a British station toilet. Now scale that up to nightclubs, schools, hospitals, offices, supermarkets, shops etc.

Here’s another statistic: up to 11% of cardiac arrests happen in the toilet and the chances of surviving very much depend if you are heard and or seen to have collapsed.

I think it is a very reasonable adjustment to have gaps under public toilet doors for the safety of millions with epilepsy, diabetes, heart conditions, who’ve had strokes, who have overdosed, who have had a mental health crisis and are self harming.

Single sex toilets in a single sex environment are the only designs permitted to have door gaps (if there’s ambiguity, the design then becomes private). It is proportionate for this design to be the main provision as it can save lives and prevent misuse inside the cubicle. It is the design with the least pathogens - the toilet flush plume doesn’t reach the sink and dryer.

Mixed sex toilets have got to be an individual self contained rooms for privacy. No one feels comfortable without more privacy in a mixed sex environment - there’s obvious voyeurism risks from men and boys on women and girls in toilets and changing room facilities.

This is still affecting provision. The Hampstead Heath Ponds committee are prepared to state everything is going to fine and it’s always been the case that the Ladies Pond is by self identification. However, they also say they are spending £££ making the facilities private. They know it’s not the same really. What I expect they haven’t done is to do a risk assessment or an equality impact assessment on changes of making everything private. That would be very interesting to see. The Good Law Project state that fully enclosed universal designs are the ‘sophisticated’ solution in Keeping Children Safe in Education. I have yet to see a risk assessment or equality impact assessment for their toilet design choice. It was disregarded by KCSiE so is irrelevant now, other than knowing that is what they will always argue.

In the last few years, it has been ambiguous who is supposed to be in the single sex washroom, so a new trend was for enclosed private toilets, even enclosing single sex cubicles to bodge making them mixed sex cubicles within a mixed sex washroom (not a regulated design). This had led to health and safety problems for the most vulnerable. The trend maximising the privacy in cubicles can now stop as we know it’s a single sex environment.

Talking of ‘alarming’ from previous posts- it is also alarming for a woman to exit an enclosed toilet to be faced with a man. Many women self exclude from any unisex toilets due to lower hygiene standards and feeling unsafe.

And as for physical alarms in toilets, there’s been new business opportunities specifically inventing and marketing alarms for the extra problems in ‘gender neutral’ toilets in schools. The alarms listen out and are triggered by pre-set phrases ‘stop-it’ and ‘help-me’.

It is not proportionate to be getting rid of all single sex cubicle designs so that all toilets are mixed sex rooms. I have a lot of data and evidence to support this. It negatively affects the protected characteristics of sex, disability (certain non-ambulant conditions), religion and belief, age, pregnancy and maternity.

What about extra people having to use the traditional mixed sex, private toilet option - the accessible (disabled one)? Is that proportionate? Well it’s not great for non ambulant people as it affects the availability of their only option. This design already has safeguards of a pull cord alarm and leading off to a visible area. But it’s not infallible which is why radar keys were introduced. There is a lot of debate on the link between transpeople and disabilities - Stonewall stated it was over 50% several years ago. So there may be many people in this demographic who need this facility. This is why it was daft of Jolyon Maugham to be so sneery of this facility - he even claimed accessible toilets would be in the basement so trans people would have to travel to go to the toilet. The accessible toilet shares many characteristics of his ‘sophisticated’ solution - why belittle the disabled? It is also a design needed by people with ambulant medical conditions such as those affecting the bowel and extreme paruresis. That’s why it’s called the accessible not disabled now - it should be left for those who can’t use another facility but that includes a huge range of people.

What would be proportionate is for larger (busier) new builds to have single sex suites inclusive of non-ambulant people (also useful for parents with pushchairs). They could have the advantages of a single sex environment too.

That leaves the mixed sex accessible option for people requiring the total privacy of the mixed sex environment. It should be the most monitored and attended to provision by its very design. It is the most worthy toilet to meet everyone’s needs and should be respected as such.

Akua Reindorf was clear that it's unlikely to apply to female toilets. You can read her response to a TIF asking here.

I am sorry about what happened to you. I know several women who have been attacked or harassed in public toilets, so you are not alone. This is no small issue.

Some large organisations have lately reverted back to offering single sex provision, eg. the V&A's cafe. They had changed the original single sex toilets to mixed sex ones. Now have changed to a single sex and mixed sex offer, which is good.

Coming across a transman in a public toilet is unlikely. A lot of them do not pass at all. Neither do they look like men, nor do they behave like them. I wouldn't worry too much. This is a non-issue that TRAs are exaggerating.

I agree and in many cafes they are the only option anyway. And generally speaking toilets are still single sex - venues aren't going to turn both sets of loos into unisex, they'll leave them as is.

I suspect your only issue will be with brand new venues and toilets. For example, there are new toilets by the pier in Teignmouth - it's one long narrow corridor with loos on one side (self-contained with wash basins. It doesn't bother me but a relative who lives nearby said she doesn't like being in a loo knowing there's a man in the one next door, even though they are self-contained. However, there are other public loos in town which are single sex.