Mick Hartley

Victoria Smith at UnHerd quickly disposes of the "my toilet at home is gender neutral" argument regularly trotted out by those who can't, or won't, see why single sex toilets are so important for women:

Do the people who make the “gender-neutral at home” argument offer up their own toilets for use by any passers-by? I suspect not, yet theirs is an argument predicated on ignoring that there is an important distinction between private and public space. Given the history of public toilet provision for women, it is telling, to say the least….

Female-only toilets are essential for women’s privacy and safety, given men’s greater propensity for flashing, voyeurism and sexual assault. To view all this as “excluding” is to see it purely from a male perspective. Female toilet provision is about granting female people equal access to public space, space from which we — not male people — have long been excluded due to men’s violence and their creation of resources which centre their bodily needs. We are nowhere close to having this equality yet.

As most women will know, even public spaces which have both male and female toilets tend to have far longer queues for the ladies’. To witness the latter opening up to male users in the name of inclusion has been galling (more often than not, the men’s remains the men’s — and even if it doesn’t, one cannot identify into being able to use a urinal). True inclusion would mean creating more women’s facilities than men’s. In the meantime, if we cannot have that, ensuring that sex-specific toilets for women are in all new builds is a start.

Because Kemi Badenoch has taken a stand on this issue, it will of course be argued that what is, in practical terms, a requirement which supports female participation in life beyond the home is actually a “Tory culture war”. I will hear none of it. To those who say “your toilet at home is gender-neutral”, I would politely point out that women are allowed to have an existence beyond it.

A comment: "A quick google search on ‘hidden camera toilet porn’ throws up 107 million results – that alone is reason for single sex toilet provision…"