Growing concerns
So, kicking and screaming, the UK manages to return to the arrangement that allowed women to engage in public life instead of being tethered to home by the size of their bladders.
New restaurants, offices and hospitals in England will be required to have separate male and female toilets, in a move ministers say will combat growing concerns about “privacy and dignity” in gender-neutral facilities.
The law will mean newly built non-residential buildings require separate facilities, and cannot solely have “universal” lavatories.
The need for women’s toilets had been understood since the late 19th century, until the bright sparks of the 21st decided that women are trash.
However, the policy has been criticised as being transphobic since it was first proposed in 2021 because it offered no alternative plan for transgender and non-binary people.
It’s not “phobic” to decline to indulge people’s silly narcissistic fantasies about themselves. We don’t build special toilets in all public buildings to indulge people who think they’re horses or Napoleon or the Eifel Tower, either.
Last week, Badenoch said girls at a school who did not have access to single-sex toilets developed urinary tract infections (UTIs) because they did not want to use gender-neutral toilets. She asked people to report public bodies that fail to provide single-sex spaces or have policies not in accordance with the Equality Act. She did not name the school or further substantiate the claim.
Oh fark off, Guardian. When do you ever demand that trans ideologues substantiate their claims? Why in hell are you implying that girls should just hold their urine all day long to indulge the selfish demands of the trans lobby?
Mermaids, an LGBTQ+ charity, has responded to government proposals about gender-specific toilets.
A statement on its website said: “We hear that trans, non-binary and gender-diverse people are too often not made to feel welcome, or even safe when using toilet facilities. It is unacceptable that any child should be made to feel this way.”
But it is acceptable for all female children to feel afraid to use toilet facilities.
H/t Acolyte of Sagan
Yeah, Mermaids, why is it okay for girls not to feel safe or welcome in the toilet facilities? Because the only girls that matter are those that are actually boys.
The story in the Grauniad was written by one Mabel Banfield-Nwachi, who from her header photo appears to be a quite pleasant young woman, and certainly no dimwit. My guess is that she was simply obeying editorial instructions from someone higher up in the Graun’s chain of command, which could well be the case given the wide variety of subjects covered in the stories she has done, on her own initiative or otherwise, so far in her career. (See https://www.theguardian.com/profile/mabel-banfield-nwachi )
But then again and if true, maybe that office superior was onto something. Maybe a contest is starting up amongst the drag-queens and other however-hung donger-hangers (not to be confused with doppelgangers, though some donger-hangers may have their look-alikes) with the winner being he who can leave it hanging out longest (in both a dimensional and a temporal sense) after his hose-down of whatever his favoured internal part of the facility is completed. Perhaps that would involve a hoe-down on his part as well, though I am sure that in perhaps one or two cases, such attention-seeking would definitely not be involved.
The key word in this sentence, of course, is ‘solely’. It completely undermines any claim of discrimination, since such facilities are still permitted, meaning that any girl who is actually okay with sharing a bathroom with a trans girl (assuming such a girl exists at that particular school) will be able to do so in a universal lav, should the school choose to provide them (which, in theory, schools that were doing exclusively universal lavs prior to this would be inclined to do).
At my alma mater (what an ironic term, one has to think), the College of Engineering is an eight-story tower. When it was built in the late 1960’s, there were restrooms on every floor–but for men only. In the mid 1980’s, the College made every other floor’s restroom for women only, but the base floor was men’s. So that still means that the women grad students in their basement offices have to ride the elevator for two floors to get to the first women’s restroom, while the men can just go up a single flight of stairs. The elevators, of course (there are two of them) are very busy during the day and one can wait many minutes for one to come all the way back down from the professor’s offices up on the 7th and 8th floors. When I was there, I knew of several women who planned their days around restroom breaks, and I know of at least one woman who switched majors partially for that reason.
In France no one cares about that (or if they do they don’t tell me). Many restaurants have unisex toilets and no one complains. Some do have separate male and female toilets, but if one is occupied too long women go into the men’s, and, less often, men go into the women’s. Once my wife found that even in francophone Belgium it’s not like that. For some reason the women’s was unavailable, but when she suggested to our (male) colleague that she could use the men’s he was horrified. I’ve sometimes wondered if this relaxed attitude to excretion is responsible to the almost total absence of graffiti from French toilets, and when you do come across one it will probably be in English and will deal with the relative merits of English football teams. Most French people seem to think of excretion and sex as two completely different activities with little in common. Once we went to a meeting about Peru that took place in a primary school. When the time came for looking for a toilet it turned out to be outside, unisex with no door. In front of me in the queue there was a young woman who wasn’t in the least embarrassed that I could see her sitting down for a pee (I was more embarrassed than she was).
Excuse me?? I think you mean the 1850s.
And where was the tide of anguished trans women back then? We are constantly informed that transness is not a new thing, but rather has been with us for all time. There ought to have been trans people barred from their ‘appropriate’ amenities that whole time, all in supposed anguish, yet we hear nothing.
Oh and is it not claimed that sex-segregated amenities will require police or genital checkers or security scans or (etc.) at the door of every toilet? I can’t say I noticed a single example of such. Odd.