New restaurants, offices, schools 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.
According to ministers, 81% agreed with the intention for separate single-sex toilet facilities in a consultation on the proposals, while 82% also agreed with the intention to provide “universal” toilets – a self-contained, and a fully enclosed toilet room with a wash hand basin for individual use – where space allows.
My (very newly built) works office has both, on alternate floors. Imagine the extra cost!
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.
*rolls eyes*
Badenoch said the move shows the government’s commitment to “ensuring single-sex spaces are protected for all” after plans to overhaul the NHS constitution by limiting the use of gender-neutral wards. These changes will mean patients in England will have the right to be treated on single-sex wards and transgender people will be treated in single rooms.
Pity the Tories have been so lax in standing up for common sense in the past, they might not be so behind in the polls...
Mermaids, an LGBTQ+ charity (Ed: missing the word 'notorious' there...), 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.
“All children, including those who are trans, non-binary and gender-diverse, should be able to access the toilet that makes them feel respected and affirmed.”
“We want a future whereby every young person can choose a toilet with freedom and autonomy; for some this would be a gender-neutral toilet and for others it would be a gender-specific toilet.”
Might as well ask for a (non-binary) pony as well.
7 comments:
I Don't Go To The Toilet To Feel 'Respected And Affirmed' - nor down in the dumps, neither.
All through Primary and Secondary school our toilets were outside walled enclosures, open to the sky, and rain. Natural antibiotics.
We were divided into Boys and Girls in those days of antiquity. Boys and Girls had separate Playgrounds in which the toilets were located. I never saw the inside of the Girls' toilet. But the Boys' consisted of a wall with a gutter at the bottom, with opposite the wall, behind the pissers' back 4 traps with cowboy saloon type doors.Without the spring to shut them. The "seat" was without the luxury of hinged wood or bakelite sit-upon. I never knew of these Boys' sit down facilities being used. Hand washing faciliies? You jest. This was the pre Pfizer, big pharma, era of spreading herd immunity. If two or more Boys needed to piss together, then there was always a competition to see who could hit the wall the highest. I have no idea how this simple amusement was adopted by governments as an economic strategy of "pissing it up the wall" as a sure fire vote winning plan. We all survived and became pillars of our communities. Thanks to District Nurses on bikes, and later, Morris Minors, doctors who would do a home visit at any time of day or night while managing to do operations - tonsils, appendectomies, broken limbs, and who knows what other horrors in the local, well ventilated with farming and sea air, local Hospital. With real nurses and a Matron. No Wacky Races ambulance run to the super duper hermetically sealed, over heated germ incubator 80 miles away.
End of rant!
Let's see what proactive tusk does with it. As Gramps and Flaxon might say "Erse"!
Sounds like Doonhamer and I went to very similar schools, probably around a similar time.
Our bit of lavatorial fun came from the 'pissing wall' in the roofless boys' facilities being just low enough so that, with the excess of pressure available to the young, it was just possible to project the stream over the top of the wall. Then one day when the caretaker, Mr Slingsby, was walking past with his mug of tea . . . . you can guess the rest.
There's a story knocking around in Avon and Somerset Police that all new Police buildings are being built or converted to have multi-sex facilities. Unpopular with the girls who think the boys aren't clean enough and unpopular with the boys, presumably because the girls will hear the boys talking about them!
Did "the rest" involve red marks on bottoms?
Once again I ask, why is the government poking its unwanted nose into this? Let businesses and organisations provide whatever facilities they think best and let people vote with their feet. The most inclusive* bogs that I've seen were unisex ones where each one was an individual room with a WC, hand washing facilities and a bin for sanitary products. Everyone can use them, male, female and those who see themselves as being somewhere in between.
*Which seems to be the only thing that matters at the moment.
"...nor down in the dumps, neither."
👏😂
"If two or more Boys needed to piss together, then there was always a competition to see who could hit the wall the highest."
Nowadays, the 'girls' would join in!
"Then one day when the caretaker, Mr Slingsby, was walking past with his mug of tea . . . . you can guess the rest."
😂🤣
"There's a story knocking around in Avon and Somerset Police that all new Police buildings are being built or converted to have multi-sex facilities. "
I'm astonished that they are building new Police Stations...yet no new prisons! Never played any kind of Sim City type game, obviously.
"The most inclusive* bogs that I've seen were unisex ones where each one was an individual room with a WC, hand washing facilities and a bin for sanitary products."
Like used to exist in my local Sainsburys, until Covid shut it entirely.
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