April 28 2025 - 10:10am
It feels a little like a logic puzzle. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of “woman” earlier this month, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has now issued interim guidance on its practical implications.
Regarding the use of public toilets, it is made clear that “trans women (biological men) should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities and trans men (biological women) should not be permitted to use the men’s facilities.” However, the guidance goes on to state that “in some circumstances the law also allows trans women (biological men) not to be permitted to use the men’s facilities, and trans men (biological women) not to be permitted to use the women’s facilities.”
Finally, we are told that “where facilities are available to both men and women, trans people should not be put in a position where there are no facilities for them to use.” If I were a trans person, I’d be thinking “yeah, but how exactly? And whatever solution is found, how long do I have to wait for it?”
However, equality in toilet access is multi-faceted, and women have their own problems to deal with — problems that have, in recent years, been downgraded and in some instances exacerbated by the prioritization of trans activist demands.
Public toilet provision has long been a feminist issue. As Caroline Criado Perez points out in Invisible Women, equal toilet provision for males and females does not equate to equal floor space. Women cannot use urinals and require more time in cubicles (due to periods, pregnancy and birth injuries, among other reasons). Rose George, author of The Big Necessity, puts the ideal female to male toilet ratio at 2:1. Not all women can manage to “hold it in”, or take the risk that they will have to, meaning the “urinary leash” remains very much a thing.
This is a distinct issue, affecting only biologically female people, and a remedy — more exclusively female toilets — is long overdue. However, though conversations about sex, gender and toilets have become louder over the past decade, little progress has been made on this particular front. On the contrary, it has tended to be assumed that the needs of trans people take priority over those of women and girls, even if this leaves the latter more disadvantaged than before.
A familiar sight in recent years has been the conversion of female and disabled toilets into gender-neutral ones, while men’s toilets remain as they are. In the name of inclusion, members of an already privileged group — able-bodied males — have been told they can go wherever they like without losing male-only facilities (since no female can identify into using a urinal). Women and disabled people have been expected to accept this, even if the impact is longer waits and — in some cases — staying at home.
Right now, there is a real risk that yet another diversion of resources to cater for trans people will leave women caught short. After all, there is enough fury from some quarters that women are getting to keep the facilities they already have. All talk is of increasing gender-neutral provisions, not giving women the extra toilets they have been requesting for years. There are also thinly-veiled threats that if women insist on having their own spaces, they will be punished (the threat of “genital inspections” is an obvious example of this). Another, less vivid but more likely punishment would be that so-called “potty parity” is once again de-prioritized.
Toilet provision for trans people is a real issue, but it is not one that women who fought for female-only spaces are morally or financially obliged to solve. Gender-critical women have contributed enough of their own time and money to sorting out problems that those in power should have been dealing with on everyone’s behalf.
Now it’s reasonable for us to focus on our own needs, which we had to set aside while fighting to retain what little we already had. The queue for the ladies’ might be a joke to some, but we’re tired of waiting our turn.
