Reverse trend of gender-neutral lavatories, urges Tory peer
Gender-neutral lavatories introduced by “woke” local authorities and public bodies make women feel uncomfortable and should be replaced with single-sex ones, a Tory peer said.
Lord Lucas told a House of Lords debate that half of all lavatories and changing rooms in public buildings should be only for women, reversing the trend of letting men and women share all public lavatories.
Increasing numbers of publicly accessible lavatories are being converted into facilities that can be used by all.
Last autumn, the Old Vic theatre in central London converted its male and female lavatories to be gender-neutral. However, Lord Lucas said that many women did not want to share with men. Blaming a culture of “wokeness”, he said: “What is the justification for making women feel unsafe? Is this desirable or justified? Has anyone – and women in particular – been consulted?”
He said he decided to raise the issue after finding he had to use “deeply unpleasant” gender neutral lavatories in the Department for Education’s Westminster offices.
He called on the Government to explain the existing law better so that managers of public buildings recognised that they were able to make lavatories or changing rooms male or female-only.
Lord Lucas said: “Organisations that take money from the public – public institutions or theatres like the Old Vic – should provide women with women’s lavatories to the extent that there is a demand for them.
“In institutions such as theatres, where the queues for the ladies are notoriously longer than those for the gents, going entirely gender-neutral creates more spaces where men feel comfortable and fewer that suit women – an entirely perverse outcome.”
The Old Vic has said that four out of five visitors neither agreed nor disagreed with the redesignation of its lavatories as gender-neutral facilities.
The Department for Education said that it had not made any estimates of “percentage of visitors who may feel excluded by separate communal male and female lavatories, and of both lavatories being gender-neutral”.
Former Tory Home Office minister Lord Blencathra, a wheelchair user, challenged the Government to “stand up” to transsexual activists.
Saying he agreed about the inadequacy of public lavatories, he said: “There are over 70,000 public buildings which wheelchair users cannot get into let alone have the luxury of deciding which toilet we use.
“So my blunt message to the Government tonight is this: when will you stand up to the small, militant, transgender fascist lobby and say the rights of 32 million real women and 800,000 wheelchair users are more important than the rights of tens of thousands who identify as transgender?”