A trans barrister
The House of Commons has been forced to apologise after allowing a transgender woman to use female-only lavatories on the parliamentary estate despite the recent Supreme Court ruling that protects single-sex spaces.
I do wish the news media would not bow to the trans rules and thus mislead readers/listeners. The reality is he’s a man, who claims to be trans, and thus a woman. The basic fact is that he’s a man, and he has no right to bounce into the female-only lavatories.
Robin Moira White, a trans barrister who is a biological male, was directed to use the ladies’ loos in Portcullis House last week after attending a meeting of the women and equalities committee in which the landmark judgment was discussed.
But he’s not a trans barrister, he’s a real barrister.
White, 61, said parliamentary employees had been told that swift access to the lavatories was required because of the barrister’s health condition. White was then shown to the closest ones to the Thatcher Room, where the committee had met.
Really? He just happens to have a “health condition” that requires him to use the women’s toilets? Meanwhile he’s not just a man, he’s a very burly man with a very deep voice – in short, intimidating. A decent man would see that as a reason to be less demanding and obnoxious rather than more so, but trans activism doesn’t work that way. It’s the height of progressivosity to make even huge rumbling men poster boys for fragile vulnerable trans girls.
The barrister was questioned outside the lavatories by two women’s rights campaigners, Kate Harris and Heather Binning, who had attended the same hearing, and said White should not be using female-only loos.
Gosh, they said a man shouldn’t be using female-only loos? The nerve.
The story makes little sense. Were the men’s facilities in another building a significant walk away? In my experience if there is any difference the men’s toilets are always more easily accessible than the women’s. Something that has puzzled me for more than 60 years — since I was a teenager — is how few architects seem to have noticed that women need more toilets, not less, than men. Have they never noticed long queues at the women’s whereas men can just walk in immediately?
40 years or so we were flying from Bogotá to Paris and the plane made a technical stop at San Juan de Puerto Rico. At that time all right-thinking citizens of the USA knew that Colombia was the source of all evil, and that its inhabitants were all terrorists, drug traffickers or other sorts of bad guys, and we were all packed into a room that was too small for the number of people. There was no queue for the men’s toilets, but the queue for the women’s filled whole room in a long snake.
That was the most extreme case I’ve known, but on a milder scale the same thing has been repeated at many scientific meetings that I’ve been to. It’s less of a problem in France than in many places, because many, maybe most, Frenchwomen have few inhibitions about using the men’s toilets when the circumstances need it, and no one turns a hair when it happens. Men (decent ones, anyway) are more hesitant about using women’s toilets, but it happens.
I imagine they just don’t care. A lot of people I know put the long lines down to ‘women putting on makeup’ (which is usually NOT done in the stall, which is what we’re waiting for) or just ‘another proof that women aren’t a good hiring choice – they’ll always be in the restroom or waiting for the restroom’.
It seems to be a joke among a lot of men, and those who are sympathetic usually don’t speak up when other men are making the jokes. Intimidation works on men, too.
Up until recently building codes required allocating the same amount of space for men’s and women’s bathrooms, which works against women in two ways: first, for various reasons women take longer in the bathroom, so the number of people who can use the space per amount of time is much lower for women’s bathrooms than for men’s; and second, some of the space in men’s bathrooms is used for urinals, which accommodate more people in the same amount of space than stalls. But the spaces were ‘equal’, so as far as the designers were concerned that was all they needed to provide.
That’s so dumb. All shoes must be equal! Equal in the case of shoes means the same size!
@guest
It’s bad enough that many public spaces don’t allocate more space for female washrooms, sometimes leading to terrible queues for women. And then, when they re-label the women’s “all gender” or “gender neutral” or whatever euphemism they choose upon opening up the female lavatory to males, the problem gets worse, because if there’s a crush — say, intermission at a theatre — the lads rush to fill both the men’s and women’s washrooms, leaving many women to wait even longer for the bathroom, plus dealing with the mess men make when their pee streams spatter all over the seat and the floor and the tank. It’s not like they couldn’t have foreseen this: it’s like if a new line opens up at a supermarket cash-out, the queue will naturally spread out into two lines. Only in this case, the women are still limited to the one line — they’re still restricted to the erstwhile women’s toilet, for practical purposes — and the men have their pick of either one. So you get a vastly shorter men’s bathroom queue, and a vastly longer women’s. Plus extra mess, severe discomfort, anxiety, etc.
(This is precisely what happened at the “woke” event venue I used to manage.)
It’s enough to put some women off going to such venues altogether. And who can blame them? For women, it’s a lose-lose-lose-lose-lose scenario.
In almost all cases, the men’s and women’s toilets are within about a three second walk of each other. Or less, as very often the doors are adjacent each other, or on opposite sides of the same passage. I don’t know if that is the case specifically with the facilities in question, but even if not true here I doubt they are particularly far apart. What medical condition does Robin have that turns such a tiny difference of access into an intolerable burden, and does this condition reside in his head or is it real?