In the EHRC guidance on sex-based provisions, this government (that has apparently sweated over this composition for a year) advises trans people to use the accessible toilets if necessary. Meanwhile, all the people you’d expect to be standing up for women are making a ballyhoo about how terrible this all is for trans people.

I agree things must feel pretty bad for trans people at the moment, because all the noise has put a horrible amount of attention on what they choose to do when they need the loo but…

Yesterday, sitting on a station platform, a woman asked us rather anxiously whether there were toilets. There weren’t. The best we could do was point out the little café (which didn’t have a toilet) and say presumably they’ll know where the nearest one is.

It happens to all of us, quite often. Society does not provide enough toilets, and doesn’t reliably keep them open or clean. Why on earth do so many train stations not have loos? It’s a problem for ALL OF US. That’s why I’m not going to buy the idea that a section of society are suddenly suffering unbelievably because they’ve been reminded of the laws about toilet provision.

Toilet provision is very important. I remember decades ago reading a newspaper article that argued the point that toilet provision was one of the best indicators of how much an authority actually thought or cared about its citizens. The first article about toilets on this blog was written in 2017. It centred on how Labour and Tory councils respectively coped with cuts.

Ironic really, we now have a Green-led council, with the new councillors thinking they have ‘balanced the books’. I assume they’re pretending not to know why the Labour council always lived on the edge of bankruptcy (they were always trying to absorb cuts without bankrupting citizens) … but hey, the Labour Party don’t care about people any more than any other party does now, which is probably why their new Equality Act guidance glibly tells trans people if they don’t like the toilets on offer, they should use the disabled loos. It’s rather like me telling a passing stranger they can use my neighbour’s toilet if they like.

I can remember getting quite annoyed about how often I found myself writing about toilets – well, here’s the whole sorry collection…

 And let us remind ourselves, one more time: Stonewall tried to make the ‘trans rights’ issue all about toilets because it was an easier argument for them than the ones about ‘should Stonewall be campaigning for an end to sex-based rights, when those very rights are important to gay men and lesbians?’ or even, ‘how can Stonewall be a charity for gay and lesbian people, when most of their funding comes from the trans lobby, whose interests clash with those of gay and lesbian folks?’

And again: the media tried to make the ‘trans rights’ issue all about toilets because they don’t trust the public to understand what’s actually in the Equality Act, or what the trans lobby have actually been campaigning for (that is, an end to sex-based rights that protect all women and girls).

And finally, here’s the point that never seems to get discussed:

Any port in a storm

When you gotta go, you gotta go. Occasionally, when push comes to shove, we’ve all made use of whatever we can find, regardless of government guidelines so I can’t say I’ve never used the toilets provided for disabled people but I, and I hope everyone else, stick to the ones we’re supposed to use as far as we can. That’s why I think it’s pretty shabby that after the years of hard work charities and campaigns for disabled people put into getting accessible toilets, the best this government can come up with is ‘we didn’t get away with presuming upon women so if trans people can’t find a gender-neutral loo, they should use the accessible one’.

It’s worse than me telling some passing stranger who asks for a loo that they can use the neighbour’s toilet if they like. The government is there for one reason and one reason only – to provide and protect the services we all need, not to play us off against each other because they can’t keep up. I can only agree with the visibly exasperated Jonathan Hinder, who told Victoria Derbyshire that [after a decade of equivocating] if the government can’t face the trans rights issue, and sort it out without trampling on someone else’s rights, well….

Well, this is the government that had to move heaven and earth to get their last halfway successful politician back into government to replace their defective leader because not one of their 400+ MPs were considered acceptable, so I suppose they really can’t find anyone amongst them with the brains or the courage to do as he suggests, and sort out the trans issue.

The wonderful Andy Burnham can’t, either. He didn’t understand the Equality Act when women went to talk to him about it years ago, and now he’s trying to make up-to-date noises when asked about the issue, noises which are equally useless, and contradict what he said then.

In other words, there is no-one in government who cares enough about an issue that matters to women and girls, in particular to gays and lesbians, and now to people with disabilities, to actually get their heads round the problem of decent toilet provision.

No wonder they can’t manage to stand effectively against poverty, climate crisis, the theft of our NHS and genocide. Let’s get ourselves a better government.

See you on the streets!

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