And all of that is awful, I'm not disputing that. Many years ago I watched the Quentin Crisp film starring John Hurt; I was only a young teen and thought how he had been treated was dreadful. So I've been well aware for decades of how vulnerable people can be in that situation.
The only answer that makes sense is for communal changing rooms that are OK with it, whilst still having same sex facilities for others.
Whether that is logistically possible (space, cost etc) is another issue.
Thanks for coming back to me on this, Mackenzie. I understand this is something you care about - we've both posted a lot about it over the years, just maybe without interacting much. Apologies if I'm coming across a bit hostile, it's a tough subject and one I've probably gotten a bit too close to over the years.
With that being said, one potential idea I've always wondered about is something similar to the format they had for my first high school's toilets about 20 years ago. It was sort of unisex but it worked really well and I've always wondered why more people haven't entertained it. Although, having said that, the Tim Horton's café in Stockport that opened just after the pandemic has gone for the same idea. Whenever I see people worrying about unisex toilets I always remember how it was at my school and how it is at Tim Horton's.
I'll explain.
My original high school (which got shut down in 2007 and turned into a new one in 2008) had unisex toilets. Only, they weren't
exactly unisex toilets. It was a unisex communal toilet area, but each of the cubicles had proper brick walls between them, the doors were four inches thick, had big locks, and they stretched from the ceiling to the floor. Every cubicle had a toilet, a hook on the door for bags and clothes, plus a bin for sanitary towels/pads. Once that door shut, you were in your own space and basically in a separate room. And in Tim Hortons in Stockport (unsure if you've been) it's even better - you stand in the queue communally but once you go into the cubicle (again behind a big thick door that goes from floor to ceiling) you've got a toilet, two bins, a sink, and it's big enough to fit a wheelchair. It's a proper space that's all yours.
Because I could quote statistics at you all day about transgender women being victims of hate crimes and stuff. But it doesn't fully get to the heart of the issue, which is that, yes, we do have a serious problem with males in society committing sex crimes and putting women in danger in places where they should feel secure. But there's also a serious lack of proper infrastructure and facilities that enable people to have proper privacy and safety in public spaces. I'm a male who identifies as a man but I hate going into men's public toilets (I've never gone into a women's toilet). Over the years, on and off, I've had trouble with gastrointestinal disorders and public toilets were things I had to rely on a lot during my 20s. And, yeah, I'll be honest, at one stage I bought a radar key off the internet because sometimes the only loos that feel "safe" are the disabled ones.
I don't understand it from a woman's perspective and never could, but I do understand it from a chronic illness perspective - trying to find a private, safe space in vulnerable public situations is almost impossible. I don't think transgender women are something to be afraid of in the first place - and you surely know as well as I do that the type of men who want to sexually assault women in toilets and changing rooms don't need to put a dress on to do it, they just bloody well do it anyway because that's the kind of monsters they are. But I think there'd be less concern full stop if toilet and changing facilities were more robust, better maintained, and designed with actual privacy in mind as opposed to just
modesty. It would cost far less and take significantly less time to improve the facilities we have instead of creating a whole third toilet for trans people to use (or, as Wes Streeting seems to think, building entirely new hospital wards for a group of people that make up 0.5% of the population).
