The Great Unisex Toilet Emergency of South Devon
I believe everyone will agree that there are moments in time when public institutions must act with urgency.
A bridge may be unsafe.
A leisure centre may face closure.
A council may discover that essential services are underfunded.
There may be flooding, housing pressures, transport failures or genuine concerns about public safety.
And then there are two private, accessible toilets in a leisure centre.
Apparently, these too can and do in the minds of some become matters of regional significance.
Imagine if you can the scale of the issue and controversy it causes.
Well, such a controversy has come to South Devon.
The controversy, such as it is, concerns two individual accessible changing and toilet facilities.
One was previously designated male, the other female.
Both are private rooms.
Both can be locked.
Neither is communal.
They have now been designated for use regardless of sex.
No walls have been removed.
No doors have disappeared.
No locks have been confiscated.
No one is being required to undress in front of anyone else.
No toilet has been abolished.
Yet objections have reportedly reached the point where concern has been expressed that the wider population of Teignbridge and South Devon was not formally informed that this change had taken place.
One can only wonder how such a public-information exercise might be implemented.
Perhaps every household should have received an official letter:
“Dear Resident,
We write to inform you of a significant development at your local leisure centre. Two private accessible toilets remain private accessible toilets, but people may now use whichever one is available.”
Would that have been sufficient?
Or should there have been public meetings?
A consultation document?
A referendum?
A ceremonial changing of the signs attended by local dignitaries?
Perhaps the Mayor, the Leader of the Council or even the Chair of the Council?
Perhaps a warning should have appeared on the electronic road signs:
CAUTION: UNISEX ACCESSIBLE TOILET AHEAD.
The difficulty for those attempting to transform this into a major public controversy is that the practical reality is so sadly and painfully ordinary.
Two private rooms existed before.
Two private rooms exist now.
What has changed is simply who may use an empty one.
That is rather important for another group whose interests seem in danger of being forgotten amid the outrage: disabled people.
Consider a very simple example.
Two disabled men arrive at the leisure centre, and both require an accessible toilet.
Under a rigid male-and-female arrangement, one could enter the male facility while the other waited outside, despite the female accessible facility standing empty.
Now reverse the sexes.
Two disabled women arrive.
One uses the female facility.
The second waits, even though the male accessible room is vacant.
For some people, waiting for a toilet is frustrating if not downright irritating.
For others, including people with certain disabilities, continence conditions or urgent personal-care needs, waiting may mean distress, humiliation or an accident.
In that context, making both individual accessible rooms available to whoever requires them is not the collapse of civilisation.
It might almost in some quarters be seen as common sense.
Indeed, one might have thought that anybody sincerely concerned about the dignity of disabled people would welcome an arrangement that potentially doubles the available provision at the moment it is needed.
If your choice is between making a disabled person wait outside an empty toilet and allowing them to use it, the moral and practical complexity is not overwhelming.
There is also the matter of privacy.
Much of the public debate surrounding toilets and changing rooms is framed around protecting privacy and dignity.
Quite right too.
Privacy matters.
But here is the curious thing: an individual lockable room is already one of the most effective mechanisms ever invented for protecting privacy.
It is even used in people’s own homes.
There is a door.
The person goes inside.
The door is closed and locked.
Everyone else remains outside.
At no stage does the word “unisex” cause the walls to dissolve.
No unsuspecting swimmer suddenly finds themselves transported into a communal Victorian bathing hall.
The facility remains exactly what it was before: a private room.
This is why the intensity of the objection deserves examination.
Because if nobody has lost a facility, if privacy remains intact, if disabled people may actually gain greater practical access, and if nobody is compelled to share the room with anyone else, what exactly is the injury requiring the attention of the population of South Devon?
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the objections are less about the physical facilities than about what the word on the door represents.
That is where an administrative change becomes a cultural battlefield.
The problem with culture wars is that they have a remarkable ability to make ordinary objects behave like ideological explosives.
A toilet is no longer a toilet.
It becomes a statement.
A sign is no longer a sign.
It becomes an assault on civilisation.
An unused private cubicle is no longer an unused private cubicle.
It becomes contested territory.
And before long, people who ought to understand proportionality are solemnly discussing whether tens of thousands of residents should have been notified.
There is something particularly strange about demanding mass public notification over a measure intended, among other things, to make facilities easier for people to use.
Local authorities and public organisations make operational decisions every day.
Doors change.
Rooms are repurposed.
Opening times alter.
Equipment is replaced.
Signs are updated.
Unless a change materially removes a service, creates a serious safety concern or significantly affects public rights, most people reasonably expect organisations to get on with running their buildings.
That is called administration.
It does not normally require a constitutional convention.
There are, of course, legitimate debates about how public facilities should be designed.
There are legitimate debates about single-sex provision, disability access, privacy and inclusion.
Those debates should take place.
But they should be rooted in the actual circumstances rather than in imagined or invented versions of them.
A communal changing area raises one set of questions.
An individual locked room raises another.
Pretending that the two situations are interchangeable helps nobody.
Nor does treating the existence of transgender people as though it creates some entirely new category of public danger requiring the redesign of every toilet in the land.
Where an individual facility can be used privately by anyone, a great many of the supposedly insurmountable problems disappear.
Nobody loses dignity.
Nobody loses privacy.
Nobody loses the ability to use the toilet alone.
The only thing lost is the requirement that one perfectly usable room remain empty while somebody who urgently needs it waits outside.
If that is the hill upon which public outrage is now to be planted, then local democracy may have entered an unusually tranquil age, where,
Perhaps all the housing problems have been solved.
Perhaps every pothole has been filled.
Perhaps social care is adequately funded.
Perhaps every swimming pool, library and community centre is secure not only for today but for generations to come.
Because one would imagine that only after addressing such minor distractions and issues could serious, elected public figures devote themselves to the pressing question of whether South Devon should have received advance notice of a change to two toilet signs.
There is of course a broader lesson here.
Public debate works best when those taking part ask a very simple question before declaring a crisis:
What is it that has actually happened?
In this case, the answer is reassuringly mundane.
Two accessible toilets existed.
Two accessible toilets still exist.
They remain private.
They remain lockable.
Nobody has been compelled to share them.
Disabled users may have greater flexibility.
And people who might otherwise face unnecessary difficulty about which door they are permitted to enter can use a private facility in peace.
If that constitutes a public emergency, I would suggest that Teignbridge and South Devon is not only doing considerably better than most of the country it is showing the way for the whole nation.
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