LGBTQ+ rights in the United Kingdom

How is that any different from what was being done before? Like, I'm pretty sure, contrary to popular belief, trans people are generally fine with disclosing the fact they're trans to their doctor when it comes to questions of conditions that tend to affect one sex over another, and the NHS wouldn't just go and broadcast that to everyone who asks without a valid reason because that'd be a blatant violation of doctor-patient confidentiality. I feel like I've missed something.

Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on May 5th 2024 at 8:09:21 PM

Two reasons:

1) No, not everyone is comfortable disclosing their trans status to potentially unsafe doctors; if you need emergency care for a broken leg, for example, or other non-specialised services, it simply isn't relevant, and transphobic doctors will try to frame absurd things as side-effects of HRT to justify pushing you off it.

2) The risk specifically of being outed is not so high for patients as it is for NHS staff.

Yeah, those are fair points.

The thing is this policy will put the burden on trans people to explain why they’re not on a single-sex ward, both to other patients and to their own visitors.

We also have to consider that a person even being suspected of being trans is used as justification for violence by some people, I could easily see random women (trans or cis) in individuals rooms being subjected to transphobic harassment or violence because it’s assumed that someone in an individual room must be trans.

Gender-specific toilets to be required in non-residential buildings

This was on the way anyway, but it feels very "culture war" that it's the first announcement since the Conservatives losses in the local elections.

It at least isn’t retroactive, but it’s going to make it so much more expensive to construct buildings with uncertain demographic throughout.

To give an example of what I’m talking about. Say you have a company with 1000 staff a 70-30 male-female gender split and you’re building a new office, do you build enough toilets for 700 men and 300 women, 500 men-500 women, or even 700 men-700 women? The actual solution is to build gender neutral toilets (the nice full room ones) for 1000 people and call it a day. I know of at least one building that did that (it later was sadly forced to gender some of toilets but not many).

Except now you’re not going to be allowed to do that, because a bunch of transphobes want to make our lives more difficult.

I used to work in an office attached to a warehouse - because it was a small workforce (literally four people, all either male or in my case male-presenting), there were only two toilets in total, both in their own separate rooms (one of them was an actual bathroom and had a urinal, the other was more of a glorified cubicle). Under the new rules, would these have to be arbitrarily labeled male and female despite there being no functional difference besides the urinal? And what would stop people from just using the other toilet anyway if one was already occupied (it was a construction/DIY business and so the vast majority of visitors were men, I feel like slapping a girl label on a toilet isn't gonna stop them from going if they really need to go :V).

Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on May 6th 2024 at 1:55:01 PM

Because apparently a toilet and a sink behind a full-height locking door is a threat to safety, privacy and dignity.

If they built such a building under the new rules yes, I believe they would. Existing buildings are at least being protected.

In the Netherlands you're obligated to have separated men's and women's toilets in your workplace. Which is kind of funny for small workplaces, since they'll have exactly two toilets, in perfectly identical rooms, and arbitrarily label one of them men's and the other women's. So when a visitor's preferred gendered room is taken, they just happily use the other, because of course they do. I think I've seen exactly one guy not wanting to use the (again, perfectly identical) women's toilet, and everyone present thought he was being weird.

It is remarkably silly, and I feel we might as well just make both rooms gender-neutral. Of course, this doesn't translate as well to larger workplaces or venues where single-toilet rooms become rather impractical.

Edited by Kayeka on May 6th 2024 at 3:00:36 PM

There's an actual ratio built into UK law.

The ratio depends on whether your staff is single-gender or mixed-gender and how many staff you have. So, staff compromised of women or mixed gender need more facilities than single-gender male staff.

Female-only or mixed-gender staff

• 1-5 people: 1 toilet + 1 washbasin
• 6-25: 2 toilets + 2 washbasins
• 26-50: 3 toilets + 3 washbasins
• 51-75: 4 toilets + 4 washbasins
• 76-100: 4 toilets + 4 washbasins
• Over 100: +1 toilet and +1 washbasin per 25 people.

So, a company with a thousand female or a thousand mixed-gender staff will need to provide a minimum of 40 toilets and 40 washbasins.

Male-only staff

• 1-15 people: 1 toilet + 1 urinal
• 16-30: 2 toilets + 1 urinal
• 31-45: 2 toilets + 2 urinal
• 46-60: 3 toilets + 2 urinal
• 61-75: 3 toilets + 3 urinal
• 76-90: 4 toilets + 3 urinal
• 91-100: 4 toilets + 4 urinal
• Over 100: +1 toilet per 50 people if an equal number of urinals are present.

So, a company with a thousand male-only staff will need to provide a minimum of 22 toilets and 22 washbasins.

I can't find information on whether it's a legal requirement for companies to provide washbasins to their male-only staff and I can't find information on whether it's a legal requirement for companies to provide urinals when their staff are mixed-gender.

Edited by Wyldchyld on May 12th 2024 at 5:56:25 PM

Cabinet Office minister Esther McVey has just banned the UK civil service from wearing rainbow lanyards to show their support for LGBTQ+ inclusion and equality.

This is going down about as well as you'd expect. But it does reinforce that LGBTQ+ inclusion, acceptance and visibility is still, as McVey says, "political".

Edit: As per this article, she's also proposing that ERGs (e.g. the civil service LGBTQIA+ network, Muslim civil servants network) are dismantled.

Edited by Mrph1 on May 13th 2024 at 5:31:14 PM

Somehow, doing this seems unlikely to make for a "happy team".

And the government announces an end to "gender ideology" in schools.

Even if they struggle to define what they're actually banning. More pre-election desperation and culture war rubbish, I guess — but that doesn't make it any better for the people at the sharp end.

It'll have a chilling effect even if it never happens.

This comes as part of the government discussing banning sex education for kids under nine (where all they get taught is healthy relationships, different family structures and about private areas being private).

It’s also not clear if this is actually happening, this government has a tendency to announce anti-woke stuff but never actually follow through because that would require effort. They’ve now retreated on the rainbow lanyards thing and are denying they were ever going to ban them.

It feels like they're going into the next election knowing they've got a strong chance of losing,so they're desperate throwing bones to the hard right voters to draw them back but it's not really work like they're hoping

I can see that it might force PM Starmer to either undo them (making him a "leftie" target for the tabloids) or retain them (alienating his core Labour voters).

But that may be giving the Tories too much credit. It does feel as if they're just drowning and grasping at straws.

Denying they made any such claim on lanyards when it's on the record just makes them look dishonest and rubbish.

I mean, another MP defected and Cummings is planning to start his own party or something, which'll attack the Tories even more, so...

Basically, at this rate I hope Sunak keeps delaying the election, it'll be funny.

I mean, if 50%+1 of Parliament decided to abolish elections entirely...

(then the King really would throw them out)

I'm still baffled by the idea that you can just delay elections like that.

It's more like "elections must be held no more than five years after the current parliament first convenes", and gives the PM the option of when exactly to put the election date — he can set it earlier if he wants. For the current one, the deadline is January 28, 2025.

Yeah delay in this context just means having them at a weird time, winter elections suck for everyone because nobody likes campaigning in the dark.

...Would that be a possible method of voter suppression, or am I thinking too leftpondian?

It relies on the assumption that the person doing the delaying will benefit from no campaigning.