Butlin’s has every right to enforce single-sex spaces

Do men belong in women’s toilets? Apparently, they do at Butlin’s holiday camps.

This week, Butlin’s issued an apology after it emerged that five ‘transwomen’ were ejected from a women’s toilets during the Bang Face music festival last weekend, at its Skegness site.

One of them, Jae Roberts, describes a security guard ‘asking a transwoman to leave’ the women’s toilets. Guards then reportedly began to use force, ‘particularly against the trans attendees’.

The security guards involved have since been suspended. Butlin’s claims that it is an ‘inclusive business’ and that the bouncers did not ‘follow our processes’. Although Butlin’s does not say so explicitly, the implication here is that its policy is to allow men who identify as women into the camp’s women-only spaces.

Some reports suggest that the Butlin’s bouncers were needlessly heavy-handed, which could well warrant an investigation and an apology. But surely, at least as a matter of principle, women’s toilets should be for women – and this boundary needs to be enforced.

What the Butlin’s incident demonstrates is that ‘the toilet question’ is not some right-wing, tabloid myth. There are many men who think they are entitled to enter women’s toilets. They believe their self-identification as women should give them access to women-only spaces – and that women’s privacy and dignity do not matter.

The toilet issue is simple to resolve. Private spaces should be segregated by sex, not gender. Women are fed up with our bathrooms going ‘gender-neutral’. We are fed up with our changing rooms becoming ‘trans inclusive’. We know that if men are allowed into a space, then it ceases to be women-only.

There is much that remains unclear about the Butlin’s toilet incident, but those security guards were surely in the right to try to eject those men. Most women would salute them for standing up for our spaces.

Rosie Norman is an intern at spiked.