'all-gender toilet”

My kids go to a religious high school. Recently they installed an ‘all-gender toilet’. We still have the usual male and female bathroom facilities, but this is a new addition. I believe our school is one of the first Catholic schools to do so.

My kids say that among themselves the students all admit that they don’t want to use it because they just want the privacy of single sex toilets. Now I’m hearing from my kids and their friend’s parents that *certain* teachers are pressuring the kids to ‘prove’ they aren’t bigoted towards trans people by using it.

Even worse, now that the ‘all gender toilet’ is there- the kids are saying that they feel insecure even in their own toilets because they’ve been told that anybody of any sex is allowed to use ‘any toilet’, and that they aren’t allowed to complain or show any disapproval at all because that would be discriminatory.

So now there are no toilets that the kids feel secure and comfortable in. And now they know that their feelings have been ranked as totally unimportant compared to trans kids’ feelings.

The kids feel unsafe, and they know it’s unfair. As a parent I am shattered and felt complicit in it just by sending them there each day.

In fact, this lockdown has been the best thing for us because my kids have told me that they like being away from that environment and want me to look into doing online learning instead of school-based learning, permanently.

But they still feel unsafe at shopping centres because it’s the same as at school.

They don’t feel safe anywhere anymore.

And I’m so angry about it, because I feel the same way.