Here’s my take, framed for a pub-table debate rather than a shouting match.
What happened at The Swan in Weymouth neatly exposes the contradiction at the heart of the so-called “bathroom debate”.
For years we’ve been told—very loudly—that sharing toilets is dangerous, unacceptable, and a threat to “female safe spaces”. This argument is almost always aimed at trans people, particularly trans women, and is presented as if it were self-evident common sense.
Yet the moment the situation is reversed—men temporarily using what would normally be labelled a “female space”—the world does not end.
No panic.
No incidents.
No need for safeguarding briefings or police tape.
Just people using a toilet, washing their hands, and getting on with their pints.
That alone should make anyone pause.
If mixed-use toilets were inherently unsafe, uncomfortable, or traumatic, this would have been the moment it showed. Instead, it demonstrated what many of us already know from lived experience: most people simply want to use the loo and carry on with their day.
The hypocrisy becomes clearer when you zoom out.
We all share toilets in countless everyday settings:
- At home, when guests visit
- On trains and planes
- In cafés, small pubs, and workplaces
- In countless venues with single-cubicle facilities
Nobody demands “sex verification” before boarding a train. Nobody claims aeroplane toilets undermine women’s safety. Somehow, magically, society copes.
So what’s really going on?
It’s not about toilets.
It’s not about safety.
And it certainly isn’t about evidence.
It’s about discomfort with trans people existing in public, dressed up as concern.
This example from The Swan in Weymouth reveals to me that when people are actually faced with shared facilities, they adapt instantly. The fear exists almost entirely in the abstract—fuelled by headlines, culture-war rhetoric, and hypothetical worst-case scenarios that never seem to materialise in real life.
Ironically, multi-use facilities often increase privacy: individual cubicles, proper doors, no gaps, and no awkwardness. For many women, disabled people, parents with children, and yes, trans people, they’re simply more practical and more humane.
So perhaps the lesson from The Swan isn’t controversial at all.
If a group of blokes can use a “female space” without incident, embarrassment, or outrage, then the idea that trans people using the loo is some kind of societal threat collapses entirely.
Sometimes lived reality is the best antidote to manufactured panic.
And that’s definitely something worth chatting about over a pint. 🍺
