Girls and boys need their privacy

Recently Lord Lucas asked Her Majesty’s Government “what plans they have to ensure that at least half of the communal changing or toilet facilities offered in public buildings are reserved for women only.”

Logically, Lord Lucas should ask the same question about such facilities for girls and boys. So he did. On Wednesday he wrote a piece for the Times Educational Supplement suggesting that schools retain single sex toilet facilities, at the same time as having some gender neutral ones.

This is so eminently sensible that you wonder why anyone needs to write about it. The reason is, of course, that the concept of sex-segregated toilets is under attack. The Crown Prosecution Service, no less, which now takes its advice from Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence, has gone so far as to suggest that schools will face legal action if they do not allow transgender pupils to use the toilets of their choice.

In response to ongoing pressure from trans activists, some schools have installed entirely gender-neutral toilet blocks. Each time they do, there are complaints from parents. But the urge to be part of a brave new world rolls on.

As Lord Lucas said in his TES article, keeping children safe is what matters above all else. The response from children to the introduction of gender-neutral toilets should be all we need to determine that they do not work. Last year, when kids in Scotland returned to their primary school to find that their old loos had been replaced by gender neutral ones, they didn’t like it. Some were too scared to use the loos. Little boys peed in the sink. Little girls tried to hold it in all day. A mother whose daughter had started her period said she was too scared to go to school on those days.

In America they’ve got here before us. One father wrote of his child’s primary school: “Within two years, almost every bathroom in the school, from kindergarten through fifth grade, had become gender-neutral. Where signs had once said boys and girls, they now said students… All that biology entailed — curiosity, fear, shame, aggression, pubescence, the thing between the legs — was erased or wished away.

“The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals.”

Sense prevailed at this American school, but only after a long fight by parents. Interestingly, at this school, the kids took over from the adults. “Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms.”

Perhaps it is true that sometimes kids know best. In recent decades, the West has been obsessed by the idea of gender-neutrality. When Joyce Benenson began researching for her book, Warriors and Worriers, which explores the differences between the sexes, she found “Academic scientists have published thousands of papers on the subject, with the general conclusion being that men and women are mostly the same, and whatever differences exist have been socialised”.

I can understand why academic scientists are keen on this conclusion. In modern western societies, men and women do end up seeming pretty similar. So when we have our own kids we commit to ironing out residual gender differences and stereotypes. Our little boys won’t play with guns and our little girls won’t wear pink… But then, somehow they do.

We send them off to school and anticipate that “our Polly” will be friends with all the little boys and all the little girls. For the first year she is. Then something happens. Suddenly the kids separate into two tribes, which are barely aware of each other’s existences. At first you resist and challenge a little. But somewhere along the line, as the years pass, you too realise you’ve forgotten the names of all the boys and barely recognise their mothers at pick up. The tribal separation is complete.

Joyce Benenson tells us that this is a global phenomenon. She suggests that when we see behaviours repeated fairly universally, some of them come from our genes — and for us, and them, to be here, they must have helped us survive.

Benenson says, that wherever you look, little boys like to create weapons and to engage in construction. But they also like to operate in packs. She says, “In my research and observation, I have found that young boys’ biology propels them towards other young boys”. When they have a chance, “as fast as possible they distance themselves from the school and the teachers and the girls”. She says that, contrary to stereotypes, “it is the boys who invest more time, effort, and energy in their relations with one another”.

“From early in life, boys possess highly social tendencies that permit rapid formation of relationships with other boys.” She concludes “anthropology has confirmed around the world. Universally boys prefer to remain with boys of the same age and away from others…” Why? It stems from our deep past, when men and boys needed to learn to operate as effective unified fighting forces — and for the group to survive.

What about girls? Little girls like to talk and to form close bonds. Benenson suggests that, as we became human, to survive and to help her own children survive, girls needed close trusted female companions. As they get older, I’ve also noticed that girls become intensely private. That thing when you see a mother on a beach, holding towels around her daughter as she gets changed into her swimsuit, because the daughter has spotted a stranger half a mile down the beach. It’s in the genes. The deep need for privacy keeps her safe.

If girls and boys are so single-sex intensely tribal, why should we gaslight them into pushing through and beyond their natural preferences? Why do they need to smell each other’s smells and hear each other’s noises, when they themselves grasp the shame of it?

In his piece for the TES, Lord Lucas called on the government to act. He said “it is high time that the government provided a plain English guide to the Equality Act 2010 and the schools-premises regulations”. He is right. The Conservatives need to re-issue “toilet guidance” to schools. It should make clear that they have an obligation to provide single sex toilet facilities for boys and girls. Where there is a perceived need, they should provide some gender-neutral ones as well.