Mixed-sex changing rooms are putting women at needless risk

Well, knock me down with a feather. It turns out, when places where women get changed are opened up to any old Joe who fancies using them, creepy blokes will walk in. As revealed by new police statistics, mixed-sex changing rooms were the location of at least 16 rapes, 80 sexual assaults and 65 acts of voyeurism in England and Wales in 2023.

Obviously, the revelation that sexual abusers thrive in confined, CCTV-free spaces that women use to strip off and wash should be a surprise to no one. Nevertheless, research by the Women’s Rights Network found up to a third of Britain’s leisure centres have changing rooms that are ‘open to everyone’, regardless of gender, placing women at needless risk.

Legally, there is no obligation for leisure centres, gyms or spas to offer single-sex changing facilities. What the law does say, however, is that when a space is labelled women-only, there is an obligation to exclude biological males. Centres that want to appear ‘trans inclusive’, while still staying within the law, therefore tend to opt for mixed-sex or gender-neutral facilities.

The consequences of this are now undeniable. The police data show that, on average, three crimes per week were committed against women and girls in gender-neutral facilities in 2023. More alarming still, in almost five per cent of those cases, the perpetrator was a male member of staff – someone you would hope to be able to alert if a man wandered into the wrong changing room.

‘To this day, the smell of chlorine makes my muscles tense’, said one teenage sexual-assault victim, who was accosted by a man in a swimming-pool shower room. Another woman, who was recorded in a state of undress by a man on his mobile phone, said she felt ‘really scared… What if there are pictures of my naked body on the internet now for everyone to see?’ In 2024, two men were found guilty of secretly filming 6,000 members of the public, children included, getting changed and using the toilet in swimming pools across London and the south. These images were then traded on the internet. ‘I feel like leaving swimming altogether now’, said one of their victims. ‘I can’t believe someone has done this to me. I feel so embarrassed.’

The toll of all this is devastating. These women and girls just wanted to be able to do sport or go swimming. Yet they now feel so belittled and browbeaten that they would rather self-exclude than risk further harm.

Worse still, according to the Women’s Rights Network, this is merely the tip of the iceberg. Its report concludes that relationships between sexual abuse victims and the police are so fraught with distrust that most changing-room incidents go unreported. In any case, incidents that are recorded by the police are often inaccurate, with officers either failing or refusing to record trans-identified perpetrators as biologically male. One wonders if the number of assaults by ‘women with penises’ on women without them will ever become so great that they will warrant a separate category. Or perhaps we will all be expected to politely ignore this peculiar spike in ‘woman-on-woman’ sexual abuse?

Despite the all-too obvious risks of letting men into women’s changing rooms, women are still having to fight for their right to single-sex spaces. Sandie Peggie, who had been an NHS nurse for 30 years, found herself sharing facilities with a male, trans-identified doctor when she was trying to mitigate a heavy period. She was subsequently placed on suspension by NHS Fife after making a formal complaint. It is unbelievably grim to think that women are being punished for asking to menstruate in private – yet here we are. Peggie’s case is echoed by that of the Darlington Eight, a group of nurses who were similarly punished after raising concerns about a biological male using their changing rooms. One of the complainants had previously been a victim of sexual abuse. Yet the nurses were instructed to ‘re-educate themselves’ about gender.

It’s not bigoted to want to restore single-sex spaces – it is a demand for a minimum level of safety, privacy and dignity. A society that asks women to tolerate fear in order to spare the feelings of deluded and sometimes dangerous men is a sick society indeed.

Georgina Mumford is an editorial assistant at spiked.