Melody Time

UK government announces crackdown on gender-neutral toilets

The Conservative government has announced it is to implement a policy preventing gender-neutral toilets from being planned in new builds.

PinkNews | Latest lesbian, gay, bi and trans news | LGBTQ+ news

The UK government has today announced a new building requirement which will prevent gender-neutral toilets in new, non-residential buildings. A policy announced on Sunday (13 August) as part of the government’s Levelling Up scheme revealed requirements for all new builds to separate male and female toilets, which it argues is to “protect single-sex spaces”. “The change comes amid dignity and privacy concerns from women and elderly people who feel they are being unfairly disadvantaged as publicly accessible toilets are increasingly being converted into gender-neutral facilities,” the statement alleges. Pro-LGBTQ+ activists have previously signalled the importance of gender-neutral toilets, including conservative MP Caroline Nokes, who said in 2022 that the “inclusive” facilities are something she stands up for “enormously.“ Following the policy’s announcement, Nokes told PinkNews: “What matters most when it comes to toilets is design. I always point at Portcullis House in Parliament which has bathrooms on every floor, nobody refers to them as gender-neutral bathrooms – they are just bathrooms.

What started organically, therefore, morphed into a planned campaign to create a coalition of mostly Jewish activist academics, pro-Israel and national representative bodies in the Jewish Diaspora, and the aforementioned major American Jewish organizations to take the discussion in an increasingly political and ideological direction, linking anti-Zionism and antisemitism ever more closely. A key player in and growing influence on this campaign was the Israeli government, pursuing a new policy since the late 1980s, through its then-recently-established Monitoring Forum on Anti-Semitism. The policy aimed at establishing Israeli hegemony over the monitoring and combating of antisemitism by Jewish groups worldwide. This was coordinated and mostly implemented by Mossad representatives working out of Israeli embassies.

The policy served to bind Diaspora communities more closely to Israel, their self-appointed “defender against external threats”; to promote Zionist immigration by using highly problematic data on antisemitic manifestations to stress the fragility of Diaspora Jewish communities; and to portray Israel as equally in the firing line of antisemitic attack by increasingly linking criticism of Israeli policy with antisemitism.

I had close personal experience to the role the Mossad played in establishing Israeli hegemony over the monitoring and combating of antisemitism. While I was director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs (IJA) and its successor the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) in the 1990s, I founded and was principal editor of the annual Antisemitism World Report, the first objective, independent, country-by-country survey of antisemitism worldwide. The London Mossad representative dealing with antisemitism made it clear to me that they were unhappy about our independent operation and tried to pressure us into either ceasing publication or merging our report with one that the then-new Project for the Study of Antisemitism at Tel Aviv University, headed by Professor Dina Porat and part-financed by the Mossad, was beginning to produce. I vigorously resisted the pressure, as I recalled in my book, The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist: “I tried to persuade the Israelis to allow us to operate without interference, but was given short shrift by the Mossad representative at the Israeli embassy in London and by the Israel ambassador [Moshe Raviv] himself,” with whom I had met, together with the chairman of the IJA, to discuss the matter in 1994. Notwithstanding, we continued to produce our report and continued to come under pressure from the Mossad. A year or two later, I made a further effort to persuade them to end their attempts to undermine our work—which they were having some success in doing as certain Jewish antisemitism monitoring bodies in other countries succumbed to Mossad demands that they cease to provide us with information about developments in their countries. In 1994 the IJA had severed its connection with the World Jewish Congress and had entered into a relationship with the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which was very keen to be associated with our Antisemitism World Report. The head of the AJC’s Israel office at that time was Dr. Yossi Alpher, former head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, but more important, he had been a Mossad officer for twelve years, leaving the agency in the late 1970s. Alpher and I developed a good working relationship and he fully understood the value of the independent antisemitism work we were undertaking. He offered to use his good contacts with the Mossad to broker a meeting between me and the Mossad official responsible for overseeing the agency’s role in centralizing global Jewish monitoring and combating of antisemitism. This meeting took place in Tel Aviv, but to no avail. The exchange was polite, but he had absolutely no intention of relaxing pressure on us. We soldiered on, but the obstacles placed in our path proved too onerous to allow us to continue, and the publication of our Report in book form ceased in 1999.