Germaine Greer calls for gender neutral bathrooms

Feminist academic Germaine Greer has called for all public bathrooms to be made gender neutral.

Appearing alongside Caitlyn Jenner and others on a British television panel to debate trans issues, Greer said segregating bathrooms into male and female was outdated, The Guardian has reported.

“Just dump the whole thing,” Greer said.

“You can actually sort out toilets in a more sensible way so that people have access to the bits they need and they don’t have to be bothered by the bits they don’t need.

“In our houses where we live our toilets are not gendered. I think that should just be now universal.”

Channel 4 screened the Genderquake debate as part of a week-long series of shows about gender and trans rights.

Bathroom access has been a central debate around trans rights, with many conservatives saying trans women should not be allowed in women’s bathrooms, and bills in the US aiming to ban trans people from bathrooms.

Greer’s seemingly inclusive opinion on bathroom access could be a departure from her previous inflammatory comments about trans people.

At a Cambridge University event in 2015 she made overtly transphobic remarks about Jenner.

“Just because you lop off your dick and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a fucking woman,” she said.

In 2016 she appeared on Q&A, calling trans women “transgender men” and repeatedly saying they are not truly women.

The Channel 4 debate was praised for its diverse lineup but slammed for allowing audience heckling of trans panellists.

“There was very poor vetting, there should have been ground rules laid out for the audience about what was acceptable,” said journalist Ash Sarkar, who was on the panel.

“Channel 4 worked incredibly hard to have diversity on the panel and that’s phenomenal and to be celebrated.

“There was a lack of preparation for just how hostile [radical feminists] are.”