THIS CHANGEROOM IS FOR MEN (and women who consent to undressing with them) — Part One
- Gender Dissent
- 6 hours ago
- 19 min read
Ottawa Resident’s Exchange with City Staff Highlights Disturbing Truth: Men Before Women and Children
This is Part One of a collection of correspondence between a women's rights advocate and City of Ottawa employees following a public consultation for Ottawa's "Women and Gender Equity Strategy". Gender Dissent had intended to publish the letters earlier in the summer, but an incident in an Ottawa city pool changeroom—so germane and so timely—prompted us to wait and see how it would all play out first.
Part Two to come. Here's Part One to set it all up:
Monday, July 21, 2025
Dear City of Ottawa Staff,
Thank you for hosting the public consultation on July 16th at Ben Franklin Place on the City of Ottawa's Women and Gender Equity Strategy. I appreciated listening to the speakers and hearing how the WGES fits into other challenges and opportunities that the city is facing at this time. I counted approximately forty people present, the majority who were women.
I particularly appreciated the numerous references made to the City of Ottawa's willingness to listen to the voices of women in establishing the Women and Gender Equity Strategy. In the small group discussion that I was part of on July 16th, one of the first questions posed was whether a similar consultation had taken place at the outset of the strategy in 2021. The answer was that Covid restrictions had prevented such consultations from taking place. I was heartened to hear that there is another consultation being planned for December, and another for the spring. I am therefore providing a list of questions and considerations that were generated during the July session.
Intersectionality
Many of the speakers on July 16th spoke of the importance of looking at women's issues through the "intersectional lens," that is, the idea that women's experiences are formed by factors such as age, disability, race, religion and other elements, in addition to being women. This seems like a fairly common sense observation. However, there are two pitfalls to subjecting women's issues to the demands of intersectionality:
One of them is that the professional world of "Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging" is limited to a particularly well-paid, well-insulated group of people who tend to talk to each other a lot, at the expense of getting out and meeting regular residents of Ottawa. Attempting to put all equity issues into an "EDIB framework" risks even more insularity and isolation from the rest of Ottawa's population.
The second risk to intersectionality is that women's issues become colonized by other ambitious agendas, such as the agenda to embed Gender Ideology into the municipal civil service. In my small group discussion, there was much interest to know how the members of the Community Advisory Group for WGES had been selected. Are these voices there merely to reinforce a mandate already determined by activists? Can the public be advised of who these influential people are, and how we contact them to relay our concerns?
Land Acknowledgement
At the outset of the July 16th consultation, participants were given a prime example of the way that "EDIB" issues have an unfortunate habit of colonizing one another. We were not able to focus on the Land Acknowledgement without hearing that "Gender Diverse Persons" are key to "dismantling oppression" in the context of the Land Acknowledgement.
Since 2015, when Land Acknowledgements became standard practice following the publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there has been increasing encroachment into this sphere by other human rights claimants. The most common group that gets wedged into the Land Acknowledgement are people with claims of gender identities.
If we want the residents of Ottawa to take their obligations around Reconciliation seriously, I would advise against squeezing other rights claimants into the Land Acknowledgement.
2SLGBTQ+ identified people added to Women and Gender Equity Strategy
In her opening remarks, Councillor Ariel Troster indicated that in 2022, the group identified as "2SLGBTQ+" was added to the Women and Gender Equity Strategy. Here again we see the mysteries of "Intersectionality" at work. Prior to 2022, had it been the intention of WGES to exclude lesbian and bisexual women from its mandate? If not, why was it deemed necessary to add these two groups in 2022? Surely they were women both before and after 2022. Or was it the intention to add TQ+ identified males to the WGES mandate after 2022?
The WGES has made available online two documents outlining the engagement strategies undertaken in 2021 to inform WGES work:
The WGES Public Engagement Finding Report is 25 pages long.
The 2SLGBTQ+ Service Needs, Gaps, and Recommendations Report is 40 pages long, and was written by a childless twenty-five-year-old male named Fae Johnstone.
2021 was the same year that Mr. Johnstone took to Twitter to call upon Women and Gender Equality Canada to vilify (his word) women who object to men in their spaces. Please see the attached document:
And it remains wholly unclear why gay men, represented by the "G" in the acronym, occupy space in the Women and Gender Equity Strategy. Surely [the city of Ottawa] is aware that gay men are men who are attracted to other men? Why are they a focus of concern for the WGES?
Surely [the city of Ottawa] is aware that gay men are men who are attracted to other men? Why are they a focus of concern for the Women and Gender Equity Strategy?
Violence Against Women and Single-Sex Spaces
Not long ago, policy-makers were talking about the need to oppose Violence Against Women. This effort has now been rebranded as "Gender-Based Violence" which intentionally obscures the fact that nearly 100% of the violence committed against women is done by men. I was glad to hear at the consultations that the city is committed to reducing violence against women. Restoring its proper name would be a good start. A second step could be to guarantee that spaces labelled "Female" or "Women" in fact exclude men.
Bathrooms, change rooms, homeless shelters and other city-run facilities that welcome men with gender identities into women's spaces, are not in fact single-sex spaces but mixed-sex spaces.
Many women are not willing to change clothes, use the toilet, or sleep in the company of unfamiliar males. During my small-group discussion, I heard that mixed-sex spaces are even more challenging for women and girls from non-Western cultures. If the City of Ottawa is eliminating women-only spaces to accommodate men with gender claims, it is important to inform women so that they can choose to withdraw from civic participation if they are not prepared to share these spaces with men. I would also like to know specifically whether city support for Interval House and Cornerstone Housing for Women is contingent on these shelters welcoming men in.
If the City of Ottawa is eliminating women-only spaces to accommodate men with gender claims, it is important to inform women so that they can choose to withdraw from civic participation if they are not prepared to share these spaces with men.
Mixed-Sex Bathroom at City Hall
The new mixed-sex bathroom at City Hall is being held up as an avant-garde experiment in eroding the privacy afforded by single-sex spaces. It also provides prime opportunity for sexual assault.
The semi-private, mixed-sex space in front of the sinks provides perfect opportunity for a predator to pick a victim. The floor-to-ceiling walls of the cubicles provide perfect audio and visual privacy to carry out a sexual assault once a victim has been identified and shoved into the cubicle.
One way to mitigate the damage done by this unpopular and expensive experiment is to post signs outside the door indicating that there are still single-sex options available on the upper floors of the building, the ones presumably used by staff and councillors.
Work with School Boards to Reduce Youth Homelessness
Councillor Troster referred to 30-50% of youth in city shelters as identifying as LGBTQ+.
The city has an opportunity here to work more closely with school boards to scrutinize what sort of organizations the boards are using to advise TQ+ identified youth on their housing options. The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, for example, works with "resource groups" that encourage school age children to find "chosen families" online if their own family is reluctant to accept their new gender identity.
It is not clear what qualifications the adult volunteers in these TQ+ forums have to counsel distressed youth. Some well-meaning adults may be advising children to undertake unrealistic solutions, like leaving home. This could be part of what is swelling the numbers of this group of youth in shelters. It is also not hard to see how human traffickers might take advantage of this pipeline to redirect adolescents into sex work.
The prevailing assumption that TQ+ identified children are "unsafe" with their gender-skeptical parents needs to be challenged if we are to reduce the number of youth in city shelters.
Data Collection
Many of the speakers at the July 16th consultation talked about the importance of data collection. In the midst of discussing the importance of gathering accurate data, Councillor Troster referred to "initiatives to train staff on the importance of pronouns". Allowing city clients and staff to choose their sex for the purpose of data collection is not a good starting point. One speaker on July 16th spoke of the risks to women on city staff who have to work alone at night.
If we are going to mitigate a risk such as this, we clearly need to know which staff are male and which female. If we are hoping to promote the interests of women by giving them opportunities and voice in different areas of city functioning, it is important to not allow men to identify into these opportunities and hijack pathways meant for women.
Likewise, if preventing violence against women is a priority, it is important to not allow males to record their sex as female when charged with a crime. This leads to great muddying of crime statistics, as it can appear as though women are increasingly committing sex crimes, when what is actually happening is that men are being given the opportunity of identifying as women in crime statistics, sometimes in the hope of being housed in female prisons. And then the supposed rise of woman-on-women crime is used as a justification to further erode women-only spaces.
Freedom of Speech
If the WGES is aiming to hear voices of a wide swath of the female population in Ottawa, it is paramount to honour the principle of freedom of speech.
Over the last five years, gender activists have worked relentlessly to attach fear, stigma and shame to any woman who fails to centre TQ+ men in women's issues. We heard some of this rhetoric on July 16th, "We are building a city where hate is not tolerated". This doctrine of neo-patriarchy, which stipulates that women have no right to any spaces of their own, and not even their own language, has resulted in a rolling back of women's rights and a recentering of men in women's issues. Young women in our schools are being taught that their role is to support emotionally-distressed men who need access to women's spaces to affirm themselves.
We need to have a much more fulsome debate on how far women should be pushed out of our own spaces to make room for men.
I look forward to a response confirming that the above issues will make it onto the agenda for the December WGES meeting.
For further information on women's issues, I recommend the excellent resources at Canadian Women's Sex Based Rights.
I thank you for the opportunity to participate in the July 16th consultation and I very much look forward to further engagement on this important issue.
Concerned Resident of Ottawa
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
Good morning Madam,
Thank you for your thoughtful and detailed submission following the July 16 consultation session. We appreciate your engagement and the time you’ve taken to outline a broad range of considerations.
Intersectionality and representation
Intersectionality is a critical framework for ensuring that gender equity work reflects the diverse realities of all women and gender-diverse people. We are committed to ensuring that our work remains grounded in community voices and open to constructive dialogue. You are always welcome to email your concerns directly to equity_equite@ottawa.ca.
Regarding the Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Community Working Group, members were selected through a process designed to reflect a broad range of lived experiences, community perspectives and areas of expertise. A Memo detailing the selection process and final membership was presented to City Council on June 3, 2025 and has been available online since.
Land acknowledgement
We understand the importance of maintaining the integrity of land acknowledgements and ensuring they are not diluted or conflated with equity-related efforts. We recognize that many communities experience overlapping forms of marginalization and that solidarity across movements can be powerful when approached with care and respect, for example, the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
The Women and Gender Equity Strategy (WGES)
Engagement with a wide representation from community groups, residents and partners played a major role in shaping the priorities of the strategy, as detailed in the strategy document (pages 19-20). Issues affecting the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community were not added on later, but rather were part of the strategy scope from its inception.
Violence against women and facility access
The City of Ottawa recognizes and prioritizes the urgent need to address violence against women, e.g. through the Community Safety and Well-Being Plan. Gender-based violence as a broader term reflects an effort to be inclusive of all those who experience violence rooted in gender norms and power imbalances.
The City of Ottawa’s approach to gender-inclusive washrooms is guided by both the Ontario Building Code and the City’s commitment to equity, inclusion and accessibility. We also recognize that some residents may prefer single-sex washrooms. These remain available in City Hall and we will share your suggestion to improve signage with the appropriate facilities team for consideration.
Data collection
The WGES is grounded in the principle that accurate, inclusive and disaggregated data is essential for effective policy-making. As part of this, the City is working to improve how it collects and uses data to reflect the lived realities of women and gender-diverse people, while also maintaining the integrity of sex-based analysis where appropriate.
On the matter of crime statistics, the Ottawa Police Service and Statistics Canada continue to report most criminal data by sex assigned at birth, while also working to improve the collection of gender identity data where appropriate. This is part of a broader national effort to better understand how different populations experience the criminal justice system, including the overrepresentation of women — particularly Indigenous and racialized women — as victims of violence.
Freedom of speech
The WGES is grounded in the belief that diverse voices must be heard — including those of women who hold a range of perspectives on gender, safety and inclusion. We are committed to creating spaces where respectful dialogue can take place, even when views differ. The phrase “building a city where hate is not tolerated” reflects a commitment to ensuring that all residents — including women, 2SLGBTQQIA+ people, racialized communities and others — can participate in civic life free from harassment or discrimination.
We understand that these conversations are complex and deeply personal. The WGES process is ongoing, and we are committed to listening with care, reflecting with integrity and responding with transparency. Your feedback is part of that process, and I thank you for taking the time to share it.
Sonia Luberti
she/her/elle
(A)Director, Gender and Race Equity, Inclusion, Indigenous Relations
Community and Social Services Department
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
Dear Ms. Luberti,
Thank you for taking the time to answer my email of yesterday point-by-point. I am particularly encouraged by the commitment of the WGES to permit the voices of women who hold a range of perspectives on gender, safety and inclusion. I will point out however, that statements like "hate will not be tolerated" sound like a warning that not all voices are welcome. All a person has to do to shut others out, is to claim that their views are "hate".
This type of lazy rhetoric is feeding an increasing polarization in the political sphere. In order to create spaces where respectful dialogue can take place, it is important to not threaten participants at the outset of the meeting that some views will be interpreted as "hate".
For the purposes of the Women and Gender Equity Strategy, it would be useful to cease using the unwieldy term 2SLGBTQQIA+. As I already pointed out, women who are same-sex attracted are already covered under the umbrella term "women". It is unclear why gay men are part of the WGES mandate. Other groups like "queer-identified" or "asexual" are clearly so open-ended, and so open for males to join, that it is not clear why they should be deliberately welcomed into a strategy on Women and Gender Equity.
I'm glad that you will consider posting signage at City Hall to direct users upstairs if they prefer single-sex bathrooms. I was dismayed on July 16th at Councillor Trosters' evident delight at witnessing the discomfort of many users of the mixed-sex bathroom. The idea of elderly, disabled or newcomers to Ottawa being mocked for their discomfort in a mixed-sex bathroom is not my idea of "inclusion". Can you provide the link to the part of the Ontario building code that requires the establishment of mixed-sex bathrooms?
I'm glad to hear that the city is committed to maintaining the integrity of sex-based analysis where appropriate. I'd say that one place where sex-based data is appropriate is when allocating spaces in shelters. Many women do not want to share sleeping facilities with men, no matter how those men identify. Demographics around gender identity would properly be collected in the same section where one gathers data on religion, philosophy or political affiliation. Gender Identity is a private belief system that does not confer extra human rights on the beholder, just as we do not afford extra human rights to people based on their religious beliefs.
Gender Identity is a private belief system that does not confer extra human rights on the beholder, just as we do not afford extra human rights to people based on their religious beliefs.
I'm glad to hear that the Ottawa Police Service and Statistics Canada continue to report most criminal data by sex. It would be important to identify where the exceptions are, where they do not report criminal data by sex. Can you shed any light on the exceptions?
A big part of allowing women to participate in civic life, free from harassment or discrimination, is to provide single-sex bathrooms, change rooms and emergency housing.
Many women will not use the toilet, change clothes or sleep in the company of unfamiliar males. Many women share a deep-seated wariness of putting themselves into vulnerable situations around men with whom they are not intimate. This is an instinct that I do not think we should be drumming out of young women, with threats of social exclusion if they refuse to accommodate men in their spaces.
Amy E. Souza is a women's rights advocate, educator, and facilitator with a Master of Arts in Depth Psychology. Her work delves into embodiment, phenomenology, and the intersections of gender, race, and identity.
I'm looking forward to a great deal more discussion on this. I appreciate the links you provided.
My initial list of questions of July 21st will be available in both English and French in August at the site of Gender Dissent. I am attempting to spark a wider discussion, as I am not confident that the city is hearing from the voices of women outside of the laptop classes.
Concerned Ottawa Resident
On July 30, 2025, Concerned Ottawa Resident was invited to to a face-to-face meeting with Sonia Luberti and another City of Ottawa employee to discuss the points raised in their correspondence.
Thursday, July 31, 2025
Dear Sonia and Meagan,
Thank you for taking the time yesterday to meet with me and to hear some of the concerns I have about women being asked to share city facilities with men based on gender claims. I am planning to write a longer email summarizing the substance of our conversation, but for the moment, here are some of the resources I referred to in the meeting:
"caWsbar" stands for [the organization] Canadian Women's Sex-Based Rights. It came into being in 2019 to try to maintain women's single-sex spaces, in the face of increasing demand by men that they be admitted based on their gender identities. caWsbar is nationwide and non-partisan. We study and discuss the challenges of maintaining boundaries for women in the context of Bill C-16, which calls on women to erode our standards of privacy, dignity and safety and to centre the demands of men, under the neo-religion known as Gender Ideology.
caWsbar members in the National Capital Region would be thrilled to set up a meeting with WGES if you are still open to hearing the voices of women.
Two articles posted in 2023 at Gender Dissent chronicle the march of Gender Ideology through the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board:
For the last two years, I have been attempting to reach someone at the school board who has read the Gender Identity and Gender Expression guidelines that were posted in 2021. So far, no luck. It's unclear whether this is due to no one having read them, or due to a moratorium on staff and trustees responding to questions about male access to female spaces within the OCDSB. Could be either.
Here is the full Scottish Supreme Court decision from April 16 2025, which ruled that the 2010 Equality Act was never supposed to allow men access to women's spaces based on the notion of gender identity.
And if you don't have time to read the whole thing, here is Helen Joyce, of the human rights charity Sex Matters, explaining the relevance of the decision:
Helen Joyce speaks to the Daily Telegraph about the Supreme Court ruling https://youtu.be/Emlk4BDAkrM?si=M811IglNUUC7t6uL
I am genuinely heartened to hear that the WGES is willing to listen to women in the context of the Women and Gender Equity Strategy. I hope that this is the beginning of a conversation where we allow a variety of perspectives, even from women who would like men to stay out of our spaces.
We believe that there should be no compromise on ALL men being safe, welcome and comfortable in men's spaces, and we can enlist men in making sure this happens. No man should feel uncomfortable in men's spaces due to his hairdo or his outfit, and we take men's safety as seriously as we take our commitment to keeping all men out of women's single-sex spaces.
More to come...
Concerned Ottawa Resident
Thursday, July 31, 2025
Dear Madam,
Thank you again for meeting with Meagan and I yesterday and for sharing your perspective. We appreciate your time and commitment to raising your concerns with us.
We also want to respectfully reiterate that our policies are firmly rooted in human rights legislation, shaped by the voices of the community, informed by lived experience, and guided by Council direction and evidence-based data. These pillars ensure our work is equitable, inclusive, and reflective of a collective vision that supports all individuals across our city.
As discussed, we will be reaching out to colleagues in Recreation, Cultural and Facility Services to gather data regarding washroom facilities and the policies in place to support all genders. I will also follow up with Kale Brown, Director of Housing Services, to inquire into practices concerning the inclusion of transgender women in women’s shelters.
Our commitment to listening and thoughtful engagement with community continues to guide our efforts.
We will be in touch with updates.
Sonia
Thursday, July 31, 2025
Dear Sonia and Meagan,
Thank you for your response to the links that I sent earlier this morning. I wish to summarize in email form, the challenge I raised in yesterday's meeting, so that we have a record.
Men who claim that it is their human right to come into women's spaces pose a problem for women. Many women will not share toilets, change rooms or dormitories with men. These women may not be the type that the DEI world hears from often. They may be elderly, disabled, non-English speakers or victims of sexual trauma. Many will self-exclude from public life if the city persists in welcoming men into women's spaces. I believe these women's human rights should come into consideration when the city is considering how much of women's space to forfeit to men.
There is no practical or theoretical method to separate men with sincere gender claims from men with opportunistic gender claims. If one man is allowed into a women's space, it ceases to be single-sex and becomes mixed-sex. It doesn't matter what the man's motivation is for being in the space — his presence makes it a mixed-sex space.
There is no practical or theoretical method to separate men with sincere gender claims from men with opportunistic gender claims. If one man is allowed into a women's space, it ceases to be single-sex and becomes mixed-sex. It doesn't matter what the man's motivation is for being in the space — his presence makes it a mixed-sex space.
I detected a distinction yesterday in the weighing up of human rights claims between women, and those of men who want access to our spaces. When I spoke of the importance that I place on women having single-sex spaces in order to participate in civic life, I was told that I would need data to back up what I was claiming.
My interpretation of this response is that the city is unwilling to honour women's single-sex spaces unless we can point to a minimum number of sexual assault convictions having taken place as a result of males availing themselves of female spaces. Under this logic, there is no case to be made for single-sex spaces until we rack up an impressive roster of sexual assault incidents.
On the other hand, in building the case for male access to female spaces, we are asked to drop the requirement for data, and to honour lived experience. Gender Ideology is after all at its core, a movement based on feelings, that a man can simply feel that he would be more comfortable in a women's change room and that that should suffice as an argument for requiring women to make room for him and to honour and revere his brave decision to use the women's change room.
If we really valued equity between men and women, we might consider flipping these requirements around. What if women's lived experience of not wanting to share change rooms with men were sufficient for us to say a firm "no" to men who aspire to spend time in our spaces? What if women's feelings of wanting to maintain our boundaries of privacy, dignity and safety were awarded the much-coveted status of lived experience?
What if women's lived experience of not wanting to share change rooms with men were sufficient for us to say a firm "no" to men who aspire to spend time in our spaces? What if women's feelings of wanting to maintain our boundaries of privacy, dignity and safety were awarded the much-coveted status of lived experience?
And what if we were to look at the assertion that some men are unsafe in the men's room due to their gender identity, and ask for some data? Can anyone point to a single incident in Canada of a man being harassed in the men's room due to his gender identity? It's time we applied some rigour to that side of the argument.
There is a double standard at work here in terms of demands of evidence. It is reminiscent of older law codes, where the testimony of a woman was worth half that of a man. Only this is worse because we are told that the testimony of a woman may not even weigh up against the feelings of a man.
There is a double standard at work here in terms of demands of evidence. It is reminiscent of older law codes, where the testimony of a woman was worth half that of a man.
You inquired about the documentation of sex offenses committed by men who claim gender identities. There is an online feminist journal dedicated to this very topic, called Reduxx:
Please allow me to reiterate: Our goal is not to keep male sex offenders out of women's spaces. Our goal is to keep men out of women's spaces, men of all identities and all feelings. To ask women to relive gruesome, painful, personal stories of why they want men out of our change rooms, is to misplace where we should be demanding "data".
I do appreciate your offer to inquire of city departments how men are currently being accommodated in women's shelters and change rooms throughout the city. This is a question of some urgency for the women whose safety, privacy and dignity is being compromised. I hope that a city that values women will prioritize getting answers to these questions in a timely way so that we can move on to next steps.
There are many more resources available and I look forward to sharing them with anyone who wishes to put women's rights into the hotly contested field of rights claimants.
Concerned Ottawa Resident
Thursday, July 31, 2025
Dear Madam,
Thank you for taking the time to outline your perspective so thoroughly. I recognize that these issues involve deeply held values, and I appreciate your commitment to advocating.
Also, for the record, I do want to respectfully clarify one point from our discussion. I did not imply or suggest that the case for maintaining single-sex spaces hinges on the occurrence or documentation of sexual assault incidents. That interpretation does not reflect my view, nor does it align with how we approach concerns around privacy, dignity, and inclusion.
We remain committed to engaging thoughtfully with all community perspectives and will continue reviewing input through both qualitative and quantitative lenses. These conversations are complex, and our goal is to find equitable and respectful pathways forward for everyone impacted.
Thank you again for raising your issues and I’m good with the information that you have shared thus far.
Again, I will be in touch with the requested information.
Sonia
And then, quite remarkably, at the same time that Concerned Resident and Sonia were exchanging emails, something disturbingly illustrative of the issues with mixed-sex changerooms occurred at a central Ottawa City pool.
END OF PART ONE
Watch for Part Two of this article where we will publish, for the record, the continuing correspondence between Concerned Resident of Ottawa and more staff at City Hall.