© Jonathan Drake / Reuters
Students at Somerville College last week voted down a motion to make college lavatories unisex, with some voicing concerns that it could result in more cases of female "harassment" by male peers.
Others suggested that both male and female students would feel "awkward" having to share a toilet with the opposite sex, and that some may have had "uncomfortable encounters" with the "other gender".
The decision came after the college's LGBTQ officer, Eilidh Wilson, proposed replacing 'male' and 'female' toilet signs with 'gender neutral toilet' and 'gender neutral toilet with urinals'.
Ms Wilson, a second year PPE student, added that Somerville should recognise "non-binary people" by introducing unisex toilets in the college bar, dining hall and the Vaughan building.
The proposal follows a number of policy changes at Oxford in recent months, which include the decision by St Catherine's to introduce gender neutral toilets.
Campaigns to de-gender toilets have also been successful at the Universities of Lancaster, Hull, Northampton and St Andrew's.
Oxford's Student Union has also taken steps to make the university more 'trans-friendly", with sabbatical officers last year urging students to use gender neutral pronouns such as a "ze" to prevent transgender students from feeling discriminated against.
However, students at Somerville have resisted the calls for change, with some challenging the proposal on the grounds that it was motivated out of "principle" rather than "practicality".
In minutes seen by The Daily Telegraph, one student at the meeting claimed that introducing gender neutral toilets would be "overlooking the practicalities, just for the point that we want to make non-binary people feel more accepted".
"There will be a lot of girls that feel uncomfortable with men being able to come into the toilet," they added.
Another student said that they feared that introducing gender neutral toilets would lead to more cases of women being harassed.
"Many women have had experiences of harassment and would feel uncomfortable with this, probably a higher percentage of people than those who want a gender neutral toilet," they continued. "[The] harassment issue would affect more people."
Their concerns come on the back of an alarming spike in "harassing and intimidating behaviour" towards female students at the college in 2015.
The spike in incidents prompted the college principal Alice Prochaska to issue warnings to students about reported groping at parties, sexual innuendo and jokes made about rape.
Several students said they were concerned about the vote being made public, amid fears that those who voted against it would be seen as "transphobic" and their peers would "judge them".
Calling for a secret ballot, one said: "I think it's very easy in a public ballot for genuine concerns to be misinterpreted as being transphobic. Issue might be with the implementation rather than the principle of the motion."
However, when challenged, Ms Wilson is reported to have told one student that their suggestion that gender neutral toilets would make men feel uncomfortable "edges on being heteronormative".
Comment: What a bastardization of language with suggestive moralizing. The norm is hetero.
Another student in favour of making toilets gender neutral claimed that holding a secret vote "might facilitate transphobic views being voiced".
However, their request for a public ballot was overruled and the motion was narrowly defeated by 31 votes to 29.
Somerville's decision to reject gender neutral toilets is believed to be the first instance where students have voted down calls for more "inclusive" policies.
It comes less than a month after Magdalen and Wadham announced they would appoint two 'trans officers', dedicated to representing the university's growing transgender community.
Founded in 1879 as one of Oxford's first women's only colleges, Somerville's alumni include Margaret Thatcher and Dorothy Hodgkin, the first British woman to win a Nobel prize in science.
Considered one of the university's most "right-on" colleges, Somerville claims on its website to have been founded to "include the excluded".
Its mission statement adds that it was created "for women when universities refused them entry, and for people of diverse beliefs when the establishment religion was widely demanded."
Comment: The truly silly thing is, if a trans person looks like the opposite sex, they will not have any problems using the toilet designated for that sex. Chances are, few will even notice - they may just think it's a masculine woman, or a feminine man. In other words, for the minuscule minority of trans people, if you look like a man, just use the men's toilet. Making bathrooms unisex just creates problems for even more people. The fact is, seeing a man (or a woman who is indistinguishable from a man) in the women's bathroom will make a lot of women uncomfortable - not to mention the potential for problems bigger than mere discomfort. And that seems to be a part of the "trans rights" activists agenda: subvert the norms of the societies in which they live, destroy those norms, and replace them with their own. If that's not a strategy to produce loads of resentment - and make their cause even more difficult - we don't know what is. But even that just reinforces the victim mentality, further fuelling the justification for their activism. And that's a recipe for disaster.