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TORONTO, October 6, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – The University of Toronto’s elite University College has been forced to recognize the existence of two genders and re-establish separate washrooms for male and female students sharing its co-ed residences.

The move was provoked by two separate incidents in mid-September of male students holding their cell phones above the shower stall dividers in so-called gender-neutral communal washrooms at Whitney Hall, a co-ed residence at the University College, to record female students showering.

“Given the serious nature the incidents of voyeurism that occurred in September, and the impact on directly affected students we made the decision to designate some washrooms in Whitney Hall for those who identify as men and some for those who identify as women,” U of T spokeperson Althea Blackburn-Evans told LifeSiteNews.

Blackburn-Evans explained that “the purpose of this temporary measure is to provide a safe space for the women who have been directly impacted by the incidents of voyeurism and other students who may feel more comfortable in a single-gender washroom in the wake of these events. “ Half the washrooms at Whitney Hall remain “gender neutral.”

For more than 20 years students attending University College have known they would have to use gender-neutral washrooms—albeit with individual and not communal shower stalls—with the exception of a single, all-female floor in Morrison Hall.

“Students are aware of the gender-neutral washroom facilities when they choose to apply to the college,” Blackburn-Evans told LSN, “and they have the option of attending one of the other six colleges on the St. George Campus if they would prefer a single-gender washroom environment.”

While campus police are on the trail of the peepers, and the administration is pondering the wisdom of letting “those who identify as men” continue to share shower facilities separated by height-challenged walls from “those who identify as women,” over the long term, observers outside the ivied walls of University College are questioning whether the practice should ever have been permitted.

“You have to wonder who is  the nutjob who thought this was a good idea,” said Walter Heyer, a onetime male-to-female transgender person who now operates a web site, sexchangeregret.com, to advocate against sex changes and help those with gender dysphoria. “To give any boy a chance to be in the shower room with a girl is asking for trouble,” he added.

Heyer speculates that the idea of gender-neutrality is a spinoff of transgenderism, the movement which he once participated in that believes those born with male bodies can really be women and vice versa and, moreover, can be given the appropriate body with medical assistance. In reality, “such people have gender dysphoria which just means they are depressed about their gender. They should be helped out of their depression,” he told LifeSiteNews, not out of their bodies.

Setting up gender-neutral washrooms to make so-called transgender people feel more comfortable, “creates a situation ripe for abuse by predators who say they identify as women so they get aroused by getting close to women and be predators,” said Heyer.

Gwen Landolt, the national vice president of REAL Women of Canada, was equally skeptical of U of T’s degendered washrooms. “Who would have thought that allowing men and women to share shower rooms would lead to this?” she asked rhetorically. “Only anyone with an ounce of sense. This is political correctness so extreme it surpasses all sense of reality.”

Landolt said behind letting the sexes share washrooms is the trendy theory of “gender fluidity” – that “women and men can change their gender from one moment to the next. It is totally ideological and not based on fact or science.”

Landolt too sees the neutralization of washrooms as an effort to accommodate a “tiny minority of troubled souls” – transgender people – without  regard for the needs of most of the population.”