Who is The Baths for?

The Baths is for women and femmes. If you want the fuller picture of what that means and why, keep reading.

Why a women's space at all?

There's something specific that happens when women get the chance to come together, free from performance and the male gaze. Some of you will feel that the second you walk in, a kind of exhale. For others it won't be a big deal either way, and that's fine too.

For a lot of the women we talked to building this, it came down to a few things: 

• feeling safe enough to actually ask the question, 

• not performing for anyone, 

• wanting the male gaze to just not be a variable for one day, or 

• simply wanting to be around other women having this conversation instead of alone at 1am with a search bar. 

That's the room we're building.

Our approach to trans and non-binary inclusion

We know that gender is experienced in many different ways and we want to honour that. The Baths welcomes anyone who identifies as a woman: cis, trans, or somewhere in between.

We'll usually use "women" and "she/her" language in our comms, because that's the identity of the space. If you'd rather we use different language with you directly, tell us and we'll use it. We're learning as we go here, and we're genuinely open to that conversation.

On the day, there'll be pronoun stickers at check-in. Grab one if you want, skip it if you don't. No one's required to declare anything, it's just there for anyone who wants to make it easy.

We also know a gender-specific space isn't going to feel like home to everyone. Some non-binary and trans folks won't feel comfortable here, and honestly, neither will some cis women. That's okay. We just want the people who do feel at home here, however they got there, to feel completely welcome.

If The Baths sounds like your kind of room, it probably is.

Language we use, and what we mean:

Transgender: someone whose sense of self doesn't match the sex they were assigned at birth. A transgender woman was assigned male at birth and identifies as a woman.

Non-binary: someone who doesn't identify fully as either male or female. A non-binary woman may have been assigned male or female at birth and identifies, to some degree, as a woman, sometimes fluidly.

Cisgender: someone whose sense of self matches the sex they were assigned at birth. Useful shorthand, mostly because it reminds everyone that "cis" is just one identity among several, not the default setting.