Female engineer 'forced to use secret toilets' after encounter with trans colleague

Maria Kelly is suing her employer Leonardo UK over the firm’s policy of providing mixed-sex toilets for staff and allowing workers to choose which facility to use based on gender identity.

Ms Kelly, people and capability lead for Leonardo’s electronics department, is alleging harassment and direct and indirect discrimination.

On Wednesday she told an employment tribunal in Edinburgh that she had grown up in a household where the women were extra vigilant to the issue of sexual assault.

Ms Kelly said toilets are an important space for women as a “place of refuge. A place to deal with periods. In a pub or nightclub they’re a place to escape people”.

She told Employment Judge Sutherland that she did not want to “sacrifice my privacy and my dignity” by sharing those spaces with males.

Becoming emotional, she told the court she began to suffer particularly heavy periods during perimenopause and required space at work to deal with them.

After coming across a transgender colleague in the female toilets at the aerospace company, Ms Kelly began accessing toilets near a cleaning cupboard in order to have a private space away from male colleagues.

“In March 2023 I was walking out of the toilet and one of my trans-identifying male colleagues walked in and I was a little taken aback, I didn’t say anything, I just said ‘hi’ and walked out,” she told the court.

She explained she had been washing blood from her hands and was “genuinely quite taken aback” to see a male colleague there.

Concerns first came to light in 2019 when a transgender person from a Leonardo office in Luton came to work in Edinburgh for the day.

Ms Kelly said female colleagues had approached her to share their worries but they did not raise the issue with the company for fear of being labelled “transphobic”.

Then, in 2023, she became aware of three people, who the court did not name but referred to as persons A, B and C, who she suspected were transgender who she assumed had been told they could use the ladies’ toilets in her office building.

“It was running into person B as I was coming out of the toilet that made me think: ‘We are going to have to stop this. I am not going to sacrifice my privacy, my dignity sharing the toilet with a man,” Ms Kelly said in response to questioning by her lawyer, Naomi Cunningham.

She then wrote to her line manager to ask if the company had a written policy on the use of single-sex spaces.

In April last year she then received a message from someone within the company telling her the policy was that anyone who self-identified as a woman could use the ladies’ toilets.

Ms Kelly also said that in October 2024 the female sign was removed from the “secret toilets” and was replaced with a WC badge.

She began grievance proceedings about the toilet issues and was asked to discuss the matter in a room with three men.

Becoming emotional again, Ms Kelly said: “I couldn’t believe that I had to sit in a room and justify why dealing with menstruation is a specific issue that women need privacy and dignity about, and then have to explain the consequences of menopause and the unpredictable nature of perimenopausal symptoms.”

Earlier in the hearing, Ms Kelly was asked if there was anything specific to her personal history that would make her wary of sharing toilets with males.

She told the court of an experience when she was a third year engineering student and, after smiling at a male peer, he followed her into the toilets.

“The guy was quite large 6ft-something. He followed me in. I had no idea if he was lost,” she said.

“You don’t know are you at risk, is it an innocent mistake, do I ask him if he’s lost or do I tell him to get out and risk upsetting him and getting punched?

“Nothing happened but I think that was the first time I really appreciated being trapped in that sort of space.”

Through tears, she told the court that she learned as a young girl that her mother had been sexually abused and so “grew up in a family where the women were more alert than usual.”

The tribunal, taking place before employment Judge Sutherland, continues.