Women-only train carriages insult us all

Sooner or later, somewhere in the UK, we’ll have trains with women-only coaches. It’s an idea which keeps rolling around, and though the train people complain — it’s unworkable, unenforceable — it makes no odds. It’s too seductive an idea for a progressive politician. Jeremy Corbyn was tempted by it back in 2015, and now the Scottish transport secretary, one Jenny Gilruth, is considering it. She often feels unsafe on trains, she says, because they’re ‘full of drunk men’, especially the train to Fife, which is her constituency. ‘I just want our railways to be safe places for women to travel.’

I’ve nothing against ladies’ coaches in principle. In my mind’s eye they look appealing. I imagine them with muted marbling and scent diffusers, full of women with the sort of graded hair effect I’ve recently discovered is called balayage. What’s alarming isn’t the thought of carriages without men, per se, but the assumptions on which the whole argument rests.