With the issues of serving openly in the military and same-sex marriage now largely resolved, the fight for all-gender restrooms has emerged as the latest civil rights issue in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (L.G.B.T.) community — particularly the “T” part.
Schools and universities (...), museums (...), restaurants (...) and even the White House (...) are recasting the traditional men’s/women’s room, resulting in a dizzying range of (often creative) signage and vocabulary.
— the New York Times
58 Comments
This is great... Until something bad happens and we'll never hear the end of it.
so i was at this gay club with my gay friends once and i asked to find the bathroom (Chelsea NYC) and they pointed in two directions. Confused I said "no, seriously, is the men's left or right".....they laughed at me so I followed the next guy to the door he chose. but not like an obvious follow, didn't want anyone to get confused..... walked in and the urinals went straight through to the other bathroom, in short both bathrooms were connected by a wall of urinals, so i walked out the other bathroom door, u shaped in plan......back at the table i said "where the hell do the women go in this place?"......"women? oh you have no idea.".........."what if my wife was here, what about privacy?"......."no one is knocking on her stall door here."......point taken.............
Okay so no one is knocking on her stall door, but is she comfortable walking into a bathroom with a bunch of dudes at urinals?...... counterpoint given!
I propose, as a Civil right, a minimum of 8 code-required restrooms:
1) straight female, 2) lebanese, 3) str8 guys, 4) men who enjoy musicals, 5) transgender identifying male, 6) tranny ladys, 7) questioning, 8) wild card anything goes!
in the future all buildings will be consumed with resting rooms
/\ ha Frac....i think we call them Unisex bathrooms, been designing them in nYC for years.....usually if you can have one ADA unisex helps alleviate additional fixtures
why the fuck would women want to share a bathroom with a bunch of gross dudes...I once saw a turd in a urinal...
this shit is retarded.
i saw a thing on tv about how people in houston were all upset about how it might become legal for men to use a women's restroom. turns out it was all a bunch of people worked up for a proposed law that had nothing to do with restrooms. seems people from texas might not be very smart.
made me wonder though. i'm pretty sure it's already legal to use the other toilet. i go into women's rooms fairly frequently. what i do for a living tends to revolve a lot around buildings, and it so happens that women's restrooms are part of buildings. if you go into a women's restroom and see a sanitary napkin disposal hung on a partition, i may have been the person to spec it (not actually very likely), and i'm not even a woman.
i can see how frac would be offended by such a breech of etiquette, but then i could also see frac getting over himself and spending his time on productive endeavors rather than just whining and complaining about how some people don't want to be just like him.
i don't know what the future holds. apparently it's not the future i envision. at some point i might be confused, i might be upset, i might be uncomfortable with the choices other people make. so what do i do with that? call people retarded? make sarcastic remarks about civil rights? seems like a lot of effort. i figure it's probably best to just move on with my own life the best i can, and not bother the many people i just don't understand.
This is an incredibly dumb thing to waste time and energy on.
There are already laws against attacking people. God this country is terrified of sex.
jla-x, "retarded" as a pejorative is absolutely not cool.
I'm guessing when FRaC uses words like "negro" or "coloured" he's a hoot at parties. It's about respect, learn some, and perhaps you'll earn some.
A picture of a toilet with descriptive text.
<sigh>
What a fucking dumb-ass stupid society we live in.
there are 2 types of people. one group has weiners, the other has vaginas. I wouldn't care if a women took a pee in the mens room, but I certainly would not want my daughter using a bathroom filled with guys. I couldnt personally care less if someone is Transexual, gay...none on my business. Nothing wrong with it at all imo, and yes a transgendered person shpuld be allowed to be president, head of the pta, sing in the quire and breakdance in st friggin peters for all I care...but if any human with a wang decided to enter a bathroom that my daughter was using....not acceptable...cut it off and pee where ever you want...
ha jla-x.....so in the future there will be cute diagrams like the heimlich manuever diagrams showing guys how to handle their weiners when in a group unisex bathrooms. meetings will be held at Parent Teacher conferences on how the boys are handling their weiners in the bathrooms...
Are we running out of things to be passionate about?
There's a fine line between being progressive and ideological vanity, and I think we're speeding towards crossing that line at this point.
jla-x, there are more than two types of people. There are people with both vaginas and penises, there are people with neither, there are people with only one or the other, there are people in the process of reducing one and enhancing the other.
None of those various states of being changes the fact that assaulting people, physically and/or visually, is illegal. Assuming that every person with a penis is assualtive and every person without is not is illogical.
Just wait a bit. We address this issue on the podcast this week, and I think you'll enjoy the very calm discussion.
i think there seems to be a growing push for accessible unisex restrooms in the ada and code. this isn't for transgender people so much as a place to help those who are too old or too young that might need some assistance. multiple signs is obviously not the answer, but a single hole room where people can go in private without offending anyone seems to be a reasonable compromise.
jla, what if you're daughter was the transgender person that was uncomfortable in the women's restroom? if this was your daughter, you would rather see her struggle to point of suicide? that certainly doesn't sound like someone who cares much about their family does it?
if my daughter was the transgender person I would let them pee wherever they like...and I would go with them so no one would fuck with them...and if someone tried I would shoot them in the balls.
Donna, are you suggesting that women assault men at a rate comparable to that of men assaulting women and other men? That is just not realistic. Women and men may be equally capable of design, politics, math, etc...but when it comes to violence men win by a landslide.
when society takes its clues from south park
Cis-men. These laws, you petty, insecure dolts, are about the bad behavior of heterosexual pedophiles, not about trans-persons.
Pull what's left of your genitals out of your mouth, and think logically here.
Trans people are not doing the raping, it's hetero-men.
Separate rest rooms for all, with appropriate signage and security.
Since gays aren't a sexual threat to their opposite gender a single gay restroom takes care of them.
How many other categories can we define? Let's start with race as that's probably the easiest.
Maybe we could combine functions here to save space. Toilet stalls could be voting booths.
Once we establish the categories there can be an open design competition for signage.
b3, yes thats what I was saying...As usual you filtered it through the righteous shit you call brains...
i just googled cis-male. i had no idea such a lexicon has been built up. that's not a term intended to be insulting like 'dolt' is it?
i have no idea where this conversation went anymore.
curt, cis-male and cis-female are purely descriptive, not derogatory.
Podcast is up! Listen here.
To me the long end game is going towards more single-use restrooms that are not defined by sex at all. Instead of a "female" room with 10 semi-open stalls in it, have ten individual private toilet compartments (walls to the floor), possibly connected to a shared sink room, or possibly each as a totally self-contained toilet/sink unit. Susan describes it better int he podcast.
Added benefits of that arrangement are multiple: for one thing, no embarrassment for shy pee-ers!
i think leaseable square footage is what will drive the industry. my guess is an appropriately sized mens and womens room (6 stalls or whatever) with say 2 or 3 accessible unisex restrooms. i assume various sorts of transgender, handicap, kids that aren't ready to go in alone yet, etc., are still enough of a minority that the space and construction costs plus additional maintenance wouldn't be worth it.
if a non-cis (appropriate terminology there?) were to go into one of the larger men's/women's room, well i don't think anyone should be looking close enough to even notice.
this applies to office and maybe some retail establishments. i don't know for sure about assembly like a stadium or something.
curt that scenario would fit easily into existing ADA-type laws, I would think, because you're providing accessibility for everyone (transgender, kids who need parental help, shy people) but it doesn't apply one constructed standard across the entire facility.
Donna, I like your idea of single stalls. It is a safety issue to have random grown men in a room with young kids...especially girls...I never let my children use public restrooms alone, but many parents do. I am 100% on board with accepting gender equality, identity, etc....Just seems ridiculous to have to rearrange society to accomodate every single variation of sexual identity...then of course, the hypocracy of the mainstream not accepting things polygamy and polyandry...
just walked a job I did recently. occupancy "storage" we have one bathroom for all, its to code. they put lockers in it, let's see what the inspector says;) have seen "WC" as description of space, in other words literally Water Closet, by calling it such then the outer area can have shared sink in the "wash room"............in the midwest, south etc... you are a white guy, in nyc you are part irish, italian, english, german, dutch, swede.....etc....i find NYC to be less racist than midwest. in other having a zilliom labels for race or sex somehow points to universal quicker than broad PC categories like Caucasian (people from say Azibjian will point ou they are the real Caucasians, and don't forget Aryans are like Armenian area or something).......so make a whole bunch of labels for people and then say everyone can have access. problem solved.
i'm not sure what you're talking about with the safety issue jla. i suppose i'm fortunate to be living in an area where people are not routinely kidnapped or raped or whatever while peeing? that's entirely irrelevant to whether a transgender male uses the men's room or women's room though right? i don't think anyone is saying old men who identify as old men are going to be in the same toilet stall as a young girl who identifies as a young girl, right? is your concern of old men and young women in a wash room the same as an old man and young woman in a storage room, or a public bus, or movie theater?
curt, a transgender man in a womens room is fine. The problem I have is with unisex public bathrooms because they are unsafe. A bathroom is not the same as a bus because it is closed off and private...its common sense people...I also do not think that most women would be comfortable in a bathroom with strange men or vica versa...fact most sexual assaults are men assaulting women. I could personally care less if a women wants to pop a squat over a mens urinal...My grandmother on the other hand may be uncompfortable if a hairy dude pulls out his wang and takes a leak in a stall next to hers....Or is the comfort of the .01% minority the only concern??...
i don't know jla. i'm not seeing the sorts of concerns you're having happening in real life. that could just be because maybe i live in a particularly respectful and safe community. are there articles in the press about girls being assaulted in restrooms because of this kind of transgender policy where you live, or is it kept quiet so people in the middle like me won't hear about it?
if a woman popped a squat over a urinal, i think it would create a maintenance issue that i would be concerned about. then again, i have concerns over maintenance issues with toilet partitions that go to the ground too.
isn't the whole concern here that some people are not ok with a transgender man using the men's room? if you put up a sign that says 'men's room' and a transgender man was comfortable going in there without being harassed, kind of ends the problem doesn't it? if there is a 'transitional' period or something like that, let the individual decide for themselves which side they belong on.
aside from that, aren't the transgender facilities discussed here typically single fixture facilities, so the idea of a girl sharing a stall or whatever isn't really being discussed?
unfortunately it happens all too often...I hear horrible cases from my wife on a regualar of assaults...bathrooms seem to be a common place it happens...99% of this stuff does not get to the media...it happens though...actually, never have I once heard of a women being responsible...it is almost always men...
The transgender issue is not a concern....I am more concerned with the overall false idea that gender is neutral...it is not. women and kids should be taught to be vigilant of men. It is called being street smart. The idea that its safe for a random grown man to be around a girl in a closed off bath room with no surveliance is a poposterously naive idea...
i suppose as a grown man i should be required by law to wear a body camera with updates regularly uploaded into the cloud, so when i eventually end up abusing a girl in a bathroom, as men tend to do, there will be evidence. once we have the sort of police state in place which recognizes the sexually deviant nature of all men, transgender people will be able to feel comfortable using the restroom.
of course you could just put cameras in restrooms, but that's creepy. you would be conducting surveillance on women as well as men, which obviously isn't fair to women.
^ no, just keep things how they are...mens room and ladies room...
i believe that your fear of men is not rational and is not a legitimate criticism of the proposed solutions to allow restrooms that are open to a more diverse set of people.
we already have single-stall toilet facilities. we already have unisex facilities. target has 'family' facilities. what is proposed here isn't much of a change. to reconsider the use of washroom and the toilet stall is a design problem that is worth discussing.
Im not afraid of men. I have 30 years hardcore mma training and can carry my own in a fight...I am just stating a legitimate fact that it is unsafe to have bathrooms that are shared by men and women...a small minority of men are sick in the head...not most...but still a danger to put girls in that environment...would you let your daughter into a unisex bathroom with a dozen strange men unsupervised? would you let her in a womens room with a dozen women?
maybe I am just the paranoid parent, but I see that as a far greater danger than a 31" patio without a railing...
so much for hsw
got this scathing email from me wife the other day, my 4 year old daughter was asking her mother how it was possible for dad to pee standing up...close the door damnit!.......jla-x i stand outside the female bathroom knocking the door and checking vocally when my two daughters 4 and 7 go in, instead of taking them to the men's. the ladies are always helpful if needed to.
i don't have a daughter, so i can't decisively say how i would act if i did. however, i can say that i'm pretty sure most people are not advocating having women stand over a urinal window shopping while men pee. the design question is how to create water closets that can be accessible to more people.
my suggestion, like yours jla, was to leave men's and women's rooms more or less as they are, but move the HC stall out of the restrooms and into single person unisex rooms. that certainly doesn't stop bad men from doing bad things, but it does provide a facility that is open to a wide range of people including handicap people, those who need assistance due to age or mobility reasons, transgender people, shy people, etc. this is not a radical solution and is already in some places. target is an example.
as an alternative, i've seen places where there are a few private stalls with shared lavatories. i think this could be viable, but i didn't care for it much. probably because i'm old and the world is changing faster than i can keep up with it. if that's the case, i have to recognize it's a problem with me rather than everyone else.
i don't understand specifically what you're afraid of jla. i get that you think there is a bad man somewhere that could abuse your daughter, and somehow a unisex restroom would increase the chances of that assault happening. maybe you think a restroom that is more accommodating for transgender people would become a stalking ground for serial rapists or something. if olaf understands what you're afraid of, as a parent, maybe he can provide more insight as to whether it's rational. from my perspective, i just don't get it.
olaf, your daughter got an early lesson learning that life isn't fair. if women could write their name in snow, it would be a very different world. probably a better one.
I already said that single person rooms are fine...The HC being seperate is a good idea. Im talking about the overall idea of gender neutrality.
jla-x I'm definitely not disputing that the vast majority of sexual assaults are committed by men. That's indisputably true. The thing I'm disputing is a belief that someone who is transitioning from one gender to the other, or presents in some way that isn't traditional, is automatically more likely to commit a sexual assault, as well as the idea that a sign will prevent a terrible person from doing a terrible thing.
My personal belief is that we should get over our very puritan bodily shame - we can ALL laugh at a fart, yes? - but that's a bigger discussion.
When my son was 6-ish I stopped taking him into the women's room with me, and like Olaf I would stand outside them men's room worried until he came out. But I'm confident that the vast majority of men going into a men's room are most likely dads who would step in if something weird was happening.
haha cutrkram....the game of swords not possible either
I agree Donna...
j-laxative, once again, your fecal vocalizing seems to result in shit getting on everything but the bowl, you got a diarrhea of the mouth?
You were the one that stated soooooo eloquently the following;
but if any human with a wang decided to enter a bathroom that my daughter was using....not acceptable...cut it off and pee where ever you want...
You do realize, you mealy mouthed pissant, that many men transitioning are going through a TRANSITION, and may not have fully transitioned? You essentially advocate a strapping down of people you think are men, and making them prove they don't have a, to use your words, "wang", or the outright hate crime of killing these people.
Your fecal logic never ceases to amaze.
^ By your own logic you are saying that anyone who thinks they are a female can use the womans room...so are you advicating a rigourous psychological test to determine is one really belives they are a female, or are you saying anyone with eyeliner gets in?
wouldn't that basically mean that all bathrooms are unisex since it would be impossible to determine what one believes? My logic is actually common practice in the prison system...if you have a weewee you go to mens prison, if you had the surgery you go to womens prison...
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