On a day to day basis, it’s sort of a fact of life that there are Men’s bathrooms and Women’s bathrooms. This doesn’t bother the majority of people, because most people are OK with seeing themselves as a gender, and having the biological sex that corresponds to that gender, and then walking into a bathroom that corresponds to both of those at the same time. Unfortunately, there are millions of people in the world for which this is not the case. Sometimes your genitals don’t match the gender that you see yourself as. There is no place more terrifying than a bathroom for this reason.
It boggles my mind sometimes if I think about how the world could be in regards to bathrooms. At my university, the queer center had gender neutral bathrooms next door. There were two stalls, and any person of any gender could use those stalls. Here in Berlin I recently came upon two great examples of gender neutral bathrooms, where the Male and Female symbols were replaced by figures of no particular gender who were standing up and sitting down. 
One of them was at The Schwules Museum, and the other at K-Fetisch. This is perfect, because then you just go to the place the corresponds to how you want to go to the bathroom.
Another easy solution is having “Family” bathrooms. You know, the kind that have an area for diaper changing, and one toilet. Or if you go to a small coffee shop for example, there will probably just be one bathroom labeled “Bathroom” or “WC” or whatever you want to call it. Then you don’t even have to think about gender.
WAIT. DID YOU HEAR WHAT I SAID?
“Then you don’t even have to think about gender.”
Ultimately, in my dream world, there would be no more gender. You would wake up in the morning, and be [insert name here], and you could go along your day, use whatever bathroom you wanted, go to your job, fall in love, fall out of love, eat some cereal, watch Adventure Time, and gender would have nothing to do with it.
If there were un-gendered bathrooms, there would be way less wait for the toilet at intermissions, breaks in class, etc. If I need to fill up my water bottle and there’s a line for the women’s toilet, what should stop me from filling up my water bottle in the men’s bathroom? Literally nothing. It’s just a place to fill my water bottle. You might be thinking, “Heidi, it’s never going to be like that. People have been using labeled bathrooms for centuries.” OK, sure, but remember when the bathroom was ultimately just a place to shit?
Just saying.
One comment
Comments are closed.