Description: a toilet door with a multigender symbol and a disabled symbol. Text below the symbols reads “Inclusive| Ira tāngata katoa”.
For context, this is the disabled toilet in the main art gallery in my country’s biggest city. There are the standard male toilet and female toilet right there as well.
Edit: sorry, image upload isn’t working for me. Basically the one disabled toilet has been turned into an inclusive gender and disability toilet. I love it that there is a gender inclusive bathroom but I don’t love it that they siloed it into the disability accessible toilet instead of renovating a new one or changing one of the 4 standard ones instead or as well.
Retrofitting infrastructure is difficult, and the end results are often quite bizarre.
At a building I visited recently, the toilets are on either side of a hallway. You can go left, into the womens washroom (sinks), and then carry on through another door to the womens bathroom (toilets). If you go right, you enter the gender neutral washroom (sinks), and then through another door to the mens toilets… It just doesnt make sense having a gender neutral washroom directly attached to the explicitly mens toilets. It confused a few visitors as well, as they didnt know where the mens toilets were, as they arent marked from the hallway, and its not immediately obvious that they would be behind the gender neutral washroom…
There, now we have both ranted :)
I’m sure it’s hard but the administration has made plans for new bathrooms and repeatedly made the same mistakes. In the new developments, the bathroom stalls with the infrastructure to accommodate people are always in men and women’s bathrooms so there is now actually no places for people that conform to neither.
Well, if its a new project/building then there isnt any excuse really.
Ive never understood why they are segregated in the first place, just put a bunch of toilets in a bunch of properly walled off rooms, and leave people to handle their shit.
The one argument they use - Rapists - Also never makes sense to me. If somebody is going to do that, they are not going to care about the symbol on the door
Making the toilets each a self contained room with sturdier doors (ie not have those stupid ass gaps that people can crawl under/over/shimmy something through to fuck with the lock) meanwhile…