Bathroom Signage

[jack]

How should toilets be signed in an ideal world?

I decided to try a third party poll site, though I'm not sure I like this one:
http://www.polljunkie.com/poll/eijrsw/bathroom-signage

(If you have gendered toilets at all, rather than unisex-only.)

I don't like the skirt/no-skirt symbols, but all the others seem more open to misinterpretation.

Comments

[liv]

I definitely don't like the stick figure / stick figure with a dress pair. But they are kind of (reasonably) internationally recognized symbols for "toilet" and one thing you don't want to do is to use symbols which are not gender essentialist, at the expense of obscuring the salient point that behind the door is a toilet. It's possibly even more annoying when the stick figure and stick figure with dress pair are both used together to indicate a unisex toilet.

I am pretty sure that changing the signs for "male" and "female" isn't going to fix the problem for trans people, non-binary people, or people who get mistaken for a different gender. The only thing that's going to work for that is to have more unisex toilets or possibly exclusively unisex toilets.

But I'm not sure that's the problem you're addressing here. Maybe you want to keep male and female toilets, without supporting the often offensive assumption that men are just default human beings while women are girly and wear dresses? I think the biological Mars / Venus symbols are better for conveying that message, but worse for avoiding confusion because lots of people don't recognize the symbols or don't remember which way round they are.

Quite a few toilets in Spain have men's toilets with a down-pointing triangle under a circle for a head, and women's toilets with an upwards-pointing triangle under a circle. Which is a bit cute because it implies that men have male bodies (broad shoulders, narrow waist) rather than just being unmarked stick figures. But it's still kind of essentialist, considering andromorphic and gynomorphic body shapes are only very weakly correlated with sex and gender.

[jack]

Maybe you want to keep male and female toilets, without supporting the often offensive assumption that men are just default human beings while women are girly and wear dresses?

More like, I think we should fix the long-term problems, probably with unisex toilets everywhere[1], but if that doesn't happen overnight, there may still be times when having "insufficient toilets, labelled right" is better than "insufficient toilets, labelled offensively".

[1] I assume so, but I don't know for sure.

[pseudomonas]

In an ideal world, single-room toilets where only one person (of any gender) is in them at a time.

[chess]

Doesn't that lead to longer toilet queues though? I got the impression that urinals were a lot more efficient than cubicles.

[ptc24]

The ideal world solution is unisex everywhere; I may well be offending some people by suggesting that their particular practises have no place in an ideal world. Alas, it is not possible to please everyone.

The best real-world compromise I've heard is to split the toilets three ways; one M, one F, one open-to-everyone. Of course this means that some (additional) people don't get segregated toilets/extra choice - this seems to me to be a minor issue to me, far less pressing than making sure that some people can actually go to the loo (there may be a certain amount of personal bias on this point), and shortening queues while making efficient use of space. In fact a larger issue (that the some people don't get...) is that some people might feel/be pressured into using the neutral loo.

I don't remember what the recommended signage was. I think I prefer M/F over M/W; not all female people are women, for that matter not all male people are men. But this still leaves the question of the other sign.

[eudoxiafriday.wordpress.com]

I think that internationally recognised signage is the most important thing, and that pictorial representations (rather than letters/words) are the way to go for that. Unfortunately, I can't then come up with anything better than what's already existing ...

I think the ideal situation would be all unisex, in variations (1) large rooms with lots of cubicle toilets for efficiency (who cares if a person of a different gender sees you washing your hands?), (2) extra-large single-room toilets for wheelchair users/anyone who has trouble with the cubicles, (3) family-oriented toilets where there's a room a with baby change table, small-child-height loo and sink, etc (some of the ones I've seen have multiple toilets, too).