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.