A small moment of Gender Piracy

[quiregrrl]

Near my new office there are two toilets, they are immediately next to each other and they are identical, each being a small room with a toilet, a basin, a mirror, and a door that locks. For the first three weeks, they were non-gendered, but apparently someone complained that you couldn't tell which was the men's and which the women's, so last Friday morning along came maintenance to stick up pictograph signs assigning a binary gender to each toilet.

*eyeroll*

As I was leaving on Friday evening, I visited the loo and as one was occupied I used the other. As I exited the loo, the person using the other one also exited and on seeing me emerging from the door beside her exclaimed "Oh! didn't you see the signs?!? that's the mens!". I stepped back, looked at the signs, looked at her, looked down at myself and replied "No, well, that one is wearing pants, and that one looks like it's wearing a dress, and I'm wearing pants, and you're wearing a skirt, so it seems about right to me". She gave me the half-sideways look, and said "well I guess that's one way to look at it"... I pointed out that they're identical, and everyone has managed to share without any problems for three weeks, so gendering the toilets now just seems arbitrary and silly to me. She replied with a half-smile and "spose so" and i smiled and wished her a happy weekend.

I don't get many chances to challenge the gender binary, so it makes me kind of happy when i do, even when it's tiny and pointless...

Comments

Re: gender anxiety

[quiregrrl.livejournal.com]

It's interesting, back in the days when I worked as a cleaner in a community centre, while the men's toilets often smelt bad (which I attribute to urinals), it was routinely the women's toilets that i found the grossest things in.

I understand the fear of sexual overtones, well, i don't really, but I understand that people have that fear, and I can make allowances for that in shared facilities, but these are individual, completely self-enclosed, completely seperate bathrooms. So regardless of who else uses it, when you're in there you have complete privacy... which is why I think assigning genders to them is arbitrary.