However, the issue of unisex toilets has been a non-issue in Malaysia - well at least not in Shah Alam, Selangor since 2007 according to the time stamp on this picture of a unisex toilet in the building across Jalan Majlis from the now closed Quality Hotel. From what I see on Google Maps, the building which housed this unisex toilet looks like it is called Plaza Alam Sentral today.
Now that was nearly nine years ago and Shah Alam is a pretty conservative city within the Klang Valley, with a largely Muslim population, yet nobody makes a fuss about this unisex public toilet, which beat the U.S. by nine years with regard to gender equality in toilet designation.
I must pay a visit to Plaza Alam Sentral to see if these toilets are still are still unisex or have they segregated into "Ladies" and "Gents".
Another interesting signboard I saw was in front of a coffee shop in the same building with a sign in English saying "Wi-Fi Free", with a sign in Malay right below it saying "Please pay at the counter".
Quite frankly, these "progressives" in the U.S. have nothing better to make issue with, especially when many people have lost their homes to foreclosure, many secure well-paying jobs have been moved offshore to low wage countries, university graduates are saddled with student loan debt which perhaps many will not be able to pay off until they are in their 40s or maybe never, and so many other bread and butter issues.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for gender equality in employment, promotion prospects, income, rights and so forth but how do gender-neutral bathrooms address such more urgent issues of gender equality and treatment?
These "progressives" in the U.S. have got their priorities all upside down or perhaps they have to make a fuss about this irrelevant issue to most, so as to remain "relevant" in the eyes of whatever funding body they may have been receiving their funding from.
So no surprise that right-wing populists like Donald Trump who promises to address the concerns of such suffering folk is so popular and is quite likely to be elected the next U.S. president in November?
Whether he lives up to his promises if elected is left to be seen but gender-neutral bathrooms would have a very low priority compared to bread and butter issues of economic survival amongst those working class Americans who are inclined to vote for him.
As for Hillary Clinton, well if she becomes president you can expect to see more U.S. imperialist intervention and de-stabilisation of other countries, more refugees fleeing to Europe, more terrorism and a much higher probability of World War III, and a nuclear one at that, though there may be many more gender-neutral bathrooms and the U.S. imperialists via their paid NGO fronts may well demand that all countries designate their public toilets gender-neutral in the name of "democracy" and "human rights".
Following below are four articles in U.S. media about this gender-neutral bathroom controversy and there are plenty more which I did not include. Just do a Google search on "gender-neutral bathrooms".
Don't you find this issue in the U.S. about gender-neutral bathrooms rather ridiculous?
CHARLES F MOREIRA
The Gender-Neutral Bathroom Revolution Is Growing
Katy Steinmetz @katysteinmetz Jan. 11, 2016
Bathrooms often become battlegrounds in fights over civil rights
San Francisco has long been considered one of America’s most—if not the most–LGBT friendly cities. Yet in at least one increasingly watched area, the city has fallen behind. On Monday, San Francisco Supervisor David Campos took the first substantive steps toward changing that when he announced plans to introduce a bill that would make many city bathrooms gender-neutral.
The measure would mandate that all single-occupancy bathrooms in the city be relabeled as places for all genders, rather than solely “men” or “women,” and that new buildings constructed in the city have a gender-neutral bathroom on each floor. The bill would also go beyond similar laws in other cities by putting in place sweeping enforcement mechanisms, including a complaint process handled by the Human Rights Commission, an LGBT rights organization, and adding these facilities as a standard checklist item for building inspections.
The measure, which is expected to pass easily, will add San Francisco alongside Philadelphia, Seattle, Washington, D.C., West Hollywood, Calif. and Austin, Texas, to the list of cities with gender-neutral bathroom provisions. More than 150 U.S. colleges and universities have also instituted such measures, including the entire University of California system. In April, the White House added a gender neutral bathroom at the nation’s most prominent address. These changes have prompted push back in a number of states, where bills that would determine access to public school restrooms according to a person’s biological sex at birth are now being considered.
Campos, who developed San Francisco’s bill with the Transgender Law Center, argues its benefits extend beyond that community. “Many people right now are impacted negatively by the gender-specific restroom,” he says. Among his examples: a mother who wants to accompany her son to the bathroom and isn’t sure which to choose; a disabled or senior person who is a caretaker of the opposite sex; any woman stuck in a long line for a single-occupancy ladies’ room while the men’s sits there vacant.
Still, helping LGBT people is the primary thrust of such bills. “Having gender-specific restrooms can create unnecessary risks that lead to transgender or gender non-conforming folks to be harassed,” says Sasha Buchert, a staff attorney at the Transgender Law Center. “Those aren’t in a vacuum either. Those types of interactions can have long-term health consequences.”
One high-profile example is the case of Chrissy Lee Polis, a transgender woman who was beaten at a Baltimore McDonald’s after using the women’s restroom. One of her assailants was sentenced in 2011 to five years in prison for first-degree assault and a hate crime. A video of the beating taken by a McDonald’s employee went viral.
Bathrooms are one of the most incendiary battlegrounds in the transgender community’s ongoing fight for civil rights, as those spaces have previously been for women, African-Americans and the disabled community. This bill comes at a time when four states—Missouri, Indiana, South Dakota and Wisconsin—are considering bills that would limit transgender students usage of facilities at public schools. The Wisconsin bill, for instance, would mandate that all sex-specific bathrooms be used by students according to their biological sex, “as determined by an individual’s chromosomes and identified at birth by that individual’s anatomy.”
The Transgender Law Center’s Buchert says such laws are unenforceable. “Are they going to place security guards at each bathroom to do DNA tests to verify folks’ chromosomes?” she says.
There are also questions about whether laws restricting bathroom access run counter to federal guidance. In a 2014 memo citing the Civil Rights Act, the Department of Education said a school “must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity in all aspects of the planning, implementation, enrollment, operation, and evaluation of single-sex classes.” Rulings from the Department of Justice have found that not allowing a transgender person to use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity is a form of sex discrimination.
Though the issue remains controversial in cities and states around the country, San Francisco’s measure is likely to become law without much fuss. “The bottom line,” Campos says, “is this: going to the bathroom is such a basic necessity that nowhere should anyone have a difficult time or be in danger because of that.”
http://time.com/4175774/san-francisco-gender-neutral-bathrooms/
Who’s Afraid of Gender-Neutral Bathrooms?
By Jeannie Suk , January 25, 2016
In the middle of taking the bar exam at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, in New York City, along with thousands of aspiring lawyers, I had to go to the bathroom. The enormous line for the women’s restroom looked like it would take at least a half hour. There was no line for the men’s restroom. I walked in, passed my male counterparts at a row of urinals, used one of several empty stalls, then returned to my desk. I felt that my decision to forgo the women’s bathroom made a difference to my passing the exam, and that the much longer wait for women than men during an all-important test for entry to the legal profession was obviously unfair.
There is now, however, an active debate around what bathrooms we should be able to use. A recently proposed Indiana law would make it a crime for a person to enter a single-sex public restroom that does not match the person’s “biological gender,” defined in terms of chromosomes and sex at birth. The punishment could be up to a year in jail and a five-thousand-dollar fine. Similar laws proposed in several other states have not passed. These proposals attempt to counter recent moves in many states to allow transgender people to access bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s same-sex-marriage decision, last summer, these skirmishes may give the sense of moving the L.G.B.T.-equality debate from the sublime to the ridiculous. But the implications of the controversy go far beyond bathrooms.
Last fall’s successful campaign in Houston to reject a broad anti-discrimination ordinance made clear that restrooms will be fields of battle over gender and sexuality for the foreseeable future. The Houston ordinance, which prohibited discrimination in employment and housing based on categories including sex, race, religion, and gender identity, was defeated in a referendum after opponents painted it as a “bathroom ordinance” that would enable men to enter women’s restrooms. One ad in the campaign showed a young girl being followed into a bathroom by an older man. Another ad emphasized the risk of having registered sex offenders in bathrooms with women and girls. The vulnerability that most people feel in a public restroom, with their trousers pulled down in proximity to others, was easily exploited in connection with sexual assault. Saying no to the so-called bathroom ordinance was framed as preventing sexual danger to women and girls (even though danger to transgender individuals is often seen as a reason to support bathroom access).
Today’s most-prominent arguments against inclusive restrooms are remarkably consistent with the Victorian notions that led to sex-segregated bathrooms in the first place. When the ideology of separate spheres for male and female, public and private, the market and the home reigned, the growth of women’s presence in public life led to the desire to protect women from the crude dangers of the male world. Among the legal effects was the 1873 Supreme Court holding in Bradwell v. Illinois that it was not unconstitutional for a state to deny women admission to the bar on the basis of their sex, with a famous concurring opinion that stated, “Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.” The same separate-spheres paternalism led to the designation of certain physical spaces for women apart from those for men, including bathrooms in public venues. These were safe spaces, if you will, tucked in a world in which women were vulnerable. As our society is currently experiencing a resurgence of paternalist concern about women’s sexual vulnerability—especially in the context of that great equalizer, education—it is no surprise that there would also be a new emphasis on the Victorian phenomenon of separate restrooms.
The connection of public bathrooms with condemned sexual behavior also relates to our recent history of criminalizing homosexuality. For most of the twentieth century, gay sex was criminal, and public disclosure of a man’s homosexuality spelled the death of his reputation and career. Public restrooms were sites of clandestine sex among men, and undercover police engaged in bathroom surveillance to catch men seeking sex in toilet stalls. David Sklansky, a law professor at Stanford, has argued that modern legal ideas of privacy were forged in the nineteen-sixties in part because of the Supreme Court’s distaste for this sordid police practice. According to his theory, bathroom sex is the “secret subtext” of Katz v. United States, which requires the police to have a warrant to eavesdrop electronically on a call made from a telephone booth, and is the source for the modern idea that the Constitution protects a reasonable expectation of privacy. Since Lawrence v. Texas, in 2003, it has been unconstitutional to criminalize gay sex taking place in private, but this protection does not apply to sex (gay or straight) in public spaces. As late as 2007, Senator Larry Craig was arrested in an airport-restroom sex sting for signalling interest in sex with a stranger in an adjacent stall, and convicted of disorderly conduct.
Whereas homosexuality was until recently considered the paradigm of sexual deviance, today’s bathroom debate focusses on heterosexual deviance. The undercover figures we imagine are not snooping cops but rather heterosexual men who might pretend to be women “that day” to follow women and girls into restrooms. I’m not aware of reliable statistics that would indicate that public bathrooms are more sexually dangerous than any other places—or would be, were they to be desegregated—though the history of bathroom sex does associate the space with sexual conduct. Even if the sexual-assault argument against allowing transgender restroom access is implausible, it is still hard to come up with an account of why public bathrooms should be gender-segregated that does not rely on a gendered version of privacy and safety that recapitulates “separate spheres” and sexual vulnerability.
Today, men and women, not assumed to be only heterosexual, are expected to function at work alongside one another, eat at adjacent seats in restaurants, sit cheek by jowl in buses and airplanes, take classes, study in libraries, and, with some exceptions, even pray together. Why is the multi-stall bathroom the last public vestige of gendered social separation? When men, gay or straight, can stand shoulder to shoulder at urinals without a second thought, is there much to back up the view that men and women must not pee or poop next to one another, especially if closed stalls would shield them from view? Women may have some distinctive sanitation needs, but why does that require a wholly separate space from men?
Perhaps the point is precisely that the public restroom is the only everyday social institution remaining in which separation by gender is the norm, and undoing that separation would feel like the last shot in the “war on gender” itself. As we consider the possibility of electing our first female President, the bathroom as the site of sex difference has been underlined by another candidate, Donald Trump, who said, “I don’t want to think about” the “disgusting” things Hillary Clinton was doing in the bathroom, in a comment widely understood to be about her female sex. Though both men and women must perform private bodily functions in public bathrooms, the mere thought of a woman doing it implied an irreducible sex difference that made plain a gross incongruity with the ultimate public role. Public restrooms are not just toilets; for more than a hundred years, they have implicated questions of who really belongs in public, civic, and professional life.
One practical reason we can’t change to unsegregated bathrooms overnight is that municipal, state, and federal legal codes, many with origins in the nineteenth century, mandate that there be separate facilities for each sex, in businesses and places of work. These widespread codes could be changed one by one. But it seems more likely that, when it comes to multi-stall bathrooms, gender segregation will remain the norm, and that we will see the addition of more single-stall restrooms that are open to any gender. Transgender people’s need to use bathrooms that match their identified gender is modest and not reasonably denied. Old ideology, in the meantime, stays alive in mundane legal regulation that resists more thorough change and determines our plumbing.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/whos-afraid-of-same-sex-bathrooms
'We need a restroom revolution'
By John D. Sutter, CNN
Updated 1551 GMT (2351 HKT) May 9, 2016
Atlanta (CNN)Before I launch into the argument for making all restrooms in the United States gender neutral -- that is, removing "men's" and "women's" labels -- I want to show you a photo.
This is James Parker Sheffield.
Now a truly ridiculous question: Which restroom do you think he should use?
Men's or women's?
In the United States at the moment, the legal answer depends on location. If Sheffield is in North Carolina, it's illegal for him to use a public men's restroom. Since he's a transgender man -- his birth certificate has an "F" on it -- he has to use the women's.
If he's at home in Atlanta, he can use the men's.
"It's now the law for me to share a restroom with your wife," Sheffield wrote on Twitter along with his selfie. He posted that message in March, only hours after North Carolina passed a law making it illegal for transgender people to use public restrooms that correspond with their true gender identities.
The U.S. Justice Department recently said the law violates the Civil Rights Act. North Carolina on Monday sued the feds in defense of the regulation.
As it's written, Sheffield would have to use the lady's room or break the law.
That's absurd, as the selfie and tweet make clear. Sheffield is a 36-year-old man who lives in Decatur, Georgia. He has a scruffy beard and a receding hairline, which he jokingly calls a "reverse fade." If he walked into a lady's restroom he'd likely be met with stares or screams or worse.
But you know what else is absurd? The idea that Sheffield -- or anyone else -- should have to choose a male or female restroom at all. And, beyond that, that any of us would feel entitled to decide someone else's gender for them -- and, consequently, where they can and can't pee.
This isn't a binary gender world. People don't fit neatly into the "M" and "F" boxes. It's time our public restrooms reflected that. The fairest way to do so is to desegregate restrooms by sex, and that means eliminating the men's and women's rooms in favor of "all gender" restrooms.
Think that's an overreaction? Take a quick look at the history of bathroom politics in the United States. We've tried time and again to control who we sit and stand next to at the toilet.
In the 1960s, black civil rights activists were killed for trying to use "whites only" bathrooms. In the 1980s, gay men were harassed because the public wrongly assumed they could catch HIV-AIDS from a toilet. (AIDS was viewed then as a gay man's disease). Restrooms weren't required to be accessible to people with wheelchairs until the Americans with Disabilities act of 1990. And now, some cities and states are trying to keep transgender people out.
The only justification is bigotry and ignorance.
You might think that allowing a transgender person to use the restroom of their choice is a workable solution. It's a first step. But Sheffield and others who don't conform to gender norms face discrimination even when they're legally allowed to choose which restroom to use.
Seventy percent of transgender people surveyed in Washington, for example, a city with progressive laws allowing people to use either restroom, reported "verbal harassment, assault and being denied access to public restrooms" because of their identities, according to a report from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. Further, 54% reported medical problems "like dehydration, urinary tract infections, kidney infections and other kidney problems" because they avoided using restrooms entirely.
Sheffield told me he plans his days around where he can and can't pee.
"I almost never go to the restroom in a place I haven't been at least once before," he told me. He cuts appointments short and avoids going out simply to avoid peeing in public. Sometimes he'll find the one stall in a men's room is occupied, or out of order. Other times he sits on the toilet for longer than necessary because he worries it's suspicious a man would sit down to urinate.
"It's not a good feeling to be a grown-up and wondering, 'Am I going to make it to a restroom on time -- and how do you explain it if you don't,'" he said.
Such fears apply not only to transgender people but also those who don't meet our rigid gender norms. In 2013, I met a female middle school student in Mississippi, for example, who told me her teachers wouldn't let her use the girl's restroom because she had short hair and wore hoodies. She looked too boyish.
Gendered restrooms support these biases.
"We need a restroom revolution in this country," said Kathryn Anthony, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
I agree. And there are simple places to start. Restaurants and small businesses with two single-unit restrooms simply can paint over the "M" and "W" on their doors and -- ba-da-bing! -- they're gender inclusive. No one's harmed as long as we men stop peeing on the toilet seat.
Philadelphia recently made that concept law for single-stall bathrooms. Other governments and businesses should follow. (And if you're a business that is considering this sort of move, please send me a tweet).
Then, bigger leaps: The International Building Code should suggest all-gender restrooms become the norm, or at least be included, in larger businesses and public establishments. (That idea comes from Terry Kogan, a law professor at the University of Utah.)
City, state and federal governments also could legislate these restrooms into existence, too.
It won't happen immediately, but new construction and renovations could be subject to our updated understanding of which types of bathrooms are safest for everyone. That's the precedent set by the Americans with Disabilities Act, Kogan said.
Harvey Molotch, a professor of sociology at New York University and co-editor of the book "Toilet: public restrooms and the politics of sharing," outlined for me what he considers to be the Holy Grail of restrooms. Walk in and you'd see a long line of private toilet stalls, with floor-to-ceiling doors. On the other side would be a row of communal sinks. Anyone is free to use any stall -- and there might be a row of urinals tucked away somewhere to the side.
The urinals could be left out of some restrooms, but they should be kept when possible, Molotch said, because they're much more water-efficient than sit-down toilets.
All this sounds wildly inoffensive to me.
And it's already happening.
The Cooper Union, a college in New York, announced on March 18 that it is removing gender identification from restrooms on campus and opening single-occupancy toilets up for anyone's use. "We have always been ahead of our time and we must continue being leaders on issues of social justice," Bill Mea, acting president, wrote in an email to the campus.
The Urban Justice Center, also in New York, made a similar move a decade ago.
"I'm delighted to be able to share that our experiences have been wholly positive," the center's executive director, Doug Lasdon, and a development associate, Hugh Ryan, wrote in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post. "To this day, we have not received a single complaint. Not one in a decade. Nor have any incidents of violence or harassment been reported."
There's little counterargument other that bias and squeamishness.
Sheffield, the transgender man in Georgia, doesn't expect the all-gender restroom revolution to occur anytime soon. "If we could go to sleep tonight and wake up and all the bathrooms were gender neutral -- great! But it's not practical," he said. "It's not going to happen that way."
In the meantime, he said, a little courteousness would help.
"We can't hold it," he said. "Trans people have to pee multiple times a day, just like everyone else."
Currently, there are only two places Sheffield feels comfortable peeing.
One's at home.
The other's at work.
And that's because it's labeled "all gender restroom."
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/09/opinions/sutter-gender-neutral-restrooms/
Right-Wing Media Monitor, Film Attendees Inside All-Gender Restroom At Democratic Convention
Research ››› July 26, 2016 2:38 PM EDT ››› RACHEL PERCELAY
Right-wing media monitored and filmed people using the designated all-gender restroom at the Democratic National Convention, looking for “obviously transgender” convention attendees in the bathroom. Conservative media have long peddled the bogus myth that nondiscrimination protections for transgender people will allow male sexual predators to sneak into women’s bathrooms by pretending to be transgender, leading to an increase in assault and misbehavior in restrooms.
BuzzFeed: People Were “Unfazed” By The All-Gender Restroom At The Democratic National Convention. BuzzFeed reported that the Democratic convention has one designated all-gender restroom and that attendees were “seemingly unfazed” by it, calling the shared bathroom “perfectly natural” and saying that using it was a “nonevent”:
Hundreds of men and women shared a big, busy “all-gender restroom” at the Democratic National Convention on Monday — and were seemingly unfazed by the experience.
“It doesn’t make me nervous at all,” Lula Dualeh, a delegate for Bernie Sanders, told BuzzFeed News. “I just need to use the restroom. I don’t care who’s next to me.”
But restrooms have been a hot-button issue for many Republicans. State and federal politicians have politicized bathroom access, saying that allowing transgender women — whom they call “men” — to use the women’s restroom poses a safety threat.
At the Wells Fargo Center, which also had single-sex restrooms, a sign at the entrance of the all-gender restroom featured a figurine in a dress and another figurine without a dress.
Inside, everyone took turns using stalls; then women and men washed their hands side-by-side at a bank of sinks. Nobody who spoke to BuzzFeed News found the situation troubling.
A co-ed pack of conventioneers were searching for a bathroom — one restroom for the guys and another for the women — when one of the guys saw the sign and said, “It’s an all-gender restroom. Let’s go.” The group emerged a couple minutes later. Did they have any qualms about sharing a bathroom with each other at the same time? “It was a nonevent,” one woman said. “It was perfectly natural.” [BuzzFeed News, 7/25/16]
http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/07/26/right-wing-media-monitor-film-attendees-inside-all-gender-restroom-democratic-convention/211903
