Everybody pees and poops. As human beings, we have little choice in the matter, especially if we continue to drink water and eat Kashi cereal.

Even if we can't control our basic need to toilet, we generally have a choice where and how we do it — most of us, that is.

The transgender community wants to make that decision easier and safer. And it could start with redesigning the bathroom sign itself.

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last June that private companies could withhold certain birth controls from their employee insurance packages under the Affordable Care Act, it caused an uproar among women's rights activists. Many worried the Hobby Lobby decision would also set a precedent for sexual or gender discrimination against LGBTQ individuals.

In fact, longtime Hobby Lobby employee Meggan Sommerville had a pending case against her employer: As a trans woman, she had been written up for using the women's restroom. Her employer did not recognize her gender identity and Sommerville was asked to use the men's restroom instead.

A trans woman from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, also claims she was fired from her subcontractor job on Jan. 15 for using the female toilets.

"Relieving oneself is among the most basic of human needs. Feeling unable to do so because one is in danger or unwelcome in a public restroom is deeply unjust and degrading," says trans issues correspondent for Advocate.com, Mitch Kellaway. As a trans man himself, Kellaway says trans people often feel unsafe in public restrooms, as potential targets of violence or hate speech. Many times he's asked himself, "Was it only a matter of time before I entered a potential danger zone if I wasn't perceived as 'male' enough in the men's room?"

Sam Killermann, a social justice comedian focused on LGBTQ equality, has heard from many trans people who go to great lengths to avoid public restrooms, often holding it in all day because they don't come across a restroom they can safely access.

It's a worry most cisgender people (those whose gender identity matches their assigned gender at birth) never experience.

A 2013 report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) indicates that transgender survivors are 3.7 times more likely to experience violence compared to cisgender victims. Trans people of color are 1.5 times more likely than white cisgender victims to experience threats, intimidation and sexual violence.

Activists are lobbying for a change in the very binary way Westerners treat gender, in this case, when it comes to male vs. female bathrooms. Perhaps the most immediate step toward safe and accessible bathrooms: changing the sign on the door. Then, hopefully, education and acceptance will follow.

Brooklyn-based sign company MyDoorSign attempted a design. It promptly failed.

MyDoorSign.com's first attempt at a trans-sensitive bathroom sign featured a "third gender" of sorts, who wore a confusing hybrid pants/dress outfit. The wording "gender neutral" did little to clarify. Image: MyDoorSign.com

The sign read "gender neutral" and pictured a strange icon that appeared half-male-half-female, in a sort of hybrid pants/dress outfit. The sign was insulting, opposition groups pointed out, not to mention confusing for the average person — trans or not.

Here's a crazy thought, Killermann said: Change the image to a toilet.

















"The world will not end if you have a person with a penis and a person with a vagina peeing in the same room," says Killermann. "This idea is one that is scary to people, but only because we've been taught that fear."

MyDoorSign listened and revised its sign, which now welcomes "all genders." It also offered free signs to college campuses.

Former GLAAD intern Andy Kang used these signs to introduce all-gender bathrooms to his Colby College campus. He says projects like this advance subliminal messaging that can lead to more powerful change.

"We don't have to live in such a rigid world where people publicly preach for equality but then privately enforce inequality-sustaining structures," he says. Kang hopes future administrators will establish an easy fix: Focus on a bathroom's function rather than on the genders of the users.

"Relieving oneself publicly has nothing to do with expressing gender; it's just that the two have been conflated for so long that we have to actively shift our minds to see the act any differently," Kellaway says. It's about meeting a basic need, and we need to return to that.

As long as humans can't avoid peeing and pooping, we all deserve a clean, private space to safely complete our business.