Signing bathrooms by the amenity they provide – rather than the gender they are deemed to be used by – is one great leap towards removing the gender binary from public spaces.

While this idea remains a challenge to people invested in maintaining traditional gender roles, the positive reinforcement of gender-neutral language and pronouns works with designs for lived experiences of gender that exist outside the male and female binary.

The familiar signage silhouettes of male and female that mark our public bathrooms reduce gender identity down to our bodies and clothing. Not only do they reinforce outdated gender stereotypes, they erase non-binary people. More seriously, these symbols present trans and gender-diverse people within a climate of violence, interrogation and surveillance based upon their bodies, when really, all anyone wants to do is use a toilet.

The Trans Pathways project – a 2016 survey by Telethon Kids Institute of gender nonconforming people aged 14-25 years – revealed 48% of those surveyed were non-binary. This data indicates a critical mass of non-binary people among our gender demographics and serves as a catalyst to hold more respectful conversations outside the male and female binary regarding rights, access and visibility in our public spaces.

What is it that we do in bathrooms? Why does it need to be connected to our body or gender?

As we see grassroots awareness of non-binary identity increase, the work of the Safe Schools Coalition Australia and Minus18 is ongoing and is now being complemented in government agencies with initiatives like “They Day” – a Pride Network campaign in the Department of Health and Human Services on the first Wednesday of each month to promote awareness about gender-neutral pronouns. Even the Australian Defence Force Academy is on board – publishing its LGBTI guide advising more respectful recognition for “they/them/their” pronouns. But how are we backing up this shift in language with the way we occupy space? Surely there is an obligation to do so with more rigour?

For the recent Workaround Exhibition at RMIT University Design Hub in Melbourne, I drew up an alternative to the existing male, female and accessible bathroom pictograms to replace the permanent signage for toilets that sat adjacent to the gallery. In a deliberate DIY yet well-designed and subversive intervention into the austere interior of the RMIT school of design, a colleague climbed a ladder and stuck them over the top of the existing signs. We then had bathrooms with no reference to gender, just one marked “toilet” and another marked “urinal”. And while we did have one leaking toilet during the day, the sky didn’t fall in.

My exhibition program presented the opportunity to make an existing space as non-binary as I could: there would be no space or building function that forced a person to feel as if their gender identity was contested against the normative ideas of male and female. It was a practical extension of my theme, “What if safety becomes permanent?”, a question that interrogates the othering of gender nonconforming people in architectural space and practice. My intervention into the gallery bathroom amenity was an act of creating inclusive space, yet it was also a provocation to hold our buildings – indeed architecture – to a higher standard.

This tactic subconsciously provoked a reconsideration of otherwise familiar signage – asking the question: is using the bathroom really about gender and how we are programmed to think about it? Or, is it about amenity and function? What is it that we do in bathrooms? Why does it need to be connected to our body or gender? Why is it that gender neutrality even needs to be stated or explained? What if we just do it right? Perhaps public bathrooms would look something like this.

Regrettably, the public bathroom has become a battleground for transgender rights; a discussion that is largely imposed upon the trans and gender diverse community by cisgender interest groups. The “trans bathroom panic” phenomenon remains a distraction – not only from our right to piss without prejudice – but from much larger issues worthy of discussion, like pathways to identification, healthcare, employment, housing security and public safety.

‘The current gender-neutral logo depicting a half female/half male figure is for many gender non-conforming people as othering and transphobic it reads.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The common assertion that gender non-conforming people who use bathrooms present a threat to the personal safety of cisgender people is rubbish. To confront the realities of this debate, and more importantly the violence enacted upon gender non-conforming people in these spaces, one only has to look at the disturbing incident in a Los Angeles Denny’s restaurant in May 2018, where a former US Republican candidate filmed herself abusing a transgender woman using a female toilet as she was evicted by security.

The public restroom is not only a place to empty one’s bladder or bowel, change a tampon or clothes, wash hands or reapply lippy; it’s an arbiter of gender, with its mostly cisnormative inhabitants to police it.

Is it time to rethink, redesign the bathroom for the 21st century?

While eliminating references to gender still isn’t part of most design strategies, this exercise is hardly a new idea – versions of gender-neutral bathrooms and pictograms are rolling out across the world. But it’s a very subjective and optional practice, often enacting the very inequitable access and transphobia it’s trying to avoid. The current gender-neutral logo depicting a half-female/half-male figure is for many gender nonconforming people as othering and transphobic it reads. That building, and design practice accepts this as a solution is even more unfortunate. I’m asking for a standard much higher, more respectful, for a future much safer and permanent for those outside the gender binary.

For designers and their clients who value the diverse experiences of gender, signing our bathrooms by the amenity they provide rather than by gender is a simple design strategy that alleviates a range of issues around bathroom access and availability. It works alongside our wider understanding of how we can break down the gender binary to include trans and non-binary identities who experience othering. Because it’s not just bathrooms where gender is violently contested, policed and governed; it’s schools, sports facilities, airport security checkpoints, hospitals, the urban street, public transport and prisons.

• Simona Castricum is a musician, a PhD candidate in architecture at the University of Melbourne, a broadcaster on Melbourne’s 3PBS FM and member of Music Victoria’s women’s advisory panel

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