More shared loos: from binary to queer

One more brief post on unisex toilet facilities, before we move on to other things! (Unless this new city which I moved to, keeps surprising me.)

My new office building has many floors. On one floor:

One cubicle for two genders.

On the next floor:

One cubicle for all genders.

(Including, apparently, the ‘wheelchair gender’. Odd how wheelchairs keep being presented as some kind of stick-on gender feature. Or genderlessness feature: most wheelchair-accessible loos are shared among all genders. But that’s a slightly different topic.)

And then there was this one:

Ain’t they a beauty?If anyone knows who designed this merhuman, I wouldn’t mind being told!

Tracing the progress of unisex loos

A brief instalment of the toilet picto saga.

In an earlier post, I shared an androgynous, or trans, or two-gendered WC symbol which I had found in an English café.

This week, I found something even more exciting:

Granted, it is somewhat curious that the person in the dress does not seem to possess any shoulders/arms. Or perhaps her hands are clasped firmly in free-kick position?

Robin van Persie with Fulham players, photo by Ronnie Macdonald, Flickr (2007).

But for the rest, this toilet sign clearly signals that you do not need to look/feel like a man or a woman to enter these cubicles. (All genders in these WCs also share the same spaces, by the way.)

And what made seeing these signs even more special to me, was that they were located in a town hall, in the place where new citizens go to be registered. It is truly, therefore, how the Dutch city of Nijmegen presents itself to the world.