Disability and Accessibility

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All things disability and accessibility related, and advocacy for making those things better.

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I have mixed feelings about this, can anyone comment? (beehaw.org)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Description: a toilet door with a multigender symbol and a disabled symbol. Text below the symbols reads "Inclusive| Ira tāngata katoa".

For context, this is the disabled toilet in the main art gallery in my country's biggest city. There are the standard male toilet and female toilet right there as well.

Edit: sorry, image upload isn't working for me. Basically the one disabled toilet has been turned into an inclusive gender and disability toilet. I love it that there is a gender inclusive bathroom but I don't love it that they siloed it into the disability accessible toilet instead of renovating a new one or changing one of the 4 standard ones instead or as well.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago (3 children)

It should be noted that I am just a man who does not use these bathrooms but I have some thoughts. My first impressions were from a queer perspective.

We have a pretty similar setup at school. It certainly doesn't feel great to me. It always felt like a shortcut used by administration to answer the 'inclusive bathroom issue'. It creates a weird fear in my mind of using one while I could be using another but instead I'd be blocking someone who needs the special infrastructure in the toilet. One of them has also repeatedly been locked by the administration because "people have sex in them" which just irks me so much. They would never close any other bathrooms if that happened in them - which it most certainly does.

Okay, that became a rant but um, these are my thoughts.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. That locked due to sex thing is irksome for sure. How can their logic be "other people have sex therefore you have nowhere to pee"?!

It creates a weird fear in my mind of using one while I could be using another but instead I’d be blocking someone who needs the special infrastructure in the toilet.

This is a big part of it. As a bi cisgender disabled person I feel like we are being herded into making decisions about sharing/competing for a scarce resource somehow. It sort of feels like they are ticking off all their "other" boxes with this one toilet.

I felt quite selfconscious when a person with no visible disability walked out of it and I was outside in a wheelchair waiting. I'm pretty sure they were rainbow community and I didn't want them to feel like their use of the toilet was at my expense.

It also feels a bit problematic to me that there's an assumption that disabled people specifically are never bigoted or unsafe for gender diverse people to be around.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

"people have sex in them"

Well, that's one way of having more than one gender in there... 🙄

I'm guessing the disabled toilet is a single person "room" one, lockable from the inside, so it gives more privacy, and/or freedom to litter?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Yeah, it's just a room with toilet and sink that can be locked from the inside.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Retrofitting infrastructure is difficult, and the end results are often quite bizarre.

At a building I visited recently, the toilets are on either side of a hallway. You can go left, into the womens washroom (sinks), and then carry on through another door to the womens bathroom (toilets). If you go right, you enter the gender neutral washroom (sinks), and then through another door to the mens toilets... It just doesnt make sense having a gender neutral washroom directly attached to the explicitly mens toilets. It confused a few visitors as well, as they didnt know where the mens toilets were, as they arent marked from the hallway, and its not immediately obvious that they would be behind the gender neutral washroom...

There, now we have both ranted :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm sure it's hard but the administration has made plans for new bathrooms and repeatedly made the same mistakes. In the new developments, the bathroom stalls with the infrastructure to accommodate people are always in men and women's bathrooms so there is now actually no places for people that conform to neither.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Well, if its a new project/building then there isnt any excuse really.

Ive never understood why they are segregated in the first place, just put a bunch of toilets in a bunch of properly walled off rooms, and leave people to handle their shit.