A Solution For Gender Neutral Public Restrooms

We can talk about gender stereotypes right now. Many women think men are so predacious that they wouldn’t feel safe sharing a public restroom with the next serial killer wearing makeup to disguise his motives. We can even be paranoid and think about how men will dress up in drag just to get free peep shows in ladies rooms.

Now let’s get into the dirty details shall we? I’ve heard cleaners of both sexes talk about how awful female restrooms are with all the shredded toilet paper (if there’s any toilet paper that hasn’t been stolen) or how the smell of used tampons creates an earthy potpourri. We can even get crude and talk about how men don’t wash their hands after shaking their penises off after pissing into urinals or how certain men reading this have masturbated in restroom stalls.

Fears abound. Especially about how men and women mixing together will begin family planning after the heat of the moment beside gleaming porcelain toilets. We all know homosexual encounters have happened in male restrooms. Gross. Even if I’m a sexually liberated homosexual, the thought of getting it on with another guy while somebody is evacuating in the next stall is not the stuff that wet dreams are made of.

America should admit that our restrooms are terribly antiquated. Not the squat over a dirt hole type of antiquated, but in a regressive post-puritanical sense. If only American public restrooms could be as socially progressive as Scandinavian public restrooms.

In Scandinavia, one enters a common area where there are several sinks and mirrors. There are several doors with spacious rooms usually to the left and right. Each room is surprisingly clean. The stereotypes are gone. One can be impressed with all genders for keeping the restrooms immaculate. There’s hardly any graffiti at all. One has privacy because, after locking the door, there’s nobody peering underneath the stall to see your feet. Scandinavians don’t need to look at people’s feet to see if a toilet is occupied. If a door is locked that means somebody is inside. Simple. Spaciousness means handicap people can use every restroom and not have just one big stall at the end. Private and secure, families can use the restroom together.

Nope, things always have to be more difficult in the USA. I am one hundred percent convinced that the reason why we have stalls showing ankles with flimsy dividers is too keep people from fucking. It comes down to lack of respect for certain human basic needs. American public restrooms have more graffiti. They are dirtier as well. Our stalls are cramped unless one uses the sole handicap stall at the end. Greed has his say too. Who wants to tear down public restrooms to put in a central common area with multiple rooms to the left or right? But Target corporation is addressing this by creating gender neutral restrooms. Once people realize Target’s gender neutral restrooms are modeled after Scandinavian public restrooms, with more privacy and security, more public places will employ the same.

Not all public restrooms are segregated in Scandinavia, but they still afford more privacy. Take the Oslo airport. The men’s restrooms don’t have semi-private and flimsy stalls. The airport restrooms have small cabins with locks that alert people somebody is doing business inside.

The real reason why conservatives don’t want gender neutral restrooms is they don’t want transgender people to exist at all, whether they are transsexuals, transvestites, two-spirit or those who appear to be androgynous. Ask somebody born intersex what they think. Which shows how ridiculous and juvenile basing access to do nature’s bidding based on genitalia is.

I know post-puritanical America isn’t Scandinavia. In Scandinavia there are co-ed clothing optional saunas at university student housing there. Of course conservative Americans would think rapes galore will happen or drunken orgies will happen, if we had co-ed clothing optional saunas in university dorms here. I accidentally walked into a Norwegian women’s locker room and the surprised look on my face made the undressing female students laugh with glee. They would scream and report a peeping tom here in America.

A young blond female janitor regularly swapped a mop in front of nude showering men at a gym I frequented in Norway. Strange when it comes to modesty, Scandinavians are much more open about the body, except when it comes to shitting and pissing. The restroom in the men’s locker room had the same type of spacious and handicap accessible toilet room to the side, separated from the lockers and showers. They layout still afforded much privacy when it came to relieving oneself.

Of course it’s not the same everywhere in Europe. Men openly piss in sidewalk urinals as pedestrians walk by in certain parts of Amsterdam. I guess that is better than smelling urine in downtown alleyways like here in America. I had a difficult time using the public restrooms after returning home. I don’t like the flimsy restroom stalls that are so close to another person, you can hear the grunts, the plops, pisses trickling into toilet water, and the flushing, let alone the malodorous after effects. We need to not only change the way we think about the human body and sexuality but the physical structure of our public restrooms.

To the conservatives, Jesus never said anything against gender neutral restrooms because he most likely did his business by squatting over a hole or going somewhere among the desert bushes. It’s you who has the problem, and probably not Jesus and definitely not transgender folks or even Scandinavians for that matter.