Disability and Accessibility

No, there are not handicapped stalls in the other bathrooms. In this particular art gallery/museum the womens' and mens' are very difficult even for some disabled people who can walk, because each is fitted with two fire doors (heavy doors that self close) - one to get into the sink area and another to access the stalls area.

If it was like @[email protected] was saying, I might feel differently but this is in a new part of the building and they are only a few years old. There's also an enormous supply closet next to them. It really shouldn't have to be like this.

It depends on the building. I'm in the UK, and a lot of our buildings are old, and have been updated over the years to add facilities. For example, if the toilets were installed before disabled toilets were a thing, fitting them in with the regular toilets would need a complete renovation. Adding a separate room still needs work, but maybe not as much.

"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?

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.

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 :)