State ballot Question 3, which asks voters if they want to keep a transgender civil rights law, has put the spotlight on bathrooms. But the marketplace for bathrooms isn’t waiting for election day. There’s a wide range of changes underway.
Take the signs. Libraries, hospitals, museums and restaurants across Massachusetts have replaced the M or W plaques outside their bathrooms with everything from just “Restroom” to “We don’t care as long as you wash your hands.”
After much discussion, Tufts Health Plan in Watertown in May posted an all-gender symbol and some explicit guidance on single-user bathroom door signs.
“The sign in my view makes a statement to employees that we want to provide transgender facilities,” says Lydia Greene, Tufts Health Plan’s head of human resources, “making it more clear through signage that that is the intent, rather than just, it happens to be a single-use bathroom.”
Gender-neutral signs and single bathrooms are becoming routine in new buildings, according to architects and contractors interviewed for this story.
“Since about 2015, it’s become an ordinary portion of the design discussion,” says Rebecca Berry, president of Finegold Alexander Architects in Boston.
But Berry says her clients, most of whom are large public or private institutions, prefer to add these bathrooms quietly.
“They want to be seen as being responsive and responsible without getting into, shall we say, the politics of gender identity, which, frankly, have been used in a divisive manner,” Berry says.
There’s no hiding from the politics of gender identity in bathrooms at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge. The A.R.T. turned its main men’s and women’s rooms into all-gender bathrooms in conjunction with a show about the lives of trans women.
“It was during that time that we felt we needed to invite all of our audience members to be open to this, and then we kept it,” says Anna Fitzloff, the theater’s managing director.
So now men queue with women going into what used to be the women’s room. In the former men’s room, women walk past patrons standing at urinals to enter toilet stalls.
The A.R.T. explained the change to audiences via email and with new signs on the bathrooms. Staff members are on hand during shows to direct patrons and answer questions. Opening both bathrooms to all has also made it easier to move 600 people in and out of the theater during a 15-minute intermission.
Fitzloff says the gender-neutral bathrooms also help moms taking their young sons to the toilet and grown sons helping a mother with dementia.
Mark Lunsford, the theater’s artistic producer, says he still gets questions about the A.R.T. bathrooms, but little “fierce” opposition.
“The minute you say, ‘We have a lot of folks in this space who don’t identify on the gender binary, or that benefit from not having gendered restrooms for many other reasons,’ ” Lunsford…
