Have you ever been to a restaurant or bar and been confused by the symbols on the restroom doors - not knowing which one represents that of your sex?
Two examples:
Others?
There used to be a bar in Tucson where the women’s room said:
Men’s
That way 
and the men’s room said:
Women’s
That way
Relatively common are XX and XY, or the Mars and Venus symbols. I’ve also seen doors labeled “Either” and “Or”.
The first time my mom visited Ireland, she saw a pair of restrooms labeled in Gaelic, with words that started with “M” and “F”. Fortunately, she remembered enough church-Latin to recognize them as cognates of “mulier” and “vir”, rather than assuming “male” and “female”.
My google skills are failing me this morning, but there was one that had the standard male figure for the men, but a bunch of the female figures for the women…and the women all had speech balloons
My favorite was a bowling alley in Nitro, WV (IIRC)
The ladies’ room sign said:
Olivia Newton’s John
The gents’ said
Elton’s John
I once worked in a small office that had just one bathroom, with two stalls.
There were two makeshift cardboard signs hanging from separate thumbtacks on the door. They were hanging on loops of string, such that you could turn them around as needed.
One sign said “Occupied” on one side and “Vacant” on the other side. The other sign said “Shy” on one side and “Gregarious” on the other side.
Back in the late 80s I was in a Tex-Mex restaurant in Dallas. The mens’ bathroom was marked “vaqueros”. I’ve forgotten what it said on the womens’ bathroom, but it was something equally incomprehensible for non-Spanish-speakers. I don’t speak Spanish, but I’ve watched a ton of Westerns and I know what vaquero means.
One time, as I was headed to the bathroom there, I walked around the corner into the hallway where the bathrooms were located and I saw a woman standing there looking confusedly from one door to the other. I pointed at the womens’ door and said, “That one.” She gratefully cried, “Oh, thank you!” as she dashed through the door into the restroom. So I’ve got that going for me.
The Irish bar in our neighborhood has signs which read “Mná” and “Fir” (Irish for “Women” and “Men,” respectively), but below those are signs which say “Women” and “Men” in English, as well.
Go to Disneyland. You begin with Fantasyland, and the doors are labeled Princes and Princesses.
A hundred or so years ago, my family took my grandmother to Disneyland. Somebody should have gone with her when she needed to pee, because the cutsie-poo labels on the doors confused her. She returned to the group, quite upset.
“What that man said to me!”
Never let grandma go to the restroom unescorted!
~VOW
A few years ago, a group of relatives and I had lunch at a restaurant none of us had been to before. Near the end of the meal, a couple members of our party went to use the restroom. They came back and said they couldn’t figure out which was the men’s and which was the women’s. A couple more of us went with them to see if we could figure it out. The restroom doors each had a drawing of a person on them. The people in the drawings were dressed similarly and both had a somewhat androgynous appearance. It also didn’t help that the hallway was dimly lit. One of them definitely looked more like a woman and one more like a man to me, though, and the others trusted my judgement. In the end we all used the restroom that we thought was appropriate.
I remember a restaurant where the men’s room was painted as a women’s door on the inside, causing you momentary disconcertion on the way out. I assume the women’s room was the opposite.
Not many cutsie-poo labels in DL.
And pretty much,“Princes and Princesses” aint hard to figure out.
Personally I dont care which bathroom you use as long as you wash your damn hands and dont flush weird stuff down the toilet.
However, i admit i am not a big fan of stupid restroom signs.
Years ago I heard of a bar near a courthouse called “The Jury Room”. The restrooms were labelled “Hung” and “Split”.
From “The Restroom Door Said ‘Gentlemen’” by Bob Rivers.
The restroom door said, “gentlemen” and I would like to find,
The crummy little CREEP who had the nerve to switch the signs.
'Cause I got two black eyes and one high heel up my behind,
Now I can’t, sit with comfort and joy.
Boy oh boy.
Now I’ll never sit with comfort and joy.
A local tavern here has two doors, both marked “Whichever”.
Could be worse. I heard once of a women’s room that has, just inside the door, a statue of a man at a urinal.
@DrDeth, “princes” and “princesses” aren’t too hard to figure out, if you realize that that’s what the words are. But those two words can very easily be confused for each other at a glance, especially for someone with failing eyes
Years ago, or probably more like a decade ago now, California passed a law saying that all single user restrooms should be non-gendered. So in compliance with the new law, my local Trader Joe’s changed the signs on their two single user restrooms to simply read “restroom” with no gender. I think it’s great to use whichever restroom happens to be unoccupied, but it seemed to confuse some of the older customers. Shortly after the change I was in line behind an older woman who seemed confused as to which one was the “correct” one for her to use, and seemed uncomfortable with the idea that it didn’t matter which one she used. She insisted on waiting for the one that used to be the women’s room even though the other one was unoccupied, and let me go ahead of her and use the other one.
There was once a gay/lesbian bar in NYC. The rest room doors had the “king” and “queen” chess pieces on them: “King” for women and “Queen” for men.
One of my earliest memories was being at a restaurant (with my parents, of course, I was only 4, perhaps 5), and I needed to go to the bathroom. We were through eating, and the grownups were all talking. I told them that I knew which was men’s and which was women’s, so I could go by myself (I am a male). I couldn’t read, but I knew the shorter word was the men’s. Well, these doors were labeled “Ladies” and “Gentlemen”. I stared at them for a minute, then decided the shorter one was what I needed (once you make a rule, stick to it).
Some lady led me back to our table and all the grownups thought it was hilarious. I was mortified, and the incident probably knocked my reading skills back a year or so.