You were reading a sign that was required by law to plainly state its purpose in French. To understand it, you need only have studied the majority language of the country for an hour or so.
I am proposing that the same is appropriate for every country. It’s very helpful of you to find a good example of that!
“If it doesn’t cause me trouble, I don’t care if it troubles someone else.”
“Again, it doesn’t trouble me, so why should I care? Everybody should be like me.”
Nice attitude.
Personally, I see these signs, and it takes me 10 seconds to figure out. It’s no hardship. But my wife, who has spoken English for 30 years, still troubles to tease out some of these puns. And I get mad on her behalf that someone decided you need to solve a cute little word puzzle to take care of basic needs. Not only on her behalf, but my 1st grade son who would have trouble differentiating “princes” from “princess” (only different by the double ‘s’).
And when I go to one of these that makes me use my college Spanish, and it’s a pun that isn’t even immediately obvious in Spanish… what the hell are we doing here? We’re putting up a barrier to someone’s basic biological needs, just to prove that the proprietors are jokey and fun people? It’s not jokey or fun to wander into the wrong restroom, or to puzzle out a neat little joke while you’re trying not to shit on the floor. Just awful ethics.
I am routinely troubled by having no frigging clue where the restrooms are. And I doubt I’m the only one who has that issue. If you think there’s a need for better signage, I don’t understand why the focus is on silly signs to indicate gender, and not on the total LACK of signs giving you a clue of where you can go. And that’s a more serious problem to the non-English-speaker, as well.
I feel strongly that most restrooms SHOULD be unisex. And that’s not about what troubles me, but it’s a topic for another thread. I don’t want to hijack this one. But THAT informs my belief that the gender signage isn’t critically important. (Unlike the often-completely-lacking “where the fuck is a restroom? I need one!” signage.)
But, having often traveled in countries where I can’t read the local language, and not being especially good at puns, I will share with you my method of dealing with gender-ambiguous restroom signs. Open the door a crack, and peek, and shut it quickly if you guess wrong. If the doors are marked something weird, like “ostriches” and “koalas”, I can guarantee you that the staff is used to your reaction, and while you might lose a bit a pride, you won’t get into any trouble, and you won’t waste much time finding the restroom you can use.
I also find it annoying when restrooms are needlessly difficult to locate. My response to that is not “we must fix all my concerns before we fix any of yours.” I would rather say “both of those things should be fixed.”
Why do I focus on the silly signs? Because this thread has a topic, and an OP expounding on it, which I will now quote:
Pardon me for addressing the OP instead of your own hobby horse. I do care about that hobby horse, it’s just beside the point in this thread. Anyway, moving along…
yeah this is just a restatement of “It’s not a problem for me, so get over it.” Again, great attitude there.
Let’s also note that there is a distinct difference between “all toilets are unisex, you know what to expect, deal with it” and “these toilets are definitely gendered, so you can expect the typical awkwardness associated with entering the wrong one, but in order to avoid that, you’re going to have to solve a cute little riddle, or just do it trial-and-error and hope you don’t make Karen scream about someone seeing her hoo-hoo.” The former is progressive and fair, the latter is just unfair, anti-consumer, and anti-person.
Er, I don’t think “here’s a solution for your problem” is identical to "it’s not a problem for me. But ymmv.
But I can reassure you on this point. Essentially every public ladies room in the US is either a single-person room with a latch on the door, or has stalls protecting people at the toilet from view as you walk in. Unless Karen is doing something bizarre (and inappropriate) in the restroom, you won’t accidentally see her hoo-hoo.
Sadly, it IS sometimes possible to see men’s bits at the urinal, but women’s rooms aren’t designed that way.
If I weren’t a weirdo, I could with minimal effort send you snapshots of several restrooms within 5 minutes of me that are not single-occupant latched rooms. Again there’s this weird thing with “my experiences are universal and definitive.”
You may have noticed over the past few years that some people have developed massive anxiety about the “wrong” people using their bathrooms. Precisely zero parts of this furore are related to any reality-based concern over who does what in there, so it misses the mark to analyze the real impact of going in the wrong one. People freak out. Why? Because they do. I find it unnecessary, but because I have a wife and children, I understand why some folks in different life situations are protective of that privacy. I was once a teen myself and I would have flipped shit if someone made me share a public toilet with the opposite sex.
If we want to make all restrooms unisex, it wouldn’t bother me personally. I have confirmed that unauthorized viewing of my genitals will not make them fall off, at least not to date. But not everyone feels that way, so we still have gendered toilets. As long as that’s the case, they should be easily and equally accessible regardless of folks’ ability to solve a cute word puzzle.
Got it. Two-dimensional communication sure has it’s limits, huh?
The first picture that came up in a search for the Dark Horse bathrooms in Boulder, CO.
The men’s has a large trough style urinal, so when women go in the wrong door, they’re often greeted by several guys standing around with everything hanging out.
Yup. Sorry if my post looked confrontational. It wasn’t meant to.
Sure. But the reason for those concerns is at best being misinformed and at worst a form of bigotry. I have no problem whatsoever pointing out to them the illegitimacy of their concerns. I will first inform them that trans people are no more likely to try and peep on them. Then I will point out that the only way they’d see the genitals of a trans person would require them to be the creep–at least, as long as we’re talking places with stalls.
It was in fact the trans restroom issue that got me to realize that gendered restrooms don’t make a much sense, as long as we let the individual toilets and urinals exist in their own private space. Sure, the US stall design could arguably be improved, without all the gaps, but, once you did so, there’s not much reason to keep the genders additionally separate. Privacy during the parts that need privacy is attained. Plus then we completely sidestep the problem of how to deal with non-binary gender.
I don’t say any of this based on what does or does not concern me. I actually know I would feel awkward knowing there could be a woman in the next stall. I just can’t see any legitimate concerns once it’s not easy for someone to peek into the stall next to them.
Now this is a good band name!
In general I agree with you. Ref the snip above I have a couple of quibbles:
I agree with your larger point that the transition will feel far weirder than the reality. Absent COVID and with normal amounts of public interaction, after a year 90% of us will be wondering what the fuss was ever about. But the last 10% of us will be more like the guy reported in this other current thread hitting on bathroom gender issues:
IOW totally weirded out by the idea of shared facilities. Given the nexus between resistance to change, religion, traditional attitudes to gender and to sex, and hypermacho men and hyper shy/retiring victim-women, I don’t see this idea going down well in large swathes of our exceptionally ignorant and backwards country.
My son refers to that as a rendering error. 
I imagine the “traditional attitude” is something like what JoAnn Morgan experienced at the Kennedy Space Center: there wasn’t any ladies’ room because, as some guy who evidently doubted his own senses felt obligated to tell her, “we don’t have women here.” So no problem with signs, but sometimes the guard would offer to stand by while she used the men’s room.
Vaquera, perhaps?
There is a Fabulous Freak Brothers cartoon. They run into a sign in Mexico that sez “Alto”, guess which meaning they took it to be?
My point here wasn’t whether people have a right to feel weirded out by uni restrooms. The point is that some people do, and therefore gendered restrooms exist. Where they do exist, the norms around them should be honored.
I think it’s highly unrealistic to say “oh, you just have to expect men are going to barge into the women’s room because they couldn’t solve a cutesy little puzzle.” That’s not a solution. That’s not necessary. There’s no world where it makes sense to have men suddenly popping into a space that women expect to be gender-private. If your establishment wants to challenge gender norms, bite the bullet and go 100% unisex (and/or single-occupant). If not, then design your facilities to respect norms of gendered restrooms. Don’t present a vague message and say “tee-hee, you figure it out”
So, given the hardship they cause to customers, what is the motive for so many restaurants to have cutesy, hard-to-interpret signs on the restrooms?
Serious question. While it’s not something I’ve ever felt needed to be regulated, (and if i got to choose between uniform signage that said, “restrooms this way” or that standardized what was actually on the doors, I’d pick the former in an instant) I’m certainly no fan of ambiguous signs. Fwiw, in the one instance in the world where i have authority over restroom signage, it is unambiguous.
And i haven’t seen anyone else jumping in to defend them. But they must serve some purpose or they wouldn’t exist.
You’re defending the status quo, so why don’t you explain its value instead of asking others to do so?
Must we assume that everything in existence has a purpose? I don’t think philosophy has established this to be true.
If I were to guess the intent, I would guess that the management is just trying to complete a whimsical decorative theme, going a little overboard in some spots. And that’s legitimately fine, as far as it goes. But when it becomes a hindrance or annoyance to the basic public need that it purports to serve, then that should outweigh anyone’s urge to be cute. Make your staff wear chicken hats, I don’t care, but don’t mess with people trying to take a dump in peace.
I am arguing against additional regulations. I’m not arguing in favor of cutesy bathroom signs. I find cutesy bathroom signs annoying. My defense of the status quo in this case boils down to, “i don’t believe in regulating stuff without a compelling reason to do so.”