Toilet Troubles...

Recently, I've been discussing with a friend the problems in trying to create gender neutralisation and one of the issues that we started thinking about is that of public restrooms. This is one of the public spaces that is unarguably still segregated (with minor exceptions) and to many people the separation of these places is necessary but obviously for Transgender or gender confused individuals this is not the case.

This link has collaborated a list of photographs of toilet signs and is really interesting for several reasons.
The first being that it brings to light the manner in which male and female forms are portrayed in the public, in ways that we are supposed to conclusively recognise as one gender or the other. Many of these toilet signs use highly simplified figures to assist us towards the 'correct' room.

Signs such as these identify the male figure as the universal and the female as the variation.

There are signs that simplify gender differences due to women possessing breasts and men not:

There are obscure gender identity signs using animals or insects to portray gender, the female is a butterfly because she is pretty. The male is a bug, because he is not:

Then there are signs that simply identify sex:

The issue of uni-sex toilets (which first entered public consciousness within American 1990 sitcom Ally McBeal) has been a hot topic of late, as many places have been testing the waters.
Council employees in Rochdale complained about the uni-sex toilets in their brand new 50 million pound offices, causing them to have to be changed back to segregated washrooms.