This night is winding down, but time means nothing

carrawayeffect:

Women’s and men’s washrooms: we encounter them nearly every time we venture into public space. To many people the separation of the two, and the signs used to distinguish them, may seem innocuous and necessary. Trans people know that this is not the case, and that public battles have been waged over who is allowed to use which washroom. The segregation of public washrooms is one of the most basic ways that the male-female binary is upheld and reinforced.

As such, washroom signs are very telling of the way societies construct gender. They identify the male as the universal and the female as the variation. They express expectations of gender performance. And they conflate gender with sex.

I present here for your perusal, a typology and analysis of various washroom signs.

Interesting stuff.

This is a really interesting article!  I had no idea so many variations on the bathroom sign existed.

There’s a coffee shop in the U District here that plays with this.  The restroom doors don’t say “men” and “women”; instead, one has a Barbie doll with her hair cut short and wearing masculine clothing, and the other has a Ken doll wearing a wig and a dress.  I couldn’t quite decide which one I was supposed to use, and then decided it didn’t matter.  A+, would pee again.

(And for the record, that coffee shop makes a mean Mexican mocha.)

(via cabell)