Gender Neutral Bathroom Challenge

practicalandrogyny:

fuckyeahftmsofcolor:

The challenge: Don’t use any gendered bathrooms or change rooms for the month of April.

What are “gendered bathrooms”? Gendered bathrooms are designated for “men” or “women” by a sign. This challenges includes ALL multi-stall and single-stall washrooms, and the bathrooms at work, schools, libraries, bars/restaurants, and everywhere, really.

There are multiple purposes for this challenge:

1) To give people who don’t find going to gendered bathrooms a difficult/unsafe experience a small idea of what it is like for trans and gender variant people to navigate this world. Hopefully, with some real life experience, you will have a broader understanding of how gendered this world really is. But,

DOING THIS DOES NOT GIVE YOU AUTHORITY TO SAY WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE TRANS OR GENDER VARIANT.

2) To inspire people to fight for more gender neutral bathrooms.

Tips: 
- Don’t drink a lot of liquid if you are leaving the house for long periods of time
- Try to figure out where some gender neutral bathrooms are in your town/city, and plan your day around using a gender neutral bathroom.
- Remember, you can use gendered bathrooms again in May. Some people can’t. 

And, even if you really have to go to the bathroom, try to not see gendered bathrooms as a possible place to go.

If you are interested, feel free to write your experiences down and send them to gnbchallenge@gmail.com. With your permission, they will be included in a zine on the topic of gendered bathrooms.

We also recommend fighting for gender neutral bathrooms in one (or more) public space(s). Often the fight for this aspect of bathroom accessibility is only fought for by trans and gender variant people; It would be nice if other people fought for it too.

(There’s also a Facebook event:https://www.facebook.com/events/209510742488108/)

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PLEASE SIGNAL BOOST!

kyrianne adds:

It would be an interesting caveat to add if you can’t find a gender neutral bathroom, you have to use the one you normally wouldn’t use, but that could cause some actual violence (which happens to trans* people on a regular basis, obviously, but for a thing like this that’s probably not the best ever)

I guess if you want the full experience you could add that to it?