Design

Public Bathrooms Are Gender Battlegrounds, Mostly Due to Terrible Signage

Well-designed, simple signs can solve real problems for gender-nonconforming people while diffusing political noise. 
Lauren Quock's Modified Bathroom Signs project is genderqueer take on traditional restroom signs.Lauren Quock

Here's a situation you may never have found yourself in: being in a public place, needing a bathroom badly, seeing the one you'd feel safest using, and still being afraid to go into it. It's a hesitation based on years of experience that you will be scolded by a panicked person for being "in the wrong bathroom!” as they clutch their child. Or worse, that someone will call security because you're seen as a weirdo when you're merely taking a whiz. Or, far worse and not unlikely, that you will be harassed or even assaulted in an enclosed space lined with hard, tile walls.

This fear is your punishment for dwelling in any between-gender identity. For having breasts and a buzz-cut. Or long hair, lipstick, and—that cross-country flight was long—some stubble. (Airport bathrooms are the worst, every time. They are full of grouchy people with nothing in common who seem to start policing others' bodies as soon as they get a whiff of industrial Pine-Sol.) I am on perpetual ladies'-room backup for my butch-presenting partner. We've learned to move fast once people start murmuring, like we're fleeing the scene of a crime.