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Ladies' rooms could vanish as equality laws bite
My wife bought a product called Extra Sensitive Baby Wipes
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M
y wife bought a product called Extra Sensitive Baby Wipes. If you use them to clean your shoes, they get really upset.
Okay, that's a joke, but I have urgent news on sanitation. Ladies should enjoy the women's room while they can ' it could well vanish forever.
The high-speed spread of equality laws makes all forms of sexual differentiation automatically illegal. 'Any type of single-sex facility is thus discriminatory,' said a reader named Mark who works as a paralegal. City officials in Vancouver have changed building laws to make unisex toilets compulsory, he added, and in the UK, universities are switching to non-gender restrooms, already common in Europe.
Businesspeople are delighted, as it makes property development cheaper, not that profit is their only concern; okay, I'm lying, profit is their only concern.
The change will also solve a lot of problems for all those 'trans' people, like transvestites, transgenders, transsexuals, transgressors, transshipments, transponders, etc. Years ago, one of them once told me: 'At the moment we can be arrested for using the wrong toilet or the right toilet, which is a bit awkward.'
In New York, police can no longer arrest topless women for indecent exposure, since toplessness is not illegal for men. Similarly, if all the male teachers in your kids' school wanted to wear frilly dresses, high heels and lipstick, it would be illegal to stop them. I really really hope this happens, as all other means of getting my kids to pay attention to their teachers have failed miserably.
This movement is going to puzzle old-fashioned people such as Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi, who is usually described as a senior Iranian cleric, but a more accurate description would be 'dinosaur who makes facepalm statements'.
In 2010, he became famous for his theory that natural disasters were caused by women wearing immodest dress. Happily, his comments led to a campaign in which 90,000 women pledged to wear 'cleavage' dresses on April 26 of that year to test it out. On that date, there was a 6.5 Richter-scale quake south of Taiwan. This doesn't necessarily mean the ayatollah was right. It could be just The Universe demonstrating its well-known sense of humor.
Some people say the whole gender-neutral thing could never happen in Asia. But I hear from a reader in China that toilets in central Chongqing city have been designated unisex. Officials were so fed up of the long queues outside the ladies' that they just changed the signage.
In India, gender-neutrality may take a while. A top politician in Goa recently complained that women should never appear on beaches in bikinis, as the exposure of bare skin in public was shocking and wrong. He was then photographed with a wandering Jain sage ' who was completely naked.
The passing of equality laws would mean that if male sages can be naked, so can female sages. This would also cause children (and parents) to pay attention in school, perhaps way too much attention.
A New Age reader informs me that we no longer say 'naked'. The politically correct term is 'sky-clad'.
Whatever. Now excuse me while I go say goodbye to the gents' room. It's been fun.
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The writer is a columnist and journalist.
