Ted Trautman explores America’s public toilet regulations, which still mandate gender-segregated restrooms in most states and cities:
Many states follow the guidelines laid out in the Uniform Plumbing Code, which stipulates that “separate toilet facilities shall be provided for each sex,” with exceptions for very small businesses as measured in square footage and/or customer traffic. In the eyes of the law in these places, a business with two unisex toilets can be considered to have no toilets at all, since neither facility explicitly serves men or women.
Such laws date back to 1887, according to Terry S. Kogan, a University of Utah law professor and a contributor to the book Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing. One hundred and twenty-seven years ago, Massachusetts passed the first law mandating gender-segregated toilets, and many states quickly followed suit. Many of those laws have never been substantially modified, with obvious exceptions in progressive enclaves like D.C. and San Francisco, meaning that much of the United States’ toilet-related building codes reflect a literally Victorian prudishness that we might mock in other contexts.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown delves deeper into this regulatory morass:
These days, America’s public restrooms are regulated by two separate federal agencies.
Workplace restrooms are the purview of the U.S. Department of Labor, which sets state guidelines through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Non-workplace public restroom guidelines are governed, broadly, by the Department of Health and Human Services.
More specific regulations are largely enacted though through state and municipal building codes. These codes dictate exactly how many toilets and/or urinals that buildings, businesses, and other public entities must provide, based on occupancy capacity. And they mandate not only the existence of separate men’s and women’s bathrooms but also how many “fixtures”(toilets or urinals) must exist for each.
“Restrooms are still almost exclusively gendered,” writes Suzanne LaBarre at Fast Company. “It’s a form of exclusion that’s written into state building code, presenting an obstacle for gender neutral bathroom advocates.”
The Dish 