I Quite Like These Gender-Neutral Restrooms

They added these All Gender Restrooms to my campus this year.

We don’t really have gender-neutral restrooms here in Jakarta. The closest thing to those are probably those special family rooms you see in malls, meant for, well, take a guess.

There hasn’t been any significant group of people here who have demanded gender-neutral restrooms. There also hasn’t been anyone complaining about the current ones we have now. If there are any complaints at all, it’s likely about cleanliness, and that’s only for certain places.

Most of the time, public restrooms here are ok. It’s not something you think about. It is truly the definition of something we take for granted.

That is until I visited the United States of America. There, I instantly increased my gratitude towards the public restrooms we have back home.

The average US public toilet (per my observation) is something like this: an unnecessarily large seat, empty toilet rolls, no bidet, a foot-high bottom gap to other cubicles, a non-zero gap for the cubicle door, and — on some occasions — no place to put your bag other than the floor.

Maybe that lack of privacy is by design, to keep you in for as little time as possible. If that’s the case, it sure works.

Compare that to the average cubicle of a public restroom in Jakarta. In most cases, there’s no gaps at all between cubicles. The doors often even have rubber seals (I like to imagine it also helps with soundproofing). And of course, most importantly, bidets. It’s just more comfortable and welcoming.

So, what’s the thing about gender-neutral bathrooms?

Well, the only one I’ve seen is the one in my campus, UIC. It seems they converted the male and female restrooms, merging them together. It’s now just a long line of cubicles. A lot of them, about 20 I presume.

The best thing about these new restrooms is the privacy, which is now comparable to the ones in Jakarta. No gaps. Proper locks. Clean. Comfortable.

The only problem would still be the lack of a bidet, but I can understand that it’s a culture thing.

The UIC gender-neutral restrooms — to me — show that US public restrooms can be made as good as ones in Jakarta. It doesn’t have to be miserable every time you go there.

This is a short rant, but in conclusion, I’m just saying that my favourite US public restrooms are these UIC gender-neutral ones.