Ladies: enjoy the women's room while you can - it could vanish forever.
The
high-speed spread of so-called equality laws means that all forms of
sexual differentiation automatically become illegal. "Any type of
single-sex facility will thus be discriminatory," said a reader named
Mark who works as a paralegal.
City officials in Vancouver have
rewritten building laws to require the inclusion of unisex toilets, he
added, and in Britain, universities are switching to non-gender
facilities. They are already common in Europe.
Business people are delighted, as it makes property development cheaper.
The
change will also solve a lot of problems for all those "trans" people,
like transvestites, transgenders, transsexuals, transgressors,
transshipments, transponders and the like. 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."
The implications of the change
can already be seen in New York, where 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 actually happens, as all other
means of getting my kids to pay attention to their teachers have failed
miserably.
"The problem is that the concepts of equality and
identicalness have been mashed together, and the result is absurdity,"
said Mark.
Now, I know some people will say the whole
gender-neutral thing could never happen in Asia. But a reader in China
reports that toilets in the city of Chongqing have been designated
unisex. Officials were so fed up of long queues outside the ladies' that
they just changed the signage so women could go into the under-used
gents'.
In India, gender-neutrality may take a while. A top
politician in Goa recently complained that women should not appear on
beaches in bikinis, as the exposure of bare skin in public was shocking
and wrong. He was then photographed with a wandering 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 visiting parents) to pay attention in school, although
perhaps 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. It's been fun.
(01.05.2015 - Nury Vittachi is an Asia-based frequent traveller. Send comments and ideas via his Facebook page)
