Week of March 9, 2020
This week’s news feed mainly focused on gender-neutral options in laws, gender-neutral language, and a rise in gender-neutral bathrooms in public spaces. In the United Kingdom, trans and nonbinary people have been receiving major pushbacks from the courts in creating more gender-neutral policies. A trans man, known as Freddy McConnell, wished to remove the title of mother from his child’s birth certificate, making birth certificates list “parent one” and “parent two” as alternates to mother and father. A senior High Court judge threw out the case, but McConnell is now attempting to overturn the decision at the U.K.’s Court of Appeals. Meanwhile, London’s High Court dismissed a nonbinary activist’s appeal to add a third gender-neutral “X” option on UK passports.
Issues with nonbinary citizens getting proper forms of identification persist in the United States as well. A nonbinary citizen wrote a plea to the governor and senator of Virginia to add a gender-neutral option to drivers licenses. In the meantime, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in Indiana was supposed to add a third gender-neutral “X” option for state issued IDs back in October of 2019. However, they have not done so claiming that adding the option would require new legislation by the Indiana General Assembly. Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill stated that, “The BMV lacks statutory authority to define gender; gender and sex are synonymous within the Indiana Code; the BMV does not have the authority to add a non-binary option to driver’s licenses absent legislation.”
Gender-neutral language was also a topic of discussion this week. One article explained how to make spaces more comfortable for genderqueer, gender fluid, and gender nonbinary people. It stressed the importance of making pronouns more prominent in day to day interactions, such as introducing yourself with your pronouns and correcting yourself and others when they misgender people. Another article went over similar topic in regard to respecting pronouns in the workplace, specifically gender-neutral ones for nonbinary individuals. Language is changing around the globe, with some temples in India changing how they give blessings. The traditional blessing for newlyweds and pregnant mothers, “putravati bhava”, or may you be blessed with a son, is actively being replaced with “santanvati bhava”, or may you be blessed with a child.
Gender-neutral bathrooms are becoming more accessible to the public. As part of Denver’s new policy to convert single-occupant restrooms in schools into gender-neutral ones, the Collegiate Prep Academy in Northeast Denver has unveiled the first gender-neutral bathroom in the district. New York State Assembly’s Governmental Operations Committee discussed a similar idea in which all single-occupant bathrooms in “school districts, charter schools, SUNY, CUNY, community colleges, restaurants, bars, mercantile establishments, factories and state owned or operated buildings” would become gender neutral. Gender-neutral bathrooms have also popped up in New Mexico State University’s Aquatic Center and a temporary homeless shelter in San Pedro.
However, recently the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre received some backlash online for their gender-neutral bathrooms. Many negative comments were transphobic, claiming that women in the center are at risk to potential violence from “adult men who claim to be women”. The center defended the restrooms stating, “For those enquiring about the toilet facilities at ERCC we’ve one individual disabled access bathroom on our ground floor, and two individual bathrooms on our second floor. The signs on each of these three bathrooms are all gender neutral in line with our commitment to being LGBT inclusive.”