California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a law requiring K-12 schools to provide gender-neutral bathrooms by July 2026.
The new law, Senate Bill 760, was among a series of laws signed by Newsom Saturday to expand protections for the state’s LGBTQ community.
“California is proud to have some of the most robust laws in the nation when it comes to protecting and supporting our LGBTQ+ community,” Newsom said in a statement.
Under the law, “each school district, county office of education, and charter school” would be required to have at least one gender-neutral bathroom on campus on or before July 1, 2026. The bathroom must be available for use during school hours and during school functions when students are present, the law states.
Disabled, my favorite gender
🥱
Disabled toilets are already gender neutral, I guess they’ll just stick another sign on the door?
only if they’re single-occupant bathrooms. which. for schools… are usually not going to be the case. personally, that should be the solution. just rip out both bathrooms, install single occupant cells. nobody cares what you are. the only sign needed is an ‘occupied’/‘vacant’ on the latch.
(edit: well, you’d still have to have a placard with braille on it so blind people can know what kind of room it is.)
Most of the disabled stalls I’ve encountered (at least in the US) are within the gendered bathrooms. So even if the stall is nominally gender neutral one first has to enter the men’s room or women’s room.
Ah, in the UK the disabled ones are separate and you need a key
So much of the online bathroom discussion makes more sense when one realises that US public restroom designs are insane.
Yeah here in the good ol (hahahaha) USA most establishments have a separate “restroom” for men and women which consist of a row of sinks for washing up and a number of stalls for toilets (and urinals in men’s rooms of course).
Sometimes the urinals are just in a row on the wall with no dividers between. But there’s usually one or two disabled stalls as well, although they’re not locked in any way.
Do you know you can just buy those keys online?
I didn’t know this for years. So handy.
But be careful as people will ask staff for the key and open it on you haha
Wow I would have thought it would at least have a regular deadbolt from the inside in addition to the external lock.
Also typing this comment makes me realise it’s a little weird to externally lock public toilets in the first place. But I know we can’t have nice things.
i never really got the whole separated toilets thing anyway, it’s a toilet, do your thing and skedaddle
we need to redesign toilet stalls to be more private anyways
Can we adopt the It’s always sunny sign instead?
“Animal Shit House”
Good reddit joke.
You’re so funny.
Big port-a-potty in bed with politicians
So there will stil be regular male/female toilets? In the end I’m kinda whatever about this as long as it’s not used as an excuse to remove urinals.
I haven’t read the text of the law, but unless it explicitly says otherwise, I suspect it will be up to the schools/districts. If they have the money and room to build separate non-gendered bathrooms, then some of them will do so. But I suspect that most will simply convert existing bathrooms and not have gender specific bathrooms at all.
Yes, every gender neutral bathroom I’ve seen here at elementary schools and college campuses have single occupancy gender neutral bathroom/s next to the men’s and women’s bathrooms.
if all the bathrooms are neutral there’s no need to have " regular bathrooms"
I don’t think that’s what he was asking.
stares in confusion But urinals are the absolute worst. Benefits: cost less money and less space. Drawbacks: lack of privacy and inevitable splashback. Why would you want them?
Urinals are more convenient when you just need to take a quick piss. I don’t get why another person next to you is a problem. Also just don’t piss dead center into the thing considering splashback. Do I really have to explain pissing now?
Urinals offer exactly zero additional convenience, and there is no splashback-free angle.
It really was just a regular bathroom all along.
The gender neutral bathroom was inside here the whole time.
Can we just have a pee bathroom and a poop bathroom?
Important consequence of this in the context of elementary schools: most little boys don’t lift up the seat when they pee and their aim is atrocious. At my kids’ school, the gender neutral bathrooms are the toilets of last resort.
Under the law, “each school district, county office of education, and charter school” would be required to have at least one gender-neutral bathroom on campus on or before July 1, 2026.
Whut?? Why not just make them all human restrooms? How does it takes two+ years to switch some signage and inform people to use whatever door they wish?
I’ve been living in a city with “gender-neutral” restrooms for so long that I forget what it used to be like. Well, aside from sports and entertainment complexes.
So glad he’s focusing on the things that really matter.
Yes, it does matter. A positive and safe environment for students is imperative for them to learn. That includes trans and non-binary students.
well we know where your values stand on the subject
