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.
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.
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
and you need a key
Why? It is already so invenient for people without disabilities to somewhere and ask for something, that for disabled it will be nearly-impossible.
It turns out, California is not part of the UK and your experience isn’t relevant.
