restrooms

About time!

Chicago activists are asking business owners to commit to offering gender-variant customers the restroom of their choice. Under the T-Friendly Bathroom Initiative, this year 500 businesses and organizations will be asked to sign a pledge that they will allow gender-variant customers to use the restroom of their choice. Those signing the pledge will receive a window decal so that potential customers can easily identify them.

A transgender woman has been arrested for using the women's restroom in a downtown Houston library. The legality of Majanae Chambers's arrest is in question, however. Earlier this year Houston mayor Annise Parker (pictured) expanded an anti-discrimination policy to allow city employees to use the facilities of their choice on the basis of their gender identity, not their sex.

Tyjanae Moore was arrested last week for using the women’s restroom at the public library in downtown Houston because police said she was still officially a man. Moore, 26, pleaded guilty even though she was in compliance with an executive order by Mayor Annise Parker that extends the city’s non-discrimination ordinance to allow transgender people to use the city restroom of their choice.

If you need us we'll be in the second row, on the aisle, closest to the restroom!

Maine legislation that would restrict transgender people’s right to use the restroom of their choice drew emotional testimony at the state capitol in Augusta Tuesday, with many speakers opposed to the bill and supportive of transgender rights. Republican state representative Kenneth Fredette put the bill forward in response to a Maine Human Rights Commission ruling that found a school in Orono and a Denny’s restaurant in Auburn discriminated against transgender people by not allowing them to use the restroom of their choice, a right established by the state’s human rights act in 2005.

Entertainment publicist Mona Elyafi doesn't delight in the "Hal-WHORE-ween" the way some women do. And she's equally perplexed by the public restroom hook up phenomenon popular in L.A. But what happens after you get lucky in the lavatory?

A transgender professor was denied tenure and fired from Southeastern Oklahoma State University for her gender identity. Rachel Tudor, who is transgender, was told by the school's human resources department that she could only use the single-use handicapped restroom after she underwent gender reassignment surgery.

Two transgender high school students in Fort Collins, Colo., say they have been forbidden to use student restrooms, and one of them, 16-year-old Dionne Malikowski, just got suspended for doing so. Malikowski, a trans girl, and her friend Kurt Peters, also 16 and a trans guy, say they have been told to use the staff bathrooms at Fort Collins High School. But, Malikowski told reporters, “There’s not staff bathrooms all over the school, so when you really got to pee, you got to pee.”