The Ministry of Environment is to spend NT$280 million (US$8.74 million) to build gender-neutral restrooms nationwide, aiming for a total of 1,246 facilities within five years, it said yesterday.
While Taiwan has 623 public gender-neutral restrooms, that is far fewer than the nation’s 44,000 traditional public restrooms, Environmental Management Administration Director-General Yen Hsu-ming (顏旭明) told a news conference in Taipei.
The ministry has launched a program to double the number of public gender-neutral restrooms, spending NT$280 million from next year to add another 623 public restrooms by 2029, Yen said.
Photo: CNA
The Executive Yuan’s Department of Gender Equality last year surveyed the quality of life of about 13,000 people who identify as LGBTQ and found that 17 percent of the situations where they would “feel uncomfortable or discriminated” were related to public restrooms or locker rooms.
Guidelines for the installation of unisex restrooms have been formulated, including the use of gender-neutral signage, colors and anti-peeping partition boards, Yen said.
The right to use public restrooms was found to be imbalanced between different genders, he said.
For example, women often spend more time in public restrooms, and usually have to wait in line in women’s restrooms, while men less frequently encounter that problem, he said.
Caregivers and the people they care for who are of a different gender might feel uncomfortable when they have to enter a men’s restroom or a women’s restroom together, Yen added.
To provide comfortable space for everyone and empower LGBTQ users to access public restrooms with ease and dignity, a total of NT$280.35 million would be invested in the project to revamp existing public restrooms or build new unisex facilities by funding local governments, he said.
Awards for outstanding public gender-neutral restrooms would also be included in the performance evaluation of facilities managed in the private sector starting from this year, to incentivize them to install public unisex restrooms, he said.
One of the common gender-neutral designs is to divide the restroom space in terms of functions — urinals, squat toilets and sitting toilets, for example — instead of gender-segregated rooms, Environmental Management Administration official Wei Wen-yi (魏文宜) said.
It is also common to transform men’s restrooms into unisex facilities to lessen the problem of long lines for women’s restrooms, he said.
Unisex restrooms would also be added at tourist attractions or public transportation sites, he added.
The ministry last year conducted a satisfaction survey on public restrooms, in which 69 percent of respondents said they would like to use unisex facilities, Yen said.
About 40 percent said they had a good understanding about the need for gender-neutral restrooms, he said.
That indicated a higher degree of interest in using such facilities than before, and the agency would continue to promote and enhance the public’s willingness to use gender-neutral restrooms, he said.
Additional reporting by CNA
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