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
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) yesterday said it had deployed patrol vessels to expel a China Coast Guard ship and a Chinese fishing boat near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙群島) in the South China Sea. The China Coast Guard vessel was 28 nautical miles (52km) northeast of Pratas at 6:15am on Thursday, approaching the island’s restricted waters, which extend 24 nautical miles from its shoreline, the CGA’s Dongsha-Nansha Branch said in a statement. The Tainan, a 2,000-tonne cutter, was deployed by the CGA to shadow the Chinese ship, which left the area at 2:39pm on Friday, the statement said. At 6:31pm on Friday,
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLAN) third aircraft carrier, the Fujian, would pose a steep challenge to Taiwan’s ability to defend itself against a full-scale invasion, a defense expert said yesterday. Institute of National Defense and Security Research analyst Chieh Chung (揭仲) made the comment hours after the PLAN confirmed the carrier recently passed through the Taiwan Strait to conduct “scientific research tests and training missions” in the South China Sea. China has two carriers in operation — the Liaoning and the Shandong — with the Fujian undergoing sea trials. Although the PLAN needs time to train the Fujian’s air wing and
Taiwanese celebrities Hank Chen (陳漢典) and Lulu Huang (黃路梓茵) announced yesterday that they are planning to marry. Huang announced and posted photos of their engagement to her social media pages yesterday morning, joking that the pair were not just doing marketing for a new show, but “really getting married.” “We’ve decided to spend all of our future happy and hilarious moments together,” she wrote. The announcement, which was later confirmed by the talent agency they share, appeared to come as a surprise even to those around them, with veteran TV host Jacky Wu (吳宗憲) saying he was “totally taken aback” by the news. Huang,
The American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) put Taiwan in danger, Ma Ying-jeou Foundation director Hsiao Hsu-tsen (蕭旭岑) said yesterday, hours after the de facto US embassy said that Beijing had misinterpreted World War II-era documents to isolate Taiwan. The AIT’s comments harmed the Republic of China’s (ROC) national interests and contradicted a part of the “six assurances” stipulating that the US would not change its official position on Taiwan’s sovereignty, Hsiao said. The “six assurances,” which were given by then-US president Ronald Reagan to Taiwan in 1982, say that Washington would not set a date for ending arm sales to Taiwan, consult
RSS