Gender equality may make Ladies room disappear

Ladies: enjoy the women's room while you can - it could vanish forever.

The high-speed spread of so-called equality laws means that all forms of sexual differentiation automatically become illegal. "Any type of single-sex facility will thus be discriminatory," said a reader named Mark who works as a paralegal.

City officials in Vancouver have rewritten building laws to require the inclusion of unisex toilets, he added, and in Britain, universities are switching to non-gender facilities. They are already common in Europe.

Business people are delighted, as it makes property development cheaper.

The change will also solve a lot of problems for all those "trans" people, like transvestites, transgenders, transsexuals, transgressors, transshipments, transponders and the like. One of them once told me: "At the moment we can be arrested for using the wrong toilet OR the right toilet, which is a bit awkward."

The implications of the change can already be seen in New York, where police can no longer arrest topless women for indecent exposure, since toplessness is not illegal for men. Similarly, if all the male teachers in your kids' school wanted to wear frilly dresses, high heels and lipstick, it would be illegal to stop them. I really REALLY hope this actually happens, as all other means of getting my kids to pay attention to their teachers have failed miserably.

"The problem is that the concepts of equality and identicalness have been mashed together, and the result is absurdity," said Mark.

Now, I know some people will say the whole gender-neutral thing could never happen in Asia. But a reader in China reports that toilets in the city of Chongqing have been designated unisex. Officials were so fed up of long queues outside the ladies' that they just changed the signage so women could go into the under-used gents'.

In India, gender-neutrality may take a while. A top politician in Goa recently complained that women should not appear on beaches in bikinis, as the exposure of bare skin in public was shocking and wrong. He was then photographed with a wandering sage -who was completely naked.

The passing of equality laws would mean that if male sages can be naked, so can female sages. This would also cause children (and visiting parents) to pay attention in school, although perhaps too much attention.

A New Age reader informs me that we no longer say "naked". The politically correct term is "sky-clad".

Whatever. Now excuse me while I go say goodbye to the gents. It's been fun.

By Nury Vittachi

(The author is an Asia-based frequent traveller. Send comments and ideas via his Facebook page)