Gender-Neutral Restrooms To Be Required in West Hollywood

In a long-awaited and progressive move, the City of West Hollywood will now require all single-stall restrooms in businesses and other public spaces to be gender-neutral.

This is a huge victory for the transgender community, many of whom have suffered from anxiety, fear, and shame when feeling forced to use the wrong restroom or when trying to use the correct one.  Our trans brothers and sisters are as integral to Weho as all the cisgendered gays who call this beautiful city home and I'm thrilled that now their specific needs are finally being addressed--hopefully this will ripple out through Los Anglees proper and eventually become a nationwide norm. This law rides on the heels of a recent incident in Long Beach where a transgender boy was attacked in the bathroom and the word "it" carved into his chest.  Sadly, this horrible attack is one of thousands that regularly happen all over the country.  Of everyone in the LGBT acronym, trans people suffer from a particularly high incident of hate crimes which leads to sky high rates of depression and suicide.  It broke my heart to read about the suicide of Leelah Alcorn a few weeks ago (longer rant to follow)--well first I cried then I got really, REALLY pissed off that there are still people who are so ignorant in this world and that we lost such a beautiful soul to that ignorance.

Hopefully with more legislation like this, shows like Transparent, and more representation of trans people in media overall we can begin to take steps towards bringing trans issues and stories to light.  It's only through visibility and education that we can start to eradicate the fear of the "Other" that has plagued the entire LGBT community for so long, and especially continues to plague trans men and women.  

It used to be that the Abba-playing-disco-ball-gender-neutral bathroom of Hamburger Mary's on Sweetzer was Weho's coolest bathroom.  In my opinion, it still is, but now we'll have so many others following suit! (And hopefully with disco balls too)