There’s an architectural wonder in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC at The Coupe DC (@thecoupedc) – the bathroom.
It’s a multi-stall, gender neutral arrangement. It’s respectful because it doesn’t require human beings to select a gender when they use it. It’s safer because it doesn’t segregate people identifying as male or female into separate rooms. It’s innovative because it connects all genders together in a single space. And it’s beautiful because it shows that people care.
The space was a little hard to photograph, I did my best.
Yes, in 2015, a doctor interested in health and safety is going to be excited by bathrooms. I wrote about this prevously: Why doctors should care about gender neutral restrooms : health, safety, and equality, in Washington, DC | Ted Eytan, MD
Thanks to Denton Shanks, DO, MPH (@DentonShanks) for letting me know about these at a previous MakerDocsDC discussion. Innovation is less about what you and more about your network. As my colleague Laureen Lazarovici (@LaureenLMP) taught me – “Proudly discovered elsewhere.”
#transformKP Love this “Proudly discovered elsewhere” – thanks for the inspiration @LaureenLMP ! Antidote to “not invented here”….
— Ted Eytan, MD, MS, MPH (@tedeytan) December 2, 2014
It’s not yet the law in Washington, DC that multi-stall bathrooms need to be gender neutral, but it is the law around single-stall restrooms, and legal or not, it should be the norm in health care. We are working on that, too.