Unfortunately, nowhere is safe from people who are afraid of things a bit different than them. This hatred can manifest itself in many ways, but the most used tends to be complete alienation of the victimized party. Sometimes, this alienation also comes with legal action, even for something as simple as using a restroom. One Alexandria, Ohio resident found an interesting note directed at trans folk that just needed to be posted online for everyone to judge. Fortunately, the internet felt that the sign was a little bit too much.
The image above looks to be inside of a gas station or some sort of a Quick Stop. It’s of an orange, women’s bathroom door with a sign threatening anyone with legal action and a fee if they enter and are not a woman. The sign states explicitly that should anyone not thought to be a woman enter the bathroom, the staff will locate the offender’s license plate number using their CCTV cameras and file a police report alongside charging a $125 cleaning fee.
Monitoring the women’s restroom all the time in hopes of catching someone to pin that fine on must be pretty difficult. The photo was posted to Reddit, where tons of people jumped into the comments to express how they felt.
“Looks like a single person private bathroom anyway so why is it gendered at all? I used to work at a gas station that had two private bathrooms that were gendered, they were literally the exact same inside. I remember a lady getting mad at me once for coming out of the women’s bathroom, after cleaning it, I was even holding the cleaning supplies. People like this confuse the hell out of me.
Edit: Lots of comments talking about how they need to be gendered because the mens room is dirtier. Let me tell ya, people in general are dirty motherfuckers in the bathroom. Men sometimes won’t lift the seat to piss and women sometimes will hover too high over the seat and piss all over it. Gendered or not the toilet will probably have some piss on it so that argument is null.”
To be fair, the commenter is very right. Why does it matter what gender someone is when it comes to a single person bathroom, and even then, regardless of which restroom you’re in, they’re all dirty. I did come across a few comments that tried defending the sign because of how men stereotypically leave bathrooms, but at the end of the day, does that even matter? If you’re charging anyone you deem a man a cleaning fee for using the women’s restroom, then why not just charge anyone who uses the men’s?
Hopefully, this location has taken down the sign as a result of the photos’ virality. At the very least, I hope that this photo reached corporate, letting those in charge know exactly how some of their associates behave.
