In March, we celebrate International Women’s Day, so we’re shining a light on the issues and opportunities girls and women face in the public realm, and celebrating women-led, women-centred advocacy, artistry, and placemaking.

The evening will include a series of short presentations from women shaping Vancouver’s public realm, an opportunity for dialogue, and small group discussion amongst participants. As part of this, attendees will have a chance to roll up their sleeves and identify priorities for public space advocacy in Vancouver.

More info, including details on the speakers will be posted shortly.

TICKETS

To help us with planning, registration via Eventbrite is required. Tickets are by donation. A suggested donation of $10/ticket helps us to cover the costs of the event.

For transgender people, bathrooms can really stink! Fortunately, Vancouverites have had ample chance to think creatively about bathroom access this year. In 2013, the Vancouver Parks Board struck a Trans* and Gender-Variant Inclusion Working Group to make recommendations on the city’s facilities, programming, training, and policies. In April 2014, the group presented its report, “Building a Path to Parks and Recreation for All: Reducing Barriers for Trans* & Gender-Variant Community Members.” The Parks Board was unanimous in its approval of the report’s 77 points. City dwellers that are new to trans issues might ask: how could there be 77 changes made to these spaces in which we make our #1s and #2s?

Sex-segregated bathrooms are places where simmering discomfort with transgender comes to a head. These scenarios might mean being stared at, treated suspiciously, asked to leave, assaulted, or arrested. For example, in 2002, transgender lawyer Dean Spade (Seattle) was arrested for using a men’s room in Grand Central Station. In 2010, a student at Cal State-Long Beach was followed into a bathroom, attacked, and had the word “IT” carved into his chest. A former lifeguard in Vancouver (who prefers to remain anonymous) describes a situation in which a trans woman was asked to leave a city pool after staff heard complaints about her presence. The author of this post can also tell many tales of being reported to staff at prairie YMCAs, quizzed about intimate body details by pool staff, or followed into bathrooms and confronted.

No wonder, then, that trans people insist that accessibility be rethought. In our city, this means we can soon expect to see non-gendered washrooms in parks, non-gendered signs on expanded universal change rooms, and more private changing stalls in all change rooms. There will also be increased support (via rental subsidies) to events such as the All Bodies Swim, a body-positive event that welcomes queer, trans, and disabled people to swim together.

This is good news. Let the champagne (and urine) flow freely! However, as disability and race advocates know, social inclusion is not achieved by mandated access alone. After all, a sidewalk is a “gender-neutral” space, but women who are commonly harassed know that policy alone does not defeat inequality. How can our city’s public spaces bring to life the promise of the new signs and facilities? Beyond the signs, how is gender-neutrality enacted?

Here are five small suggestions from the outlook of one transgender Vancouverite.

1. Know that trans people often face multiple types of discrimination. As we are often discriminated against in workplaces, the biggest barrier to public space a trans person might face is a high cover charge.
2. Because trans people often report disproportionate targeting by law enforcement, be mindful that many trans people will avoid spaces in which contact with law enforcement is more likely.
3. Choose venues with non-gendered washrooms, or else post a handmade sign on the washrooms.
4. Don’t require legal pieces of IDs for participation (or be welcoming to people with unconventional pieces of ID).
5. Use architecture and installation to imagine new kinds of bathrooms.

On the last point, here are two examples. Consider Monica Bonvicini’s piece, “Don’t Miss a Sec,” a functioning public bathroom encased in one-way mirrors. The effect is that the curious public crowds the mirrored box, squinting to see inside – while the bathroom user has the feeling of relieving oneself on a big public stage with the public scrutinizing. Such art might give a non-trans person a sample of what it feels like to be trans in a public washroom!

Architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro break down bathroom walls quite literally. In Brasserie, a mid-town Manhattan restaurant they designed in 2001, one long sink spans both bathrooms. The barely opaque wall between the rooms parts to let the sink pass. One small drain is located between the two rooms. Gendered wastewater swirls together and disappears. This whimsical design acknowledges – as will public spaces in Vancouver – that all of our gendered fluids end up in the same place anyhow. Recognizing this might just make bathrooms stink a little less for our city’s transgender, transsexual, and gender-variant dwellers.

]]> https://vancouverpublicspace.ca/2014/10/08/ethinking-accessibility-safe-public-spaces-for-the-trans-gender-variant-community/feed/ 0 https://vancouverpublicspace.ca/2010/03/08/women-and-public-space/ https://vancouverpublicspace.ca/2010/03/08/women-and-public-space/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:59:43 +0000 http://vancouverpublicspace.wordpress.com/?p=125

Helena Gutteridge, first woman elected to Vancouver City Council
(Photo: BC Archives, Call#C-07954)

Today is the 99th anniversary of International Women’s Day. Over the past few decades, attention to the role that gender plays in city-building and the public realm has continued to grow.

While it is often still the case that “distinction between masculine and feminine space overlaps with distinctions between work and home and between public and private life” (Nancy Kleniewski, Cities, Change and Conflict) – it is also true that, from a city planning perspective, many of these distinctions between masculine and feminine space have been critically assessed and tackled. This makes the city more inclusive for everyone.

If, as elsewhere around the world, a doctrine of separate spheres characterized life in Vancouver up through the first three-quarters of the 20th century, it is to our collective benefit that, since the 1970s, the role of gender in planning and city-building began to fall under the lens of feminist writing and activism.

It was at this pivotal point, as Leonie Sandercock notes in her book Towards Cosmopolis, that “the spatial order of the modern industrial city came to be seen as a profoundly patriarchal spatial order…” To this end, we can credit pioneers such as Jane Jacobs with kick-starting the critical assessment of cities and the planners that designed them.

The result, says Sandercock, was that

“urban social movements advocating for women’s needs in the city – needs for more and better public transport, for child care, for community facilities, for safety for a right to occupy public space, and night, and so on – have flourished…”

Not only is this better from the perspective of equality and human rights, it’s better for city-building, period. Take the case of urban design and how it affects parks and plazas. After an exhaustive study of open spaces in New York, sociologist William H. Whyte identified a simple principle:

“The best used places also tend to have a higher than average proportion of women… Women are more discriminating than men as to where they will sit, they are more sensitive to annoyances, and they spend more time casing a place…. If a plaza has a markedly low proportion of women, something is wrong. Conversely, if it has a high proportion, the plaza is probably a good and well-managed one and has been chosen as such.” (Whyte, The Design of Spaces)

Of course there is more work to be done. Much more. Another example. Switching from park plazas to the democratic space of City Hall, we note that the local government continues to be comprised of an elected body that under-represents the city’s gender demographic. Where women have comprised between 50 and 51% of the population of Vancouver (and have done so for decades) the composition of women elected to City Council is, and always has been much lower.

As the figure above illustrates, of the 12 municipal elections since 1980, seven have produced results in which the ratio of men to women was about 3:1, two had results in which the ratio was about 4:1, and only one instance, the 1993 contest, saw the number of women elected anywhere near the 50% mark (5 out of 11, or 46%). While the last two elections have each seen four women Councillors elected, the fact is that parity still hasn’t been achieved.

This has to change.

Today, let’s take a moment to honour the many fantastic achievements that have been made – in planning, design, and in city-building in all its forms. Let’s also take a moment to renew our collective commitment to make this city open, inclusive and accessible to people of all genders, ages, ethnicities and abilities.

Postscript – While on the subject – readers may want to check out the poster display created by the Parks Board to acknowledge the achievements of local women athletes. There are some fantastic stories here.