New York City Enacts Anti-Discrimination Rules for Locker Rooms and Rest Rooms

Beginning Monday, persons touring the city can access bathrooms, and locker rooms, that are in line with their sexual identification.

The city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, signed the order which ensures people entrance to single-gender lavatories at city buildings such as offices, swimming spaces, and rec centers. The move, which comes in the middle an ongoing national discussion over anti-intolerance regulations, also eliminates the need to present any evidence of gender such as an ID card or diver’s license.

“Access to lavatories and additional single-gender toilet is a basic right that won’t be limited to any person, de Blasio said. “We have pretty transparent New York standards, and we will fight for them.”

The executive order applies to all city structures and doesn’t require offices to build distinct single-stall facilities. Instead, the rule demands that all persons, including those, are transgender, are at liberty to use single-gender restrooms compatible with their chosen identity.

New York City’s city schools are excluded from the order as there is a procedure already in place that pupils must be permitted to use bathroom or restrooms in line with their sexual identity. New York’s city council is reviewing a bill that would demand publicly accessible, single-occupancy bathrooms in  to be assigned as sex-neutral.

New York City officials say there are an estimated 25,000 transgender people living in the city which will benefit from the executive order which instantly went into force.

Almost all of the country’s 20 largest municipalities have town or regional nondiscrimination regulations that permit transgendered people to access any bathroom with which they identify. Houston voters overturned an law last fall that would have placed safeguards for gay and transgender people. South Dakota’s governor recently refused a proposal that would have meant the state becoming the initial one in the nation to pass a law compelling transgender pupils to use facilities which correspond with their gender at birth.