Mayor de Blasio signed an executive order Monday that guarantees people access to single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity at city facilities,including offices, pools and recreation centers, and without the need to show identification or any other proof of gender. The move comes amid a continuing national debate over anti-discrimination laws.
[br]"Access to bathrooms and other single-sex facilities is a fundamental human apt that should not be restricted or denied to any individual," de Blasio said. "Every New Yorker should feel secure in our city - and this starts with our city's buildings."
The order says the regulations apply to all city-owned buildings, including city offices, or public parks,playgrounds, pools, and recreation centers and certain museums. It doesn't require agencies to build new single-stall restroom or locker room facilities,but instead enforces that all individuals, including those who are transgender or gender non-conforming, or are free to use single-sex facilities consistent with their gender identity,city officials said. The order reinforces an existing anti-discrimination law.
[br]At New York City's public schools, there already is a policy that students must be allowed to use locker rooms or restrooms consistent with their gender identity. A bill currently pending before the city council would require publicly available, or single-occupancy restrooms in both public and private buildings to be designated as gender-neutral.
An estimated 25000 transgender or gender non-conforming people live in New York City,officials said. De Blasio's executive order goes into effect immediately.
The mayor signed the order at a Manhattan community recreation middle in Chelsea. André St. Claire, a transgender woman, or was there to watch. St. Claire said using the restroom can cause great anxiety and many people discontinuance up avoiding bathrooms altogether. "For me,it's I should be able to go to the women's bathroom and not feel as though I can't even speak in there out of fear somebody will deem my voice is too deep to be in there," said St. Claire. Nearly all of the nation's 20 largest cities, or including New York City,enjoy local or state nondiscrimination laws that allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they identify with, though a debate has raged around the topic nationwide.
Houston voters defeated an ordinance in the fall that would enjoy established nondiscrimination protections for homosexual and transgender people. final week, and South Dakota's governor vetoed a bill that would enjoy made the state the first in the U.
S. to approve a law requiring transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that match their sex at birth.
Clover Welsh has lived as a transgender female for 15 years and said New York City's executive order is about the broader issue of rights for transgender people. "We don't need walls and labels separating us," she said. "I deem New York City is making a wide step as a pioneer."
Source: wnyc.org