Nagoya University announced that it will open Gender Research Library, the first special library for gender studies in Japan on November 1st.

At Gender Research Library, people can have access to over 40,000 books and documents related to gender. It was built for the bettering of gender studies and providing more information related to gender. Anyone can use this library and it is likely to be a hot topic.

There will be books on the history of women’s human rights and discrimination based on gender and diaries written by gay women in Gender Research Library.

There will be six bathrooms. Four of them will be all-gender bathrooms and the two will be ladies-first bathrooms.

The bathroom icons will be unique such as a person with beard wearing a skirt , a man wearing a dress, and a woman wearing pants. Ms. Umazume, a designer living in Fukuoka, designed the bathroom icons “to provide opportunities for people to think about gender issues.”

For your information, a lot of questions have been raised whether the use of different pictures that aims to show gender neutrality at the entrance of a bathroom is good or not. For example, some people say that pictures showing both male and female characteristics make transgender people feel like they are ugly creatures such as chimera. The icons in Gender Research Library’s bathrooms were criticized, too. In 2015, PROUD, a support group in Kagawa Prefecture, invited public participation in making gender neutral designs for bathrooms. As a result, many people voted for the designs that did not have too much rainbow colors and LGBTQ-ness. This is how the gender neutral icons were made and selected. Gender Research Library use the designs. On the campuses of Osaka University and Kyoto Seika University, they use gender neutral icons, too.

17/10/2017