Three high school students have developed a smart phone application which will allow gender diverse people to locate gender neutral bathrooms in their area.
Lydia Watson, Joanna Li and Piper Whitehead, students at Auckland’s Diocesan School for Girls and creators of new gender neutral bathroom finding application, ‘Loocation’, say “It’s something quite important. Everyone in society should have a right to find public bathrooms.”
The new application uses crowd sourced information to provide a location of a gender neutral bathroom in the users area. On top of this, the application can also locate bathrooms which have child friendly facilities making it a god send to many different facets of people.
The students worked closely with Rainbow Youth, Youthline, and other members of the queer community to ensure that their application was functional and helpful to the community. Originally created as an entry into the 2016 Technovation challenge, a competition aimed at getting young women into the technology industry, the application serves a significant purpose in wider New Zealand.
The demand of gender neutral bathroom facilities continues to grow with an increase of debate and lobbying being dedicated to the change. Spurred on by increased conversations concerning marginalised groups within the queer spectrum, and discriminatory laws concerning bathroom use in the US, these three students have locked on to a need and filled it.
“Not being able to find a bathroom can be quite upsetting,” Joanna says in an interview with Stuff.co.nz. “This is one way to normalise a simple part of life so [LGBTQIA people] don’t have to struggle to get through.
“We thought it was something people would not typically think about and it was time some attention was brought to the issue.”
Source | Stuff.co.nz
