Publication

  • Stalled!: Inclusive Public Restrooms
    Joel Sanders
    Editor
    Quemuel Arroyo, Hansel Bauman, Antonia Caba, Seb Choe, Eron Freidlander, Abby Ginader, Terry Kogan, Magda Mostafa, John Pachankis, Barbara Penner, and Susan Stryker
    Contributors
    Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2024
  • GRANTEE
    Joel Sanders
    GRANT YEAR
    2022

JSA/MIXdesign, Gallaudet Student Center Restrooms, Lounge. Credit: Jeffrey Totaro

This project addresses an urgent design challenge that impacts social equity and public health: the need to create accessible, inclusive public restrooms for everyone irrespective of age, gender, race, religion, and ability by using restrooms as a case study of an inclusive design methodology applicable to other architectural spaces. The book, a joint publication between the Stalled! team and Yale Public Health, compiles all materials related to Stalled!, an award-winning interdisciplinary design-research project launched in 2015 that took as it point of departure national debates surrounding transgender access to public restrooms. The publication explores restroom design from the diverse perspectives of scholars in the humanities (race, gender, cultural studies), public health, law, architectural history, and from design practitioners. It presents a cross-disciplinary analysis of public restrooms in addition to a toolkit with principles, prototypes, and participatory design practices that provide designers with a roadmap to work with institutional, government, and commercial clients to implement inclusive bathrooms for both renovation and new construction projects. The book treats restrooms as a case study of an inclusive design methodology applicable to other architectural spaces.

Joel Sanders is principal of JSA, his LGBTBE-certified, award-winning architecture firm based in New York, as well as MIXdesign, a think tank and design consultancy dedicated to creating inclusive design solutions that meet the needs of people of different ages, genders, religions, and abilities. Sanders is Professor-in-Practice at Yale School of Architecture and the author of three books -- STUD: Architectures of Masculinity, Joel Sanders Writings and Projects and Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture. JSA projects have been featured in international exhibitions and the permanent collections of MoMA, SF MoMA, Art Institute of Chicago and the Carnegie Museum of Art. The firm has received six New York Chapter AIA Design Awards, three New York State AIA Design Awards, three Interior Design Best of Year Awards, two ALA/IIDA Library Interior Design Awards, and Design Citations from Progressive Architecture.

Antonia Caba is a doctoral student in Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Caba's work is highly interdisciplinary, spanning the fields of public health, human development, and architecture and design. Her current research projects focus on sexual and gender identity development processes (e.g., identity disclosure and outness) and health outcomes among LGBTQ+ adolescents and young adults. In her previous work, Caba conducted primary and secondary research to explore how restroom design and accessibility are associated with the wellbeing of diverse populations.

Seb Choe is a trans nonbinary, Korean-American architectural activist and community organizer. Choe is associate director of MIXdesign, a New York-based inclusive design think tank and consultancy that works to make everyday building types including restrooms, university campuses, workplaces, hospitals, and art museums accessible and welcoming to people of different ages, genders, races, cultures, religions, and abilities. In Charleston, Choe organizes with Friends of Gadsden Creek, a grassroots campaign demanding reparations for continued local patterns of environmental racism. Choe was a 2020 Fellow with the Carolina Youth Action Project, a QPOC-led abolitionist organization that building power alongside trans and gender non-conforming youth. Choe’s independent multimedia practice produces books, built-installations, music, and video works that warp corporate design strategies into queer, optimistic proposals for new status quos. Choe holds a bachelor’s of arts in architecture from Columbia University.

Terry Kogan is a professor of law at the University of Utah. He has spent the last decade considering issues surrounding the legal and cultural norms that mandate the segregation of public restrooms by sex. Kogan has written extensively on bathrooms and gender segregation from a legal perspective. His latest scholarship, Public Restrooms and the Distorting of Transgender Identity (North Carolina Law Review, Volume 95, Issue 4, forthcoming) addresses North Carolina House Bill 2, which requires that public restroom access be based on biological sex, rather than gender identity. Most recently, he has submitted an amicus brief for the US Supreme Court transgender restroom case—G.G. v. Gloucester City School Board.

John Pachankis is an associate professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences division of the Yale School of Public Health, where he studies the health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals. He specifically seeks to identify the psychological processes and social contextual factors explaining LGBT individuals’ disproportionate experiences with various adverse mental and physical health outcomes. To accomplish these aims, he combines social psychological methods with life course developmental models of stigma, health, and mental health. For example, one line of his research examines the psychosocial consequences of concealing one’s sexual orientation in various contexts and across formative years of development. Another seeks to examine the longitudinal effects of migrating to urban areas on young gay and bisexual men’s health. He draws upon his training as a clinical psychologist to translate the results of these studies into psychosocial interventions to improve the health of the LGBT community. One of these intervention projects, for example, seeks to promote resilient coping among young gay and bisexual men to counter the negative mental health effects of stigma. He receives funding from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Drug Abuse for his collaborative involvement in these projects.

Susan Stryker, Professor Emerita of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, is a leading figure in the field of transgender studies. She earned her PhD in United States History at the University of California, Berkeley in 1992, subsequently held a postdoctoral fellowship in sexuality studies at Stanford University, and has held distinguished visiting faculty positions at Harvard, Yale, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Simon Fraser (Vancouver), Macquarie (Sydney) and Mills College (Oakland). She is the author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, coeditor of the multivolume Transgender Studies Reader, founding coeditor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker for Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria. She is the former executive director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, and currently serves on the board of directors for the New York-based American Museum of LGBTQ+ History.