When Yelp added a way for its trans and gender non-conforming users to find safe restrooms, it felt like a mixed blessing for a community that’s used to..
When Yelp added a way for its trans and gender non-conforming users to find safe restrooms , it felt like a mixed blessing for a community that’s used to being ignored. Over time, Yelp’s feature will provide a robust database of public bathrooms — the kind the transgender community has been building for itself for years.
While just about everyone can agree that having restroom info right on Yelp’s massive legacy local business platform is a good thing, it does bring some tensions to the surface for the transgender tech community. From North Carolina’s HB2 to the upcoming Gavin Grimm case , the issue of transgender rights does appear to be reaching a tipping point in the tech community. The big question: What took so long?
In an atmosphere of intense political polarization around the issue, figuring out a low-stress restroom contingency plan in public places can be a total nightmare for trans people. Naturally, most people outside of the trans community have no idea how much fear and stress can go into something as simple as meeting a friend for a beer or two after work. Now, that conversation — and the larger accompanying question of equal access — comes up on the national stage in the way that marriage equality did a few years prior.
For a company like Yelp, building bathroom data into a platform that already tracks things like Wi-Fi, bike parking and kid-friendliness wasn’t that difficult. Still, it did require dedicated resources, pulling as many as a dozen people off of their existing tasks, ratcheting up the priority level and getting it done.
Last week, news of the upcoming Supreme Court case of transgender student Gavin Grimm set Yelp’s wheels in motion. It set out to demonstrate its commitment to transgender rights beyond just signing onto tech’s “friend of the court” brief with 53 other companies. Yelp’s new restroom tool announcement was originally timed for the same day as the brief, but after the brief was released a day early, the restroom feature news stood alone a bit more than intended.
“Given the attention this issue is receiving on a legislative level, the choice to build this resource into the fabric of our platform really does — and has — opened up Yelp to a lot of criticism from those on the other side of the transgender rights issue,” a Yelp spokesperson told TechCrunch.
