"Which Restroom?" Dilemma

"I can't even tell the bathrooms apart!"

"Bathroom signs: the bane of my existence. Which one's supposed to be me?"

— Dominique Pamplemousse, Dominique Pamplemousse in "It's All Over When the Fat Lady Sings!"

When a character, due to bad signs, gender ambiguity, being transgender, disguising as a member of the opposite sex, raised as the opposite sex, or some other circumstance, has no idea what bathroom, changing room, or other gender-specific room is suitable for them. Potentially an extremely embarrassing or awkward situation.

This is, unfortunately, Truth in Television: Many transgender, intersex, and gender-ambiguous people face this problem as well.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Parodied on one of the This is Sports Center commercials where Western Kentucky University's "Big Red" mascot is having trouble deciding on a restroom (due to there being none specifically designated for a mascot that doesn't have a specified gender). The solution is suggested by anchor Rich Eisen.
  Rich: [on his way to the men's room] Why don't you use the woods out back?
• Insurance company Clarica had a series of ads demonstrating the importance of clarity. One of them showed a man who needs to use the restroom, but he was in some artsy upper-class club, and the signs above the bathroom doors are abstract symbols which are impossible to parse. He decides to wait outside to see if somebody comes out to clue him in, only for an incredibly androgynous person to step out of one of the bathrooms, offering no contextual help whatsoever.

Anime & Manga

• A Running Gag with Hideyoshi in Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts.
  [signs read "Boy's Changing Room", "Girl's Changing Room", and "Hideyoshi's Changing Room"]
  Akishisa: So is "Hideyoshi" a new gender?
• Played with a bit in a Bungo Stray Dogs Wan! Chapter. The Black Lizard follow Q wanting to confirm his gender, and become excited when Q stops in front of single-sex bathrooms for a while. Q ultimately decides to go for the unisex one.
• In Dog Days, Cinque walks into the girl's bath because he can't read the native language. Later, he learns the language, but someone cleans the hall and accidentally switches the signs, so he walks into the girl's bath again.
• In Kokoro Connect, when the group is going through the "random body swap" phenomenon. Taichi is shown accidentally heading into the boys' room in Yui's body, startling a couple of guys who were in there. A few days into the phenomenon, Inaba asks who else has made that particular mistake, and every single one of the group raises their hands.
• In A Lazy Guy Woke Up As A Girl One Day, Yasuda, the eponymous guy-turned-girl, is forced to confront this dilemma when nature calls on his first day at school post-transformation. Yasuda's classmate Sugiura says that some would argue that Yasuda should use the female restroom due to having a female body, while others argue that he should use the male restroom since he still argues as male. Yasuda's kohai Igarashi suggests that Yasuda might go with the female restroom since other males might be uncomfortable due to having someone who looks female in their restroom, but Yasuda continues going to the male restroom, due to being lazy.
• In the first episode of Minami-ke Okawari Makoto, a boy forced into masquerading as a girl, runs into this problem when the group visits a hotspring with separate changing rooms. Some, but not all, of the group know his real gender, so he's unsure whether to just use the men's changing room and risk revealing the ruse to those who are in the dark, or to try to get away with changing in the girls' room and be mistaken for a pervert by the people who know the truth already. He eventually decides to use the men's changing room, only to cause this trope to hit another character: one of the other boys enters the room and mistakenly assumes he walked into the girls' changing room by mistake. Before Makoto can correct him, said boy promptly leaves and goes into the actual girls' changing room.
• Junji Manda in Ojamajo Doremi is frozen over which bathroom to use while posing as his twin Yoko at school. Thankfully for him the ruse is exposed before he can choose, after which he immediately rushes to the boys' room.
• In Otoboku - Maidens Are Falling For Me, this is what gives Mizuho the most trouble about his 'transformation' into a girl. On his/her first day in school, he/she can't work up the courage to visit the ladies' room - and since it's an all-girl school, with only female teachers, there isn't even a men's room. He/she ends up holding it in till he/she gets back to the dorms, where he/she... bah! Where he can make a run for the 'private' bathroom... only for Takako, his instructor in all things feminine, to swiftly lambast him for leaving the seat up... (How he managed to pee standing up while wearing an ankle-length dress is best left to imagination.)
• Homura from Sekirei is a male-identifying Hermaphrodite (formerly completely male). In the second season's OVA, he faces problem when pondering which side of the communal bathhouse he should go, twice. Both times something happens that destroys the rooms, so the problem resolves itself.
• Trans kids Nitori and Takatsuki have this issue early into Wandering Son when they start going out as a girl and a boy respectively. They decide to go with the girl's room since Takatsuki is young enough to pass as a tomboy.

Card Games

• One of the half-breed cards in Munchkin depicts this dilemma with restrooms separated by species.

Comedy

• Sean Lock has a joke about the time he went to a theme pub called The Swan where the signs on the toilets said 'Pens' and 'Cobs', and how he didn't know enough about swan biology to know which he should use.
• Michael McIntyre once performed a routine about going to an Irish pub in which the bathrooms were labelled "Mná" and "Fir". Not knowing which was which, he chose Mná since "it has all the letters of 'man' in it". Only when a group of women walk in while he's still in the cubicle does he realize he's in the wrong bathroom.
  Michael: To be fair, I should have just looked for the urinals.
• The Hessian comedy duo Badesalz have a sketch in which they are in Japan and in a Potty Emergency. There are public restrooms, but they're labeled in Japanese, and the two can't read it. They come up with plans ranging from simply waiting for someone to enter to trying to listen to the urine stream and deducing the right door from the height of its fall.

Comic Books

• It's Bigger on the Inside, a collection of spoof Doctor Who cartoons by Tim Quinn and Dicky Howlett (creators of "Doctor Who?" for Doctor Who Magazine) includes one strip where a Cyberman walks past a door with the symbol for men and one with the symbol for women, before finding one with the same Cybermen symbol as the tombs in "Tomb of the Cybermen". It turns out to be a trap by the Doctor.

Comic Strips

• One The Far Side strip had two outhouses with jellyfish symbols, and the caption saying, "Only they know the difference."
• Insanity Streak:
  • A strip has a human standing in an alien bar and being completely baffled by the bizarre symbols on the restroom doors.
  • Another example is a Scottish man who is not sure whether the door sign represents gents or ladies, due to the skirt also being represented as a kilt.
• A The Muppets newspaper strip has the Great Gonzo pass doors saying "Men" and "Women" before finding one that says "Whatever".
• One Private Eye cartoon, just after the Anglican Church started accepting female bishops, was a female bishop standing outside a set of toilet doors in confusion. Both of the signs were woman icons. Because bishops wear robes. And on the sign they'd look like dresses. Visual gag.

Films — Animation

• Happens to Mater in Cars 2 when he has to go to the bathroom in Japan. He tries the door on the left and a female scream is heard and he promptly speeds to the one on the right.
  Mater: Sorry, ladies!

Films — Live-Action

• The 1987 Made-for-TV movie Bluffing It has Jack Duggan be laid off from his auto plant job because he's illiterate. Trying to get by as a trucker, Jack finds himself at a seaside diner where the restrooms are labeled "Sailors" and "Mermaids." Stumped as to which is which, Jack goes by the "M" in mermaid as the same for "M" in men's. He learns quickly that this was a mistake.
• In Carry On Matron, career criminal's son Cyril Carter goes undercover in a hospital as a female nurse, but the elastic on his knickers breaks, and while he is able to borrow a safety pin from receptionist Frances Kemp to make the necessary repairs, he reflexively goes into the Gents' toilet, where the lecherous Dr Prodd finds him and takes an immediate fancy to him.
• In Holiday on the Buses, after breaking her glasses, Olive spots a Man in a Kilt and mistakes him for a lady, leading her to accidentally follow him into the kitchen which she thinks is a toilet. Luckily, Blakey quickly catches her and escorts her to the right spot.
• In the film Ladybugs, the main character Matthew is forced by his mom's boyfriend to join his soccer team for girls because he's good at sports. After the first game, Chester decides Matthew needs lessons in etiquette, so he drags Matthew into town in a dress and (convincing) wig. After a while, Matthew ends up desperate for the bathroom.
• Invoked in Manta — Der Film when one of the GTI guys exchanges the signs on the doors from the main hall to the shower rooms at a sports center so that he and his buddies can go in and peep on the showering girls.
• In a scene from the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business, Harpo stands in front of a bathroom sign that apparently reads "men". A guy enters then gets thrown out. Then Harpo leaves and we see that he was obscuring the "Wo" in "Women".
• When Mrs. Doubtfire was going into a restaurant's restroom to change out of "her" disguise into Daniel Hillard, by force of habit "she" starts to step into the men's room, just as Miranda and Natalie are coming out of the ladies' room. Miranda points out what Mrs. Doubtfire is about to do, to which she comes up with the excuse that she may need new glasses and thanks her.
• In My Favorite Year, legendary actor Lyle Swann enters the ladies' room because he is too drunk to tell the difference, not to mention too blasé about it to care.
  Lil the Wardrobe Manager: This is for ladies only!
  Lyle Swann: [unzipping his pants] So is this, ma'am, but every once in a while I have to run a little water through it.
  Lil: [shrugging as she walks out] Huh.
• The same happens in the comedy Otto — Der Außerfriesische: Otto needs to visit a public toilet. He sees a sign on the wall that reads, "MEN". He comments (in the German original), "It's a men's world," and goes through the door. What he didn't notice that the person standing seemingly next to the sign actually covered a part of it. It actually reads, "DAMEN" ("ladies" in German). Cue screaming women.
• In Seven Chances, Buster Keaton's character accidentally crashes the "Ladies day" at the Turkish bath because someone covered the sign at the entrance. Hilarity Ensues.

Literature

• In Just Tricking from Andy Griffiths' Just Series, one of the short stories (Copy-Cat from Ballarat) is about Andy disguised as a girl at a school dance as part of some scheme to annoy his sister Jen. At one point he needs to use the restroom, and automatically goes to the men's room, but a teacher stops him and tells him to use the ladies' instead.
• The early Arthur book Arthur's Eyes had a subversion; Arthur knows which restroom he needs, but when he figures he doesn't need glasses after being teased about them, he can't tell the two restrooms apart and attempts to go into the right one from memory. He doesn't succeed and causes chaos when going into the girls' room.
  When Arthur walked down the hall to the boys' room he had to count the doors. He opened the door. Francine was talking. What was Francine doing in the boys' room? "Get out of here!" screamed Francine. "This is the girls' room!"
• In Barry Williams' book Growing Up Brady, he relates the following anecdote from a time he guest-starred on Mission: Impossible as a teenage king who was fleeing from assassins by dressing up as a girl.
  It was uncomfortable — and only got tougher when, a couple of hours later, I desperately had to use the bathroom.
  First, I had to decide which facility to use. At first I thought it might be wise to use the ladies' room, but when push came to shove I just couldn't go in. Finally, when my bladder threw up a white flag, I was forced to hike up my skirt, throw out my pride, and in my most macho posture, march into the men's room.
  Naturally, Murphy's Law was running rampant, and the men's room was packed, loaded with big, burly crew members. They looked at me first in surprise, then in disgust. Homophobic anger was rising in their eyes. I nervously muttered something at them like "How 'bout them Rams?"
  With that, I flicked my long hair back and locked myself in a stall.
• A real-life example is described in Barry Farber's book How to Learn Any Language, in which the author encounters two doors labelled "Nok" and "Ferfiak". Since he never studied Hungarian, it took some linguistic detective work to figure out which door to go through. Fortunately, he was able to use his knowledge of Chinese to figure it out.
• Morris The Moose: Morris Goes to School is about a talking moose attending school. At one point Morris wonders which restroom to use.
• Nice Little Girls: On her first day at her new school, Jackie, who has short hair and wears overalls, is mistaken for a boy by her teacher, Mrs. James, and the whole class laughs at Jackie. On top of that, when Jackie volunteers to build a box, Mrs. James tells her that it's "a boy's job". Jackie decides she may as well pretend to be a boy, since everyone thinks she looks like one anyway. But the other kids just call her weird, and Mrs. James tells her, "It's time you started acting like a nice little girl." Jackie doesn't want to be a "nice little girl" if it means she can't build boxes. Needing a chance to think, she excuses herself to use the bathroom but then is unsure which one to go into. She peeks into the boys' room, one she knows she isn't supposed to be in, and gets scared by the urinals. She runs to the girls' room, thinking that everything is a mess.
• Ana on the Edge: When Ana, who is nonbinary, goes to Fairyland with the Lubecks, who think she's a cis boy, she doesn't know what bathroom to use. If she uses the girls' room, the Lubecks will know she isn't a boy, but she feels too uncomfortable to go into the boys' room. Instead of making a choice, she just holds it until she gets home.
• Gracefully Grayson: As trans girl Grayson becomes more openly feminine, she considers going into the girls' room on several occasions. But since no one knows she's trans, she always uses the boys' room instead.
• Both Can Be True: On genderfluid teen Ash's first day at Oakmont Middle, they can't decide whether to use the boys', girls', or gender-neutral bathroom. They're afraid that if they use the neutral bathroom the other kids will think they're a freak, and if they use either of the gendered bathrooms, everyone will think they're either Ashley or Asher forever. Ash is about to go into the neutral bathroom when they see their crush Daniel, who is straight. They go in the girls' room instead, even though they've been feeling more like a boy lately. Daniel spends most of the book thinking they're a girl.
• Gabe from Beautiful Music for Ugly Children is a closeted trans high schooler. When he and Paige go to another city, he uses the men's room because no one knows him there. Back in Maxfield, he uses the women's room at Perkins because the risk of being recognized in the men's room and Forced Out of the Closet is too high. Because he's presenting as male, a girl jumps and says "Oh!" but then relaxes when she recognizes him as a "girl" she knows from school.

Live-Action TV

• Shows up in a parody PSA, with Trey Parker and Matt Stone portraying a pair of hermaphrodites, who are confused about which restroom to use, and find a sign labeled "Hermaphrodites" pointing to a nasty bucket.
• One episode of The Benny Hill Show had Hill going into the wrong restroom after hitting his head and reading the sign as "Laddies".
  • Another sketch had a woman wearing slacks go into the "pants" restroom, and a Man in a Kilt go into the "skirt" restroom.
• On Corner Gas, Lacey replaces the signs for the bathrooms shared by Corner Gas and the Ruby with ♂ and ♀ symbols in an effort to add a touch of class to the place. Of course, nobody but her knows which is which, and it starts a whole plot about the women being disgusted by the filthy men's room and the men discovering the Wondrous Ladies Room and getting angry that their own bathroom doesn't measure up.
• Catherine on CSI once caught Warrick Brown washing his face in the ladies' room of the lab. In this case, it was an honest mistake - he'd been working on and stressing over a case for multiple shifts without sleep - and she accepts his chagrined apology without any fuss.
• In one episode of How I Met Your Mother, Robin meets her father for dinner at a kitschy Italian restaurant where the bathrooms are labeled "Spaghettis" and "Meatballs." She picks the wrong one.
• This happens on The King of Queens; Doug uses the restroom in an unfamiliar restaurant, and the doors both have South-Pacific-type carvings of indeterminate sex, whose only difference is in their arm positions. Naturally his first guess is incorrect.
• Limmy's Show has a sketch where Limmy is flummoxed by two toilets marked only with landscape paintings. On the left, a flowery meadow scene with a blue frame—and on the right, crashing ocean waves in a pink frame. Limmy's internal monologue notes how the color-coding of each frame is completely at odds with the relative masculinity or femininity of the scene it encloses. What tips the balance for Limmy is the presence of a bumblebee in the flower painting—since the pollen-gathering bees in a hive are always female, that must be a clue that it's the door for the female toilet! Proud of himself for solving the riddle, Limmy walks through the other door—and immediately retreats, while a woman berates him for entering the wrong toilet. "I mean, look, the frame's pink!"
• In Little Britain, "Emily" (Eddie) Howard, the friendly neighborhood crossdresser, goes to a swimming pool. "She" stands outside the ladies changing room for about a direction, motioning that she is about to go in, however the clerk does not give in and eventually she reluctantly gives in and storms into the male changing rooms.
• An episode of Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide has Cookie suffer from this. After he succeeds in getting Lisa to tell him what she wants a guy to do for her by disguising himself as a woman, he's unsure which restroom he should go in to change back to normal.
• Inverted in an episode of Night Court: When a group of New Wave/Punk fans of a female rock star visit the court en masse following rumors of involvement between her and Harry, their attire is so freakish that Liz^note the season 1 public defender after the pilot and Selma^note the show's first assistant bailiff start taking bets on which restroom one will enter when he/she approaches.
• In an episode of Rentaghost, Timothy had reason to be loitering around the change rooms at a swimming pool. One of the attendants started looking at him strangely. He looked at the two signs and, being unsure of what to do and having been told to act like an 'innocent bystander', used his magical powers to create a third sign reading 'Innocent Bystanders' and headed off in that direction.
• Briefly shown in one of The Rick Mercer Report's Heritage Moments, which pays tribute to the large-scale debut of the international symbols for Men's and Women's Restrooms at the 1967 Expo in Montreal. A crowd of Expo attendees in various national costumes wander into and out of the restrooms... until a Scotsman in a kilt pauses in confusion over which bathroom to use. He guesses right.
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch has this crisis when the boy brew (a potion that temporarily turns her into a boy) begins to wear off. Once her voice goes back to normal she hurries into the ladies room at the Slicery. Her left side reverts back to female, and she spends the next few seconds panicking as she waits for her right side to do the same.
• In a Pat sketch from Saturday Night Live, the man who has a crush on the gender-ambiguous Pat follows him/her/it around waiting for Pat to use a bathroom so he can find out what gender Pat is.
• In the 2nd episode of the 1990s version of The Tomorrow People, Kevin disguises himself as Megabyte's little sister so he can use her passport to get into the United States. When he needs to go to the restroom at the airport, he first starts to go into the men's restroom, but a man comes out just as he is about to go in. He turns and starts to go into the women's room, but the man's girlfriend/wife steps out. Once they've left, Kevin takes one last look around and quickly ducks into the women's restroom.
• Two Sentence Horror Stories: In "Elliot" the title character can be seen briefly stopping when faced with the bathrooms, choosing the men's after a moment of hesitation. He then gets harassed for doing so by the principal inside as he's trans, and flees.

Music

• The point of the mock Christmas Carol "The Restroom Door Said Gentlemen" by The Bob Rivers Crew. A prankster switches the signs, and the hapless narrator ends up walking into the restroom to find two nuns, three old ladies, and a nurse, who mistake him for a pervert and beat him soundly for an honest mistake.

Music Videos

• The music video for Etienne de Crecy's "Am I Wrong" features a particularly bizarre version of this. The doors feature an unidentifiable object (a safety pin?) and a cow. The protagonist enters the cow room... and proceeds to Meet The Meat.

Radio

• Steph McGovern had confusing toilet signs as one of her pet hates on Room 101. "Am I an upward facing triangle or a downward facing triangle?"

Video Games

• Defied in Lonely Wolf Treat. Annie May Hot Springs has gendered baths, but the owners openly state that anyone who doesn't fit in the gender binary is allowed to bathe wherever they feel the most comfortable.
• WarioWare: Smooth Moves: One of the challenges has you playing as a worker at a beach who must guide panicking patrons into the proper public restrooms. Apparently, they all need to go so bad, they can't focus on the restroom signs, only at you.
• Averted in Leather Goddesses of Phobos. The player's choice of restroom is simply the way he or she selects the gender of his or her character.

Visual Novels

• Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: During one of the Monokuma Theater segments, Monokuma recalls the time he was stymied by a "Gentlemen" bathroom sign, agonizing for several minutes over whether or not he had the right to go in. While at first you may think the reason for his dilemma might be a species issue (since while he is male, he's a bear, not a man), or possibly because the person controlling and acting as him is actually a girl (or in this case, an AI with her personality), it's actually because he didn't know if he was sophisticated enough to qualify as a gentleman. He ultimately decides that anyone who is able to hold in their poop for that long thinking about a sign is most assuredly a gentleman and marches right on in... only to then be faced with the choice between a Western or Japanese style toilet.
• The protagonist of Double Homework walks into the wrong changing room by mistake, hoping for a workout at the gym. After noting how it looks different from how he remembers it, he sees Rachel walk in and start undressing. Only then does he realize his mistake.

Web Animation

• The Happy Tree Friends episode "Something Fishy" made a gag of Flaky (who acts and sounds somewhat feminine but whose sex was deliberately left unclear until Word of God confirmed her as female) being confused as to which public restroom to enter. The scene cuts away before we see which one Flaky used.

Webcomics

• A running gag on And Shine Heaven Now is that the new member of Iscariot wants to know what bathroom the gender-ambiguous Heinkel uses. Finally answered in this strip.
• Five Color Control pokes fun at Ashiok's Ambiguous Gender in this strip by having Ashiok puzzle over which restroom to use.
• Even restrooms labeled with initials can be confusing, as Wario discovers in this comic from GG-Guys!. Waldo and Winnie-the-Pooh suffered the same fate.
• In I Want to Be a Cute Anime Girl, the first time the transgender main character Cheryl is in public in girl mode, she needs to use the restroom and initially goes in the men's, but gets yelled at and leaves. She ponders going into the women's, but decides to leave instead and go at home.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal gives us this amusing variant.
• One VG Cats strip where the cats are (for once) cooperating, trying to figure out the gender of Slippy from Star Fox — by plying it with copious amounts of soft drinks and then watching the bathrooms to see which of them it enters. They are thwarted, however, when it ignores both and goes to pee in the break room.
• In Whomp!, in "Riddle of the Stinks" Ronnie can't tell between one door with a spoon on it and another with a fork. When he enters he finds a man there and figures he guessed correctly. Both doors lead to the restaurant's kitchen and Ronnie pees in the sink.
• Wondermark Has this strip in which the first bathroom (presumably) has women in it, and bears in the second one.

Web Original

• "Hip Bathroom Signs Are The Worst" CollegeHumor skit. There are just two white circles on black doors. The punchline? After the main characters (a man and a woman) each pick a door, they turn out to lead to the same place.
• A male character (now female, long story) from the Whateley Universe accidentally enters a women's locker room to flee from a bully that is targeting him because he looks girly, among other reasons. While there, he strips down and the girls there are quick to point out how they wish they could look like him.

Western Animation

• Arthur: Besides including the incident from Arthur's Eyes when the book was adapted into an episode for the show (see Literature), another episode, "D.W. the Copycat," had D.W. dressing like and copying everything Arthur was doing, and at one point when Arthur goes into the boys' room at the public library, D.W. decides to follow him in. Cue the boys screaming.
• Family Guy: In "Foxx In The Men House", while going out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant with the family, Peter attempts to go the men's restroom, however, the restrooms are marked "samurais" (men) and "geishas" (women), androgynous-looking women emerge out from the "samurais" bathroom and androgynous-looking men come out of the "geishas" bathroom, much to Peter's confusion.
• In The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Billy jumps into Mandy's body and takes over her life. In one scene, Billy goes into the men's room but is then promptly kicked out. He then went into the ladies' room but ran quickly out. He then just stood outside both bathrooms refusing to go into either one.
• In a season 2 episode of Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero, while in the body of the ruler of Oceanaquaripolis again, Penn has to pick a bathroom. He enters the door on the right side and gets a male scream. Then he goes into the door on the left side and get a huge group of female screams. The next scene after this is Sashi explaining the latest mission for Penn's group.
• In a report on SheZow´s SheSP, this is used as a example of an embarrassing situation. Guy (as SheZow) goes into the women's bathroom... only to change back to Guy right after he walks inside. We see him walk out from the opposite gender's bathroom and into the men's room immediately afterwards.
  Guy: I hate it when that happens.
• A subversion: in The Simpsons, Lenny goes to a '50s theme bar and the toilets are "Cool Cats" and "Squares". He goes into one, women scream, he goes into the other, same thing. He is confused.
• South Park had an entire episode about this. When Cartman is tired of waiting in the men’s restroom, he pretends to be Transgender so that he can use the women’s restroom. He ends up making it smell really bad, annoying the women. He even ends up getting his own exclusive bathroom to avoid gender confusion. To get revenge, Wendy pretends to be trans as well so that she can use Cartman’s bathroom. Things only escalate from there, as the entire school has trouble deciding which restroom that they should go in.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "Rock Bottom" when SpongeBob and Patrick get lost in the bizarre titular town, Patrick complains that he can't even tell the bathrooms apart; instead of a male or female sign, the signs are a question mark and an upside-down question mark. SpongeBob suggests discerning the signs' meaning by seeing who comes out of each restroom, but everyone they see leave the bathrooms are bizarre deep-sea creatures that have no Secondary or Tertiary Sexual Characteristics, which spooks the two.
  • In "The Chaperone", after SpongeBob makes a mess of Pearl's junior prom, he breaks down crying and runs into the bathroom. A second later, a bunch of girls come out screaming, revealing he had run into the ladies' room.
  • In "Plane to Sea", SpongeBob, Patrick, and Squidward fly on a plane to Bora Bora Bottom for an all-expenses-paid vacation. At one point, Patrick needs to use the restroom, so he heads to the back of the plane, where the door to the restroom is right next to the door to the emergency exit. He gets confused over which door is which, and accidentally sends the flight attendant out of the emergency exit.
• In Voltron: Legendary Defender in the Space Mall, Pidge come across a bathroom but as the sign is written in an alien language and the people going in and out are aliens without clearly defined genders she decides to hold it. Hunk seems to momentarily have the same dilemma when looking for a hiding spot. However, Keith does not seem to have had any problems as he comes out of one side quite casually.
• In one episode of Whatever Happened to... Robot Jones?, Jones usually went to the men's room, due to the fact that he was boy-like but after bonding with girls, he starts to experience gender confusion and wonder which bathroom he would go to now. In the end, he chose to start using a utility closet.
• In an episode of What's with Andy?, Andy is dressed up in drag at a dance to annoy Jen. He enters the boys' bathroom but is kicked out, so he has to (reluctantly) go into the girls' bathroom.
• Yin Yang Yo!: Subverted. When Yuck, an Enemy Without made from the bad halves of Yin (female) and Yang (male), goes to the bathroom, he's seen using a third door labeled with a question mark.

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