This is a pretty formidable achievement for President Barack Obama, who, locked in a constipated relationship with his congress, is making more and more use of executive power.

The political ramifications have not yet been determined, but we can be sure that it will enrage Fox News and prove to the Christian Right that Obama is a recidivist foreign-born Muslim.

If a big step for a man, the transgender loo is a massive step for Americans, given that most can hardly bring themselves to utter any word that speaks directly of bodily functions, or places from which human waste is evacuated.

The new loo is described as a rest room. Perhaps a bathroom. Or a wash room. A facility. Perhaps, in extremis, a lavatory or a toilet, even if these, strictly, also mean places where people wash rather than relieve themselves. Toilet is, in any event, so direct a word that it makes many Americans, particularly men, blush.

They faint, of course, at words like bog, dunny, jakes, john, or the unambiguous lav. One hesitates, particularly in the context, to use the word "girlish" to describe this twee indirectness, but it may well be doubly inappropriate given that it is, in my experience, American men who are most squeamish.

They are not necessarily as squeamish about the apparently limitless permutations of transgenderness and intersexuality.

I'm fairly sure that Jon Stanhope banned any form of discrimination on the topic during his reign. I'm 100 per cent on his side and agree that action was urgent. But I have, occasionally, entertained some curiosity about just how many people were emancipated, as it were, by this act of liberation, what the practical consequences were, and how (or whether) the world was transformed as a result.

Some time shortly after I ceased to be a full-time layabout at university, the loos in the Student Union were liberated by ardent feminists, who proclaimed that, henceforth all loos were unisex.

I still wandered in and out of the place, doing the odd subject now and then, and the main effect, it seemed to me, was an improvement in the literary quality, and the utter filthiness, of the limericks on the walls of loos hitherto labelled as being for men, or boys.

But soon after, most of the unisex loos seem to return, de facto if not de jure, into being patronised mainly by people apparently of the same sex.

This was, I was told, because a good many of the women decided that gents loos were in practice fairly disgusting. This, it was said, was not (primarily at least) on account of the mere existence of urinals, but because of spillage.

Proto-feminists such as myself were actually on the side of the impulse of women to liberate men's loos. In the typical establishment there is usually a marked disparity between the number of loos provided for men and women, aggravated by the fact that women, usually, take longer at their functions.

One frequently finds long queues outside the ladies, steady traffic at the gents.

Some years ago, I campaigned (typically unsuccessfully) for the local liquor authorities to be required, when determining the maximum patronage of restaurants and nightclubs, to decide according to the number of pedestals in the women's loos.

Had Jon Stanhope been about, I am sure that he would have immediately seen the point, perhaps allowing extra credit for any transgender and intersex loos.

So far as I am aware, the opportunity to open the first transgender loo at the ACT Assembly, or in the office of the Chief Minister, was, however, neglected by Stanhope. Perhaps Andrew Barr, so desperate for immortality that he continually campaigns for a football stadium in Civic, could switch his attentions to this glaring gap in public facilities. I would be glad to attend the formal opening and dedication, perhaps to compose an ode.

Actually, I cannot see why transgender people cannot attend any loo of their choice, even if, as I understand it, there are some folk – including Germaine Greer – who vehemently disagree.

The very essence of a loo, except perhaps for urinators and cottagers, involves the opportunity for privacy in a tiny room, perhaps cubicle.

Some women may also regard the loos as places of public resort for primping their hair, powdering noses, gossip, downloading on each others' current domestic crises and getting refuge from tedious opportuning men outside.

Even then, such people are at no more risk from a person of different gender in a nearby cubicle than they are from the discovery that their worst enemy turns out to have been in one of the cubicles, listening to all the slander.

One hesitates to suggest that transgender people who happen to be fussy about their company avail themselves of the disabled loos.

This would be just the sort of discriminatory association with disability or apartness than many transgender people feel to be devaluing and unaffirming.

It is no doubt my own fault and the result of wilful ignorance, but I am not sure what transgender people want in the provision of such facilities.

We cannot be upstaged by Obama, but we must proceed with caution and deliberation and avoid being rash.

We would do well to commission an inquiry, perhaps an ACT Legislative Assembly under the chairmanship of Shane Rattenbury and much of the Liberal Party backbench.

This would give great opportunities for everyone to grandstand and for various dogwhistles about sexuality.

Then the ultimate reward would involve having having Andrew Barr, Simon Corbell, or perhaps the publicity-deprived Joy Burch, rush in to save the hour.

This would no doubt be with a Commonwealth-sponsored infrastructure plan that puts an intersex loo on every bike-path and tram.

There would be a extra advantage in having Rattenbury doing the honours, as it were.

It might distract him from his manic mission to turn the all of the vacant canyons, gulch and dry gullies of those parts of Civic not already colonised by the Canberra centre to be arbitrarily closed to cars, pedestrians, and all those who do not use velodromes.

This is being achieved by miles of fencing, deviations of all kind, endless paving and re-paving, much activity by jackhammers, particularly where people are eating, and, usually, a scarcity of workers actually doing anything so as to prolong the public's agonies for as long as possible.

A good many citizens of this community believe that all of our politicians, in all of the political parties, must be being paid off by developer interests.

Surely such follies could not be planned, or occur only by accident, they argue. The fools.

Our politicians are too stupid to ask for money and developers and others are too clever to offer it.

Why would one bother when the impulse to destroy a once-working environment comes so naturally, often as an insight and a vision.

Come to think of it, perhaps the whole of Garema Place could be turned into a dozen or so toilet blocks, one for every sex and gender and category of victim so far discovered or (self)-identified.