Camosun College needs to get rid of gendered bathrooms on campus.
There are many reasons why multi-stalled gender-neutral bathrooms benefit everyone. You don’t need to personally benefit from every reason, but you’ll benefit from at least one, and none will make your life worse. (I’m not talking about change rooms, just bathrooms.)
Equity
People with mobility issues deserve to use the bathroom, too. There are very few places on campus with enough space for a person with mobility aids to use the washroom. If a fully mobile student encounters a busy bathroom, they might be annoyed but they are physically able to find another nearby bathroom that will accommodate them.
Not all students are so lucky.
Unfortunately, trans and nonbinary people need that same space to feel safe, which means a very limited resource needs to service twice as many people. The resource is further stretched since able-bodied, cisgendered students often use the single-stall washrooms out of convenience. Making all bathrooms gender-neutral would further free up accessible washrooms for the students who are limited to what bathrooms they can use.
Convenience
There have been too many times when I’ve desperately needed a bathroom only to have the one I find is closed for maintenance or unavailable because it has a gender marker that doesn’t allow me in.
Sometimes men’s and women’s washrooms are, inexplicably, on opposite sides of a building. This is frustrating. I’ve been in a number of places that have gender-neutral multi-stall bathrooms. The result is that a usable bathroom is always nearby—and these bathrooms are often some of the cleanest I’ve used. Despite the increased number of people using the bathroom, it increases the number of bathrooms you can find, so the availability actually increases.
Lower building costs
While changing existing bathrooms to be gender neutral is as easy as removing a gender marker from a sign, new buildings are given a new design opportunity. Many smaller buildings only need one bathroom per floor, based on the average number of people who frequent the area, but then there needs to be double to accommodate the gender division. The extra cost just isn’t necessary.
While this will benefit everyone, it’s important to note that your trans classmates will benefit from this the most, and that carries a lot of weight right now. Earlier this month, a nonbinary teenager was beaten to death by their peers in the bathroom of their school in Oklahoma. I have peers at Camosun who choose to not use the bathrooms on campus at all because they feel awkward or unsafe wherever they go. As a trans person, this is something we’re thinking about all the time.
You’ve been using a gender-neutral bathroom your whole life: the one in your own home. The way someone uses the bathroom, whether or not they’ll bother another person in the space, and the cleanliness level they leave it in has everything to do with behaviour, and that isn’t inherently linked to anyone’s gender. We know this is true—let’s start acting like it.