I saw a story on the local news about a student-led initiative, and watched to see what it was students were concerned about. Could it be the high price of textbooks? Rising tuition? Student loan issues? Nope. The student initiative concerned “gender-neutral bathrooms,” which are apparently a burning necessity due to gender identity ambiguity.
Some students don’t feel comfortable in either bathroom, so they agitated for gender neutral bathrooms. In several local colleges, they have successfully changed some bathrooms to neutral status.
So why were these bathrooms really necessary? I found an article from 2009, in which a lesbian student describes a horrifying situation, in which she was told by a male student to use the correct bathroom next time. The student, who goes by the name Tenzin Mingyur Paldron, decided she felt more comfortable using the male bathroom — but only if there weren’t actually any men in it.
Given the fact that I look like a man to most people, or a very queer-looking female, restrooms are a frequent place of discomfort for me. I usually use women’s restrooms because I have always felt male restrooms to be sources of more potential violence. However, almost always when using the women’s restroom—since my teens and more frequently every year—I encounter some kind of problem. Usually this involves stares or words of some kind; sometimes, aggressive body language and confrontations. On this particular day, at Evergreen, I chose the women’s room.
Upon entering the women’s room, I heard voices, so I immediately left, without anyone seeing me. I entered the men’s and found it empty. Relieved, I entered a stall and closed it. A few seconds after I started using the toilet, I heard someone enter. I tensed a little, but knew I’d be fine, and that I’d just wait for the person to leave. Oddly, I didn’t hear him make any noises indicating that he was using the facilities himself, and a couple moments later I felt a presence outside the stall door.
“Next time, use the right restroom,” the voice from outside the stall said.
The tone was unfriendly, and I experienced a menacing anger coming toward me. The man paused for a moment, then left.
I exited the restroom shortly afterward and luckily found my girlfriend waiting outside for me. I asked her if she had seen the man who exited, and she had. She thought it was strange because he had literally run out the door and around the corner. I told her what happened, and that’s when this experience of restroom intimidation really changed for me. It turned out she knew who he was, that he was a staff member in one of the first floor departments. This change is significant, because never in my experience of restroom intimidation have I ever been in a vicinity that I frequent and experience the harassment coming from a person based in the same location. It is only because of this unique aspect of the incident that I had any power to address it. In the vast majority of restroom harassment cases, the target never has such a chance.
Am I heartless for finding this funny? I thought restroom harassment was when someone bangs on the door and tells you to hurry up. But poor Tenzin runs the gauntlet every time she has to take a dump.
The solution – gender neutral bathrooms – doesn’t really offend me. In fact, the more bathrooms the better. If either normal bathroom is full, then one can just scoot on over to the neutral one and relieve oneself. However, I suspect that, as a straight male, I would find myself distinctly unwelcome in the “gender-neutral bathroom.” And that’s really all this is about:
The campus has a few single-stall unisex restrooms already. Many college campuses have designated such facilities in recent years in response to hate crimes committed against transgender students in restrooms. But the existing gender-neutral restrooms at WSUV are few and far between on the sprawling campus, Teal said.
And the two students’ aim isn’t to have more such restrooms built on campus. That would just allow those subjected to the harassment to hide, they say.
The two want to make people think about preconceived notions of gender.
What gender-confused people have done is carve out their own special accommodation despite being perhaps 0.2% of the population (that’s being generous). On our dime, of course. Now that these rainbow toilets have been installed, I expect that the next story about them will concern men “harassing” people in them, because you can bet your last dollar that those accusations will be used to keep ordinary men out of them, so now we’ll just have to make do with fewer toilets.
