Universities And Bathrooms

The big focus now is on gender neutral bathrooms and locker rooms in schools, is it bad or is it good?

Lehigh University Introduces 70-Plus Gender-Inclusive Bathrooms
The Advocate
By Cleis Abeni
December 02, 2015

Considered one of the United States’s 24 “hidden Ivies,” Lehigh University now has another accolade to add to its Pulitzer-prize winning faculty, flourishing NCAA basketball team, and bucolic campus in Bethlehem, Pa: Lehigh is one of a wave of select major colleges and universities to implement a robust gender-neutral bathroom policy for its transgender and gender-nonconforming students.

Chelsea Fullerton, the director of Lehigh’s Pride Center for Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity tells The Advocate that, unlike Northwestern University, which last year announced that it would be creating just two gender-neutral bathrooms on the third floor of its Norris University Center building, Lehigh has designated 70-plus gender-inclusive bathrooms in almost every academic building on campus, making the school’s trans-inclusive policy one of the most ambitious and comprehensive among its peer institutions. (The terms "gender-neutral" and "gender-inclusive" are used interchangeably by Lehigh and Fullerton to refer to accomodations [sic] that welcome all people regardless of gender identity and expression.)
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“We thought that gender-inclusive bathrooms were an important piece of our [diversity] work here,” Fullerton emphasizes. “A student who worked for the Pride Center two years ago wrote up a proposal that included facts and stats about trans folks and came up with a rationale for why this is important.”

I remember when I was going to grad school some of my classmates came to me all enthusiastic about a petition that they created to have more gender neutral bathrooms I questioned whether the petition would require a trans person to use a gender neutral bathroom because it was very vague in its wording.

I think one of the pitfalls with gender neutral bathrooms is that trans people would be expected to use them rather gender specific bathrooms.

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