Update, July 2014: The new all-gender bathroom is complete, providing a convenient, single-stall restroom on the ground floor of Olin Library. Thanks to Roseann Sillasen and Physical Plant for getting the installation done!
Update, January 2014: University administrators have approved the installation of a single-stall, gender neutral bathroom on the ground floor of Olin. Because of the scope of the work involved, the installation will take place this summer–our apologies for the delay! In the meantime there is a single-stall, all-gender bathroom in the PAC, accessible via the Olin connector, for those who feel uncomfortable or object to using gender-specific bathrooms.
Thanks for your understanding and patience! –Pat Tully, University Librarian.
Original October 17, 2013 post: This past week, the gender-specific bathroom signs have been torn off the doors on the ground floor and third floor of Olin Library (and elsewhere on campus), and replaced with ‘All Gender Restroom’ signs. A statement of principles was posted as well, Desegregate Wesleyan Bathrooms.
Each morning in Olin we are replacing the gender-specific signs. Here’s why:
– We agree that there should be all-gender as well as gender-specific restrooms in every building on campus. Because of the age and construction of many of the older buildings, including Olin, it may not be practicable to immediately retrofit every building with all-gender bathrooms. Designating all restrooms ‘all-gender,’ with no changes in the interior of the facilities, invites misunderstandings and confusion for everyone needing to use those facilities.
– We believe strongly that it is important to maintain gender-specific bathrooms—not just because an all-gender bathroom makes some people uncomfortable, but because having no gender-specific alternative is offensive to the religious or cultural beliefs of some members of our community.
We are committed to finding ways to provide facilities and services that accommodate and respect all members of the Wesleyan community, and we welcome further conversation about this issue.
If I were taking on tens of thousands of dollars in loans to go to a liberal arts college, the lease I would ask for is some privacy when visiting the necessary. But I guess privacy is not politically correct.
Would it be possible to have all-gender bathrooms on one of the floors and gender-specific bathrooms on the other floor? You say that you are “committed to finding ways to provide facilities and services that accommodate and respect all members of the Wesleyan community” but how is that possible if you are not providing bathrooms for people who do not feel comfortable using a gender-specific one? I have trans* friends at Wesleyan who feel that they cannot study in Olin because there are no gender-neutral bathrooms. They deserve as much respect and accommodations as members of the community who seek out gender-specific bathrooms for religious, cultural, or personal reasons.
Hi Pat,
Thanks for offering an explanation as to why you’ve been doing what you’re doing. I’m not a student anymore, and obviously can’t speak for anyone but myself, but since I recall engaging you over the library weeding project as being a fairly pleasant, I thought it would be worth explaining why I fundamentally disagree with your reasoning and choice of action here.
Specifically, you point out the problematic issues as being that “it may not be practicable to immediately retrofit every building with all-gender bathrooms”, the potential introduction of “misunderstandings and confusion” to those who need to use the bathroom, and that “having no gender-specific alternative is offensive to the religious or cultural beliefs of some members of our community”. I’ll address these in turn.
First of all, I doubt that “retrofitting” buildings with all-gender bathrooms is very difficult; one piece of evidence would be that (as far as I know) all campus bathrooms for multiperson use contain single-toilet stalls, which to the best of my knowledge are usable for people of all genders. Another piece of evidence would be that the group Pissed Off Trans* People seems to have been converting bathrooms for all-gender use at relatively little cost.
Second, trans* people suffer “misunderstandings and confusion”, or worse, on a daily basis as a result of unnecessarily gendered bathrooms. Bathrooms split into two categories of which some people belong to neither and that others aggressively police are, in my view, a rather unnecessary evil. Ultimately, though, I feel that it’s fairly easy to understand a sign that indicates people of any gender are free to use a restroom, and as University Librarian, I expect that you yourself could provide much evidence that even if change may be potentially confusing, it does not simply follow that changes should therefore not be made.
Finally, you claim that lacking gender-specific bathrooms might be offensive to many community members. Narrowly speaking, this is no argument against the proliferation of all-gender bathrooms, since all one would have to do to meet this requirement is to have at least two single-occupancy bathrooms or two single-gender bathrooms to create a safe space for the two dominant genders in our society, and this could be done in a building like Olin while still keeping the majority of its bathrooms gender-neutral/all-gender. But more broadly speaking, the fact that it might offend people is unimportant. Among the things that offend “religious or cultural beliefs of some members of our community” are spelling and grammatical errors, certain kinds of clothing, preferences of food and drink, various habits of speech and conduct, holding certain jobs or attending certain schools, commitment to ideals that some people oppose, and, of course, bathrooms separated into narrowly defined gender groups that don’t include all people and that most people had no voice in deciding. To choose this issue as one where the offended sensibilities of some people take precedence over the acknowledgment of other people as human seems rather arbitrary and, frankly, unjustified.
I hope my reasoning above makes sense to you. But even if it doesn’t, I hope you’ll at least understand that nothing you’ve cited strikes me as a good reason to tell some people that they can’t use a freakin’ bathroom if it’s right in front of them or if they need to because of something—gender—that we literally just made up.
(For an understanding of “offensiveness” as given by a trans* person that has largely shaped my own, I recommend this link: http://genderbitch.wordpress.com/2011/04/02/words-offense/.)
You have as much privacy with people of other genders there as ever (they’re called stalls)- and these are PUBLIC facilities. If you want privacy, you can use the single-stall bathrooms or your bathroom at home. That is, after all, what you seem to think should be sufficient for transgender students. They’re paying to go here too, and all they’re asking for is access to, as you say, necessary facilities.
Hi Emily,
Last year we looked at the options for creating or designating gender-neutral bathrooms in Olin. Most gender-neutral bathrooms on campus now are single-user, which minimizes privacy and safety concerns. Because of the age of Olin and plumbing issues, we determined that it would be cost prohibitive to turn one of the carrels, for example, into a single-user, gender-neutral bathroom. Designating one or more of the gender-specific bathrooms as gender-neutral with some modifications to the stalls is an alternative. But incidents in recent years of peeping Toms sneaking into the women’s room in Olin and sliding devices under the stall to take pictures, led to our concern about both the privacy and safety of people in a multi-user, gender-neutral bathroom.
That being said, we will be looking at this issue again in the next few weeks, to see if there are possibilities that we have not yet explored. We certainly do not want to make anyone feel marginalized or invisible! Thanks for taking the time to comment.
Pat Tully
The fact that there is already voyeuristic violence in gendered bathrooms and that a study POTP has offered shows that these trends either don’t change or decrease with all gender bathrooms. Pat Tully is not an ally. Olin is an access failure. Stop wasting our time.
Hi Pat,
Thanks for your response.
In regards to the peeping Toms, nothing stopped them from doing this in bathrooms that were gender-specific, so citing this as an example of why it would be difficult to have an all-gender bathroom seems to be very counter-intuitive, right?
If you are looking for any feedback I would love to talk to you in person about this, since I am on campus. Do you have office hours?
Hi Emily,
Because the peeping Tom incidents occurred in gender-specific bathrooms, it was easy to identify the perpetrator. Now this would not work if the perpetrator was spying on victims of the same gender, but in these cases the perpetrator was not a woman but a man.
I’d love to talk to you about this. I’m currently at a conference, but maybe we could schedule a time to meet next week. I’ll be in touch next Monday to find a mutually-convenient time.
Pat
Dear POTP,
Don’t write me off too quickly! The fact that we don’t agree does not mean that I’m not your ally, or that I don’t want to understand where you are coming from. Any meaningful resolution will involve you, me and many others on campus who are concerned about the issue. Let’s work together.
If you are an ally it speaks to the failure of that term to carry much meaning or significance. We are certain that we will discuss this plenty as individuals, as a campus, but remember that your group’s shitty body essentialism/cluelessness (“Designating all restrooms ‘all-gender,’ with no changes in the interior of the facilities, invites misunderstandings and confusion for everyone needing to use those facilities”) and failure to educate yourself on how you oppress people is not our responsibility, but yours.
I hope that this discussion indicates that while many people at Wesleyan are “progressive,” the environment and culture certainly is not. Fascinating that people still appear to apply to Wes with this idea that Wesleyan is “radical.” It’s certainly “weird,” but not radical (despite isolated instances of what appear to be radical direct actions [i.e. firebombs, sit-ins, etc.]). Radicalist culture at Wes is as significant or less than many “peer” liberal arts schools. Doesn’t mean it’s dead, though–voices like POTP are so valuable towards a social “retro-fit,” here at Wes. If only they could find ways to get even louder…
I can be an ally–and I want to be–without necessarily agreeing with all you say or do. I really want to understand your point of view! But the characterization of other points of view as ‘shitty body essentialism/cluelessness … and failure to educate yourself on how you oppress people’ seems intended stop real communication and engagement with the issue, rather than working toward a solution. Let’s find a way to talk to each other about this.