Last weekend my friend came to visit me here at school, and we were spending a few hours in the library. At one point, he got up to go find the bathroom, and I directed him to the basement because, for whatever reason, I generally think of those bathrooms as cleaner than the ones on the upper level. When he came back to where we were sitting, he looked at me with equal parts amusement and bewilderment.
“I think—I mean, I hope I used the correct bathroom. I don’t know, though.”
This struck me as really strange—I’ve never had any confusion about which bathroom in the basement was for women, and which one was for men. Was it possible he had never familiarized himself with the ever-important distinction between the stick figure in a dress and the one in pants?
“Well,” I said to him, “Did you use the near one or the far one?” I hoped he would respond that he had used the near one, by which I meant the one nearest to the copy machines.
“The far one.”
The facial expression with which I responded must have conveyed my amazement at his folly, because he quickly rationalized:
“There were no gender signs on the doors. I guess that means they’re for both sexes.”
Ok, so I was able to rest assured that he understood common signage. I made a mental note to myself to take a look at the bathrooms later, and I went on with my reading.
On my way out, as I was checking out a DVD for my friend and I to watch, I asked the student employee at the circulation desk whether the bathrooms had become gender-neutral over the summer. She replied, with a striking nonchalance, that they had indeed transitioned from distinctly gendered bathrooms—one for men and one for women—to gender-neutral bathrooms. Both have stalls, and neither have urinals.
It’s a good thing to have gender-neutral bathrooms on campus. It’s a really good, important, progressive thing; we should all be able to recognize that not every person has a gender identity that fits into our culture’s traditional binary, and that those people, among others, might feel uncomfortable or unsafe using gendered bathrooms.
But at the same time, bathrooms are a very private place. People like to know what to expect when they go into a bathroom, and for most people, that knowledge has always been a right as opposed to a privilege. The only criticism I have of the new gender-neutral bathroom status is that it was unannounced to the general public. The administration and the campus groups that concern themselves with the gender-inclusiveness of bathrooms on campus shouldn’t need a majority of consenting votes in order to enact new policies like that of the gender-neutral bathrooms, but they do have a responsibility to let everybody know who might be in the stall next to them when they are pulling down their pants.
I am glad that my friend didn’t have any alarming experiences when he used the bathroom in the basement of the library. I know that I would have been profoundly taken aback, and upset, really, had I encountered a man in the bathroom that I had always thought was exclusively for women. If students are made aware of the gender-inclusiveness of bathrooms on campus, they can pick which ones they use based on their individual level of comfort with gender-neutrality. This is one instance in which information absolutely needs to be made available; if the fundamental goal of gender-neutral bathrooms is to prevent discomfort and discrimination in public bathrooms on campus, that purpose is defeated when people run the risk of being surprised at who they may find in the places where people least like to be surprised.