Gender- Neutral Washrooms

Through the past 6 blog posts I've stressed the need for teachers to create safe, welcoming, and comfortable spaces at school.  This may seem like a given, however what I stress is that this needs to be done for ALL students.  Have you ever felt unsafe while going to the bathroom at school?  This is a human basic need, all humans need to use the washroom at some point throughout the school day.  However something very human has to do can cause certain students a great deal of stress.  The LGBTQ community have been fighting for the right of gender neutral washrooms for a long time, however it seems only recently they have been incorporated into our Canadian secondary school system, and some high schools haven't jumped on the bandwagon at all.  The increasing acceptedness of the LGBTQ community resulted in gender neural washroom becoming more of a norm then ever before, but like a lot of things, there is still room to grow with the acceptance and accommodations that we as the education system need to provide.

Support is becoming the norm for transgendered teens and a big part of this is gender neutral washrooms within our school system.  It creates a place where they are able to feel safe without the fear of having to identify or be perceived as possibly not conforming to socialized gender norms that your basic female/male washrooms represent (Huges 2014).  A powerful quote that I found while researching more about gender neutral washrooms in Canadian school's is as follows "Bathrooms are more dangerous when they are segregated.  They actually become safer when they are unsegregated, including showers and bathrooms, with fewer incidences of sexual assault.  It is a myth that we need to segregate by gender." (Hughes, 2014).  Creating gender neutral washrooms within a school takes such a small effort to make happen but can make such a huge different for the students by providing them a safe place to take care of a basic human need, needing to use the washroom.

Although gender neutral washrooms are needed for inclusivity, there are instances where it is taken advantage of.  For example at the beginning of this school year, U of T decided to make all bathrooms gender neutral at the residents.  However within the first week, two different girls reported seeing a cell phone peeping over the stall as they were showering.  This resulted in U of T going back to female and male identified washrooms with the exception of one single stalled gender neutral washroom per floor.  This is a very unfortunate step back, gender neutral washrooms exist in order to give transgender people a place where they feel included and won't be misgendered. The students of U of T are very passionate about gender neutral washrooms and have put together a project called the Washroom Inclusivity Project where they inform students about the need for gender neutral washrooms, decide where they need to be placed, and work with the school in order to make that happen.  Their overall goal is to create a more inclusive and safer campus.  Shouldn't that be the goal for Canadian schools country wide?

http://blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca/washroom/about-us/

Reference:

Hughes, T. (2014). Gender-neutral washrooms.  Education Forum, 40(2), 9-10.