Gender-Neutral Bathrooms and Where to Find Them
Yes, this cover image is supposed to be ironic, The Rival American does not condone JK Rowling
by Row Sullivan
An updated list of gender-neutral bathrooms available on campus can be found here
“For how fucking gay this schools is, we’re definitely going to make sure we have the most LGBTQ+ inclusive policies and resources” is certainly a thought you’d hope would go through administration’s head. That’d be a pretty good start in building a community of care and instilling that changemaker spirit. Challenge accepted, right?
And golly, gee! Would you look at that? AU is adding 9(!) whole gender-neutral bathrooms! ...
… At the expense of 14 gender-neutral bathrooms. Also the 9 new ones won’t be open until July and will all only be single stall. The 14 existing bathrooms that are being taken out consist of every single multi-stall gender-neutral bathroom on campus. How progressive!
Don’t worry, this is an improvement, administration said so. They’re doing this because “an important aspect of American University’s commitment to an inclusive campus is providing accessible bathrooms for the AU community.” It was literally the second sentence of their email, so it must be true.
Then again, they also recognize that “this change will have an impact on the LGBTQIA community.” In case it wasn’t implied well enough, that impact is negative. The mental gymnastics on that train of thought must be insane.
The full text of an email sent to the American University Community on August 15, 2022
Maybe they don’t realize how much of an inconvenience it is? I truthfully never really thought twice about what bathroom I was going into until I was standing in the basement of EQB in a dress, looking, presenting, and feeling more like the sign on my right (the women’s room), but still being in the body of someone who would typically go through the door on the left (the men’s room). It’s not because I would feel dysphoric if I went into one bathroom over the other. If both bathrooms were empty, I couldn’t care less, and why should I? I just have to pee. No, it’s the fact that it becomes a choice between being violently out of place in the men’s bathroom or having to cross your fingers and hope you look enough like a girl to not be seen as being out of place in the women’s. Either way it’s head down, in and out, don’t talk, hope no one else is present. Or you can hold it. Or you can miss the next 20 minutes of class searching for the nearest gender-neutral bathroom. But hey, at least I can rest in comfort that half my classes have been in that horrendous, non-ADA compliant building that will hopefully get demolished within the next decade.
I guess we should really give admin the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they just wanted to send us on a fun scavenger hunt every time we need to use the bathroom.
Fun Fact: EQB actually has two separate gender-neutral bathrooms on the third floor, which is crazy because before looking at the list of designated gender-neutral bathrooms, I was barely aware EQB had a third floor, and I’m fairly certain at most ten students on campus have ever even been up there.
I went up to the third floor once before this and entirely missed these gender-neutral bathrooms all together. Why? Because they’re tucked away in a dark corner with no signs pointing to them! Nevermind that the other signage in EQB seems to suggest that the only bathrooms in the building are located in the basement with no mention of the existence of a gender-neutral option (the sign is just a piece of printer paper, mind you).
The signage in EQB suggests that there is no gender inclusive bathroom option in the building. If by chance someone did make it up to the third floor, both gender-neutral bathrooms are tucked away in a corner with no labels to alert students of their existence.
Let’s say you missed the 3rd floor EQB gender-neutral bathrooms because of poor advertising, and because, let’s face it, you weren’t fully aware a 3rd floor of EQB existed, as much as that knowledge would have been really nice to know a couple semesters ago. Perhaps you should just hop over to SIS? Surely, one of the nicer, newer buildings on campus will have at least one or two.
And they have one. It’s down the stairs and to the left, through a door and then a little bit of a walk through some lockers. I made a wrong turn in search of it, but it’s there…. and it’s out of order.
Sure, it’s a little tucked away, but at least SIS has a gender-neutral bathroom.. sometimes. The 2nd and 3rd floor have gendered restrooms only.
But hey, you know where the bathroom in the library on the first floor is… oh wait: that one’s out of order too. At least it points you to another one… nevermind, it points you towards a men’s bathroom- because those are so hard to find.
Gender-neutral bathroom out of order? Just use the men’s room, I guess
There’s allegedly a gender-neutral bathroom in McKinley. I say allegedly because I couldn’t find it despite searching for it explicitly. Maybe I’m just dumb, but again, the signs didn’t help much.
Are any of these bathrooms neutral? Who knows! (Allegedly, there is one in T73)
Continuing around the quad, the gender-neutral bathrooms in MGC and Bender Arena are prominent and easy to find. Could there be more of them? Sure, but you know where to find the ones that exist. Again, it’d help if administration didn’t regender the previously gender-neutral 2nd floor bathroom, but I feel like MGC still passes the very low bar that’s been set.
KOGOD is home to two more gender-neutral bathrooms, and they weren’t even all that hard to find. Again, this isn’t a high bar to pass, but it’s still pretty good considering I expect nothing but unbridled Republicanism “moderate ideology” out of KOGOD.
SPA has the token gender-neutral bathroom on the 2nd floor, and an additional one on the 3rd floor (as any good political science major who’s been here for too long knows).
A handful of other buildings have what should be the bare minimum of 1 including Watkins, Asbury, and probably a couple other of those buildings that are on the verge of falling apart, but alas are on the edge of campus so we all just collectively forget about them unless we’re cursed with having to actually have a class in them. (Is EQB really that bad, or does it just sit on prime real estate?)
Both of the new science buildings- Don Meyers and the Hall of Science- do better than really any other academic building on campus. They manage to fit a gender-neutral bathroom on each floor. Maybe science truly is more progressive than the arts?
Hurst Hall though? Out of luck.
Battelle-Thompkins? For what is home to what may be one of the most stereotypically gay departments, you’d think it’d have at least one, but nope. (Thanks admin for regendering the one that already existed!)
Katzen? If you’re crossing Nebraska Ave for class, you better just hold it. (Edit: It’s been brought to our attention that there’s a gender-neutral bathroom tucked in behind the practice rooms. Our bad for trusting the official university list of gender-neutral bathrooms to be accurate.)
The Rival reported in the Spring of 2019 that there were plans in place to try to have “at least one inclusive bathroom in every building within the next academic year.” Over 3 years later, that evidently has not happened. For that matter, we seem to have gone backwards.
The increase in ADA accessible bathrooms by this time next year is a positive change that shouldn’t be overlooked. Nor should the “increased awareness” of gender-neutral bathrooms be ignored– if it’s more than a fluffy line thrown into an email to try to appease the student body.
Those are reasonable goals, but the school is dishonest and disingenuous when they claim that their project will benefit the LGBTQ+ community. Nine is not more than 14, especially not when the 9 won’t be ready for a year, and the 14 make up every single multi-stall gender-neutral bathroom on campus. The best form of “awareness” for gender-neutral bathrooms is to simply have enough of them that no one has to spend 20 minutes looking for one in the middle of class, or God forbid cross a street from Katzen to use the closest one in the depths of KOGOD of all places.
If the university cares about “increased awareness,” they can start right now by putting in adequate signage to find the nearest gender-neutral bathroom and fix one of the more pressing issues in a matter of minutes. And again, the signs in EQB insinuating that bathrooms only exist on the bottom floor are made of printer paper. I do mean it would literally only take minutes to fix this.
I’m not sure how long it’s supposed to take for the university to assemble its “working group of campus stakeholders… to lessen the impact and minimize disruption.” However, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or more literally the Center for Diversity and Inclusion) to figure out how AU could show better concern for the needs of their non-binary and trans communities, and it’s not with another disingenuous email telling us that they’re really doing their best. We know that they’re not.
Truthfully, in the grand scheme of things I don’t even think gender-neutral bathrooms– or bathrooms of any sort– are remotely the biggest problem the AU queer community, or the AU community as a whole, are currently dealing with. And yet, when administration has a track record of only digging themselves into deeper holes, the problem only worsens, and it becomes ever so apparent that their “community of care” was only ever meant to be plastered on the side of a Wonk bus.
Go piss, girl.