Some students and university officials are calling for more gender-neutral restrooms to be built in campus buildings and others say administrators need to provide a more up-to-date list of their locations.
For Jack Izen, the choice is often difficult — being late for class or having to use a “dude bathroom.”
Izen, a junior American studies and government and politics major who identifies as “they” or “their,” has to use men’s bathrooms when there aren’t any gender-neutral ones around.
And that, Izen said, is pretty often.
“There’s not enough, and they’re too hard to find,” Izen said.
Izen said they have friends who have to strategically camp outside gendered bathrooms until they’re empty, and run in and do their business before anyone else comes in. A transgendered student who looks and sounds male might face discrimination or violence in a men’s bathroom, Izen said, or be seen as a pervert in a bathroom marked “women.” The university needs more gender-neutral bathrooms and needs to maintain an up-to-date list of these locations, according to some officials and students.
In 2005, former university President Dan Mote sent an email to the university stating he planned for every on-campus building to receive at least one gender-neutral bathroom, which would be clearly labeled and consist of a single-stall restroom with a lock on the door. But that dream wasn’t realized, and even though Facilities Management mandates all new buildings and large renovations be fitted with a gender-neutral bathroom, according to Facilities Management Director Carlo Colella, many older campus buildings have not yet been upgraded.
The fix isn’t too difficult, several students and officials said. There are plenty of single-stall bathrooms on the campus that are labeled as men’s or women’s, and there are plenty of other restrooms throughout campus that can be converted.
The onus has fallen on Facilities Management, which is responsible for all on-campus bathrooms, and, as such, fields requests from concerned students. According to Luke Jensen, the director of the university’s LGBT Equity Center, Facilities Management has been open to retrofitting old bathrooms and making other changes whenever a student brings up a need and proposes a solution.
Jensen said he points students looking for a list of gender-neutral bathrooms to a database on Facilities Management’s website that catalogs all campus facilities — including bathrooms, elevators and study rooms — and can be sorted by type. Jensen said he tells students to look at the “general use” and “family restroom” categories, both of which satisfy transgendered students’ needs.
But Colella said the number of bathrooms listed — 155 between the two categories — was out of date. He said he was unaware students could be using the database as a reference, and that he’d gather a team of workers to catalog all of the gender-neutral bathrooms and update the database. A timetable has not yet been set.
Other lists are even sparser. One, which appears in this school year’s DISorientation guide put out yearly by various activist organizations on the campus, offers more than 60 bathrooms.
A file tucked away in the LGBT Students section of the Graduate Student Life Handbook on Stamp Student Union’s website shows 67, but the link was broken until The Diamondback reached out to Stamp officials for comment. Stamp officials then put the file back online in about an hour. According to Jensen, the equity center used to hand out that list but stopped after it became too out of date.
Stephanie Payne-Roberts, the assistant director of technology services, said Stamp’s website is currently undergoing an upgrade, and the file was probably lost in the transition.
“The document was put back where it belongs,” she said.
But that file — and the list provided by College Park Activism — offers, among other things, the former journalism building, which is now Chincoteague Hall, as having gender-neutral bathrooms. According to Zachary Mellen, who was born biologically female but identifies as male, one of the listed bathrooms in McKeldin Library has become a group study room.
“A lot has changed since then,” the sophomore letters and sciences major said of the list. On Sept. 30, before the file went down, he copied its text into this university’s Trans U Facebook group.
Without a fully updated list, it becomes difficult for transgendered students — and other students with the need for a labeled, unisex bathroom — to reliably find places to go, several students and officials said. Izen offered the online campus map as a possible place to compile a comprehensive, centralized list.
Mellen uses gender-neutral bathrooms and said that while he has a couple mainstays, their placement is not convenient. For instance, he’s found some bathrooms in unreasonable places, such as the service corridor in the student union, and some are in buildings that are not centrally located, such as Leonardtown office building, which has three; Rossborough Inn; and the Shuttle-UM bus facility near Paint Branch Parkway and Greenhouse Road.
“I put up with it,” Mellen said. “It sucks, but I’m used to it.”
One of Mellen’s go-to places is the University Health Center, which has provided a handful of gender-neutral bathrooms since its 2004 renovation, according to the Facilities Management site. Last summer, the health center put a concentrated effort into making the single-use restrooms more visually identifiable, according to Jenna Beckwith, the health center’s sexual health program coordinator and liaison to the LGBT Equity Center. There are now signs peppered throughout the building that point to bathrooms marked “unisex.”
“I think that they’re incredibly important, especially in fostering the health center as being a safe place for all patients, a comfortable place for all patients,” Beckwith said.
The Department of Resident Life is also well-aware of students’ requests for more gender-neutral bathrooms, especially considering gender-neutral housing has been such a contentious issue the past few years, according to Erin Iverson, the department’s manager of assignments and public inquiry. The department formed a task force this semester to “fully explore gender-neutral housing options across campus,” said Iverson, who is Resident Life’s LGBT Equity Center liaison. She also is a member of that task force.
By the end of the semester, Iverson said the task force will offer suggestions to Deb Grandner, Resident Life’s director.
“I know there’s a limited number of single-use or gender-neutral bathrooms, but that’s part of the task force’s work,” she said. “To find what buildings they exist in.”
But although steps are being taken to make gender-neutral bathrooms more common, Izen said it’s not enough. The bathroom issue is part of a larger problem: According to Izen, transgendered students on the campus are marginalized. They’re frequently mis-gendered by teachers, even after they correct them. Any attention they get, Izen said, is in the form of public relations appeasement, and no real steps are being taken by administrators to adequately combat the genderism they face.
“On this campus, I feel invisible,” Izen said. “It’s the silence that’s most damaging.”
jwolper@umdbk.com
