With the recent uptick in attacks against diversity, equity and inclusion coming from President Donald Trump’s administration, it is more important than ever to push for the basic accommodations that let everyone lead comfortable lives. For instance, is it too much to ask that everybody is allowed to use the bathroom?
Keene State College has a number of gender-neutral bathrooms available for use on campus, but for a campus claiming to prioritize diversity, I cannot help but feel the overall accessibility of bathrooms that can be used by anyone remains lacking.
The majority of the gender-neutral bathrooms I am aware of on campus are single-stall facilities tucked far out of sight. They are inconvenient to physically get to and far more likely to demand a long wait due to their singularity.
Even outside of accommodating the existence of transgender and gender-expansive students, which in any case really should not be as difficult as some make it seem, the campus-wide restrictions on bathrooms should be a concern for everyone who calls Keene State home. I know from experience that some of the dorm halls do not have bathrooms of both gender assignments available to the general resident population or at least are not obvious to those walking through the halls. If a cisgender male who has no interest in challenging any kind of gender norms happens to move into a dorm room that has no attached bathroom, he may find himself forced to violate some serious gender dogma in order to go about his daily life.
Keene State has been around since 1909, and while many of the campus facilities are certainly much newer than that, I still suspect this lack of equal infrastructure is at least partially a carryover from simpler, worse times where boys all went to one place and girls all went to another and seldom did the two interact. Surely it is high time to take a full step into our modern world and acknowledge that no harm will come from giving everyone a place to pee.
While it is tempting to try and play to the center by suggesting it is unnecessary to altogether remove gendered bathrooms on campus, I feel that would be both unfair and unrealistic. The only solution I can imagine that would preserve the oh-so-sacred presence of gendered bathrooms would be to expand the infrastructure afforded to gender-neutral bathrooms with either a greater number of single-stall bathrooms or converting the existing single-stalls to multi-stalls. Both of these solutions would be complex and costly to the point of utter nonsense and impossibility and I cannot in good faith recommend them.
Instead, I suggest the far easier option: Take the signs off the doors and let people go where they choose. I understand it is an uncomfortable proposal for many, but I encourage those who are unsure to give it some more thought. I am not suggesting any actual change to the infrastructure of these bathrooms, just the removal of the “Men’s” and “Women’s” signs outside the entrances. Cisgender men can continue using the bathrooms that provide access to urinals and cisgender women can continue using the ones that do not. If any concerns arise about newcomers to the college being confused, it would hardly be too difficult to replace the old signs with a sign that has a urinal for the former men’s room and one with a toilet for the former women’s room.
Importantly, trans and gender-expansive people could find a shred of comfort in knowing they can avoid confronting a bathroom designation that needlessly butts up against their personal sense of self. All else aside, that shred of comfort is the least a college that promises to uphold diversity can offer.
Charlotte King can be contacted at
cking@kscequinox.com
