It’s the first week of the semester, and I have to pee.
I walk down the steps to the basement-level bathrooms in the Science Center. I remember that last year, during the pandemic-impacted spring semester, the bathrooms there were gender-neutral.
This semester, though, I stop in front of the restrooms, held back by a small difference that the crowds flowing in and out of the adjacent spaces don’t seem to notice.
One of the rooms is marked “men” and the other “women.” I turn away.
Following this experience, I reached out to Harvard’s Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, asking why the bathrooms had been re-gendered. I heard back in an email that due to Harvard’s return to “near normal campus operation,” the University had “returned the bathrooms to their regular status.” The Office noted that last year, the restrooms became single-use facilities for COVID-19 safety but that this year, due to the volume of students on campus, their single-use status wasn’t sustainable and, as a result, they were reconverted to multi-use spaces. Somewhere in that process, they were re-gendered as well.
I deserve the right to pee, and we all deserve a world without gender.
Gendered Bathrooms, Harmful Bathrooms
Gendered bathrooms present a struggle for many transgender people. According to a landmark 2016 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 60% of transgender Americans have avoided using public restrooms. This presents a health concern — 32% of respondents also reported that they had restricted their water or food consumption to avoid needing to use a public restroom, and 8% reported developing kidney infections, a figure that contrasts with the less than 1% of the general population who contract the affliction each year.
Why are these statistics so different for transgender Americans? For many transgender and nonbinary people, using a gendered restroom can bring discomfort, fear of discovery or alienation, and sometimes, the threat of real violence. The same 2016 survey reports that 12% of transgender Americans say they have been verbally harassed in a restroom, and two percent share that they have been physically or sexually assaulted in such a space. Two percent sounds like a small number, but in the same year, a study by the Williams Institute reported that there were 1.4 million transgender Americans. That’s about 28,000 people.
At Harvard, transgender and nonbinary students and staff are often forced to use gendered multi-use restrooms. Returning to your private dorm bathroom, if you’re lucky enough to have an en-suite, is not a viable option. The geographic spread of Harvard’s campus leaves most undergraduate student dorms a 10 minute walk or more from classes, and for graduate students and staff, the majority of whom don’t live on campus, the commute is obviously much further. While there are some gender-neutral single-use bathrooms on campus, they can be hard to find, often tucked away in basements or long hallways, and they are not present in every building.
Additionally, transgender students and staff should not be relegated to single-use spaces. While single-use restrooms do provide an ungendered space, they do so in a way that still excludes trans people from the safety and comfort, as well as the ease of access, provided to cisgender people in multi-use bathrooms. Making all bathrooms on campus gender-neutral is essential for the health, comfort, and safety of transgender and nonbinary Harvard affiliates.
Making bathrooms gender-neutral has benefits for everyone, too. To remove gender from restrooms is to remove its harmful reinforcement from another layer of our lives. It brings us all a step closer to gender abolition, an increasingly popular idea of a world without gender.
“A World Without Gender?!”
Daphna Joel, a professor at the School of Psychological Sciences at Tel Aviv University, writes about gender abolition in her opinion-piece published in Scientific American. She describes that “a world with no gender means that the form of one’s genitals, whether female, male or intersex, has no social meaning — just as being right- or left-handed has no inherent meaning.” She clarifies that “a world without gender does not mean there would be no differences, on a group level, between humans with female and male genitals. But in a world without gender, we simply wouldn’t care.”
Gender has no productive purpose in our society, at least not anymore. We have seen the slow but steady removal of gendered roles and rules over the last few centuries as men and women attend school, work, and even fight in the military together. Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at Harvard Law School, has noted this, asking, “why is the multi-stall bathroom the last public vestige of gendered social separation?”
While gender segregation is decreasing, the gender binary is still present and harmful for all of us. To sort people into categories that prescribe their behaviors, expressions, emotions, relationships, and occupations with no regard to an individual’s actual preferences and skills limits our life and potential. For women, gender results in widespread workplace discrimination in “hiring, training, pay, and promotion,” and can also impact men entering traditionally women-dominated fields like housekeeping and customer service. For men and women of color and people at other intersections of marginalized identity, these gender-based impacts are only amplified.
Gender also has measurable negative health impacts. Women experience a gender gap in receiving health care and men suffer from higher rates of suicide and drug abuse.
Gendered bathrooms represent one of the final physical manifestations of enforced gender in our society. To remove gender from the spaces would be a contribution towards removing it entirely.
More Popular Than You Think
As I walked away from the Science Center bathrooms in that first week of class, I realized I’d need to find a place to pee this year. I searched “gender-neutral bathrooms Harvard” on Google and stumbled across the Gender Inclusive Restroom Mapping Project. This interactive map of all the gender-neutral bathrooms on Harvard’s campus was produced by the Office for Gender Equity.
When asked about the map, Caysie Harvey, the Associate Director of the Office for Gender Equity, said that its purpose was to “let the Harvard community members know that there are spaces for them that are inclusive.” Speaking alongside Nicole Merhill, the Director of the Office for Gender Equity and Harvard’s Title IX Coordinator, Harvey added that this effort was particularly important for “our transgender folks and our gender nonbinary folks who don’t have an inclusive means of locating a restroom at Harvard.”
I noticed upon first viewing the map that all of the gender-neutral bathrooms on Harvard’s campus are single-use restrooms, with the one exception being the restrooms in the Loeb Drama Center. These restrooms are operated by the American Repertory Theater, who did not respond to my request for comment.
I asked Harvey and Merhill what their thoughts would be on multi-use gender-neutral restrooms at Harvard. Both indicated their support, should the student body call for it. Merhill noted that “we’re moving in a positive direction, and there’s more opportunity to move here at Harvard and other post-secondary institutions.”
She’s right — Yale University already has multi-use gender-neutral restrooms throughout its campus, including in many of its dorm restrooms equipped with showers.
I decided to measure student opinion. I stood outside of the re-gendered Science Center bathrooms on two separate days in October and asked every student who came out of the facilities for a brief interview.
I spoke with 18 students of a variety of genders, class years, and concentrations. I asked each one about their views on single-use gender-neutral restrooms before explaining to them that the restroom they had just exited was gender-neutral last semester. I asked the students if they would support the bathrooms remaining gender-neutral this year, but as multi-use spaces. Then, I asked if they would support all restrooms on campus becoming gender-neutral. Finally, I asked what they thought other students’ opinions on gender-neutral multi-use spaces would be and whether those opinions might change over time. For each question, I asked them to explain why they felt the way they did.
What I found surprised me.
Not a single student was opposed to single-use gender-neutral restrooms. The facilities received much praise, with students citing their cleanliness, privacy, comfort, and convenience. One nonbinary student said that they preferred the restrooms because “they feel less like [they] have to choose.” Some students commented that they had a hard time finding these restrooms, and two said they had never seen one on campus before.
Not a single student opposed the Science Center bathrooms remaining gender-neutral. Most responded that they would continue to use the restrooms due to their convenient location, and said that their feelings toward the spaces would remain unchanged. As one student said, “They’re convenient and I have to go to the bathroom.”
There was more hesitation about making all bathrooms on campus gender-neutral, with some qualifications presented, but ultimately, all 18 students said that they supported the measure.
Most predicted some student discomfort or opposition to the idea because, as one student said, “people have a tendency to have a status quo bias.” Only one student said that they themselves would feel a “slight increased level of discomfort,” which they also attributed to a change in the status quo. Ultimately, the students uniformly agreed that people would “get used to it” over time.
As one student said about the status quo, “you have to implement these ideas in order for people to become accustomed to it and to just naturally accept it.”
Three students specified that they supported all bathrooms being gender-neutral so long as single-use restrooms continued to be available. One contributed that “it’s striking a balance between having gender-neutral bathrooms being more accessible but also keep giving people the option of having a single-use one.”
One male-identifying student brought up the issue of women’s safety.
Old Laws, Old Perspectives
Women’s safety is a rebuttal frequently brought up in opposition to gender-inclusive bathroom spaces. Safety is an important issue. However, in regards to restroom safety, there has never been any evidence that indicates gender-inclusive restrooms increase violence towards anyone.
The argument placing women’s safety in opposition to gender-inclusive spaces has deep roots, and has resurfaced recently in debates about whether transgender people should be allowed to use bathrooms that match their gender identity. A Williams Institute study found zero correlation between the presence of nondiscrimination laws allowing transgender people to use the restrooms they identify with and increased rates of violence towards women.
In her New Yorker article, Gersen writes about society’s preoccupation with the protection of women’s vulnerability, tracing the issue of “women’s spaces” back to Victorian times. She calls the issue “separate-spheres paternalism,” and links it to the same patriarchal ideology that has led to women’s exclusion from the legal bar and other spheres of civil life.
There is no evidence that women in gender-neutral restrooms face increased rates of violence. Arguments against such spaces that center women’s safety often are rooted in an unfounded and paternalistic view that gender segregation is necessary to protect women.
My conversations with University staff indicated agreement that gender-inclusive restrooms spaces do not pose additional safety risks, and that threats to women’s safety are something found more in the media than in real life.
My conversations with students also suggested broad support for gender-neutral multi-use restrooms. Most said that they wouldn’t care if gender were removed from the spaces, and that their experiences in bathrooms would not change. Many lauded such spaces for their benefits for transgender people. One student exclaimed that “going to the bathroom and taking care of your body shouldn’t have to depend on binaries and gender.” Two students noted that gender-neutral restrooms would be a good measure to reduce wait times.
While some support for the measure might have been influenced by the face-to-face nature of the interviews, there was certainly no strong opposition to the idea of gender-inclusive restrooms across Harvard, and every student was at least open to having the conversation.
The Office for Gender Equity indicated that its support for multi-use gender-neutral restrooms at Harvard relied on student opinion, and there is certainly broad support for their implementation.
However, Merhill and Harvey brought up another obstacle, one that affects many localities across the United States. That obstacle is city and state ordinances requiring gendered restroom facilities. Cambridge has such codes. According to the City of Cambridge Policy on Unisex Bathrooms, Massachusetts state plumbing codes require “that a specified number of bathrooms in public buildings, on each floor, be designated as men’s bathrooms and women’s bathrooms and specifically identified as such.”
The EAB, a consulting firm for educational institutions utilized by over 500 different provosts, has identified best practices for implementing gender-inclusive restrooms. The firm acknowledges that in some cases, gender-inclusive restrooms might run against local building codes, just as Merhill and Harvey pointed out. In these cases, though, it notes that the “costs of violating these codes are fairly minor” and states that “while certainly not recommended for every institution, some have chosen to intentionally lapse in code compliance.”
In 2017, Yale University filed a lawsuit against Connecticut over the state’s building codes requiring the school to have gendered restrooms. As a result, the state changed its building codes.
Harvard prides itself for being at the frontier of education and global leadership and for producing leaders who create a better world. It can move towards that better world by making life safer for transgender and nonbinary people and loosening gender’s harmful grip on society.
The prominent queer writer and artist Alok Vaid-Menon imagines this better world beautifully. They write:
“We fear the loss of the gender binary because we don’t know who we are outside of it. The ways that we have been taught to parent, build family, structure our lives and communities are called into question. But that interrogation, it’s the beauty of being alive. We are dynamic, constantly self-healing. We are predisposed to transformation. Why would we want to remain stagnant when we could be soaring?”
Harvard University should promptly remove all gendered labeling from its restrooms, a decision that would relieve a significant daily stress from the lives of many transgender and gender-noncomforming students and staff and would benefit all of us by helping to undo the restrictions of the gender binary.
Gender is holding us all back, just as it held me back on that August afternoon in the Science Center, and just as it holds back thousands of transgender and nonbinary people each day. In order to take a much-needed step towards a genderless world, we must de-gender bathrooms.
Image by Gabe Pierce is licensed under the Unsplash License.
