By Ruth Steinhardt
Over the summer of 2014, students Alex Copeland and Travis McCown participated in a peculiar scavenger hunt. Armed with clipboards and camera phones, they went into every building on the George Washington University’s Foggy Bottom and Mount Vernon campuses to locate, photograph and note every single-user restroom. A team from GW Facilities surveyed the Virginia Science and Technology campus in Ashburn, Va., for the same information.
They were gathering research for the Gender Inclusive Bathroom Initiative (GIBI) sponsored by GW’s LGBT Resource Center within the Multicultural Student Services Center (MSSC). It was inspired by the Washington municipal government’s Safe Bathrooms DC campaign.
At its most basic level, GIBI’s mission is to make sure that GW’s bathrooms comply with a D.C. law requiring “all covered entities with single-occupancy restroom facilities [to] use gender-neutral signage for those facilities (for example, by replacing signs that indicate ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ with signs that say ‘Restroom’).”
On a level beyond mere compliance with the law, however, GIBI leaders hope that the initiative will make GW students, staff and faculty feel safer and more comfortable. They also hope it will start a conversation about evolving gender norms.
Cisgender people—those who identify with the gender label assigned them at birth—may never have thought about the disadvantages of rigidly gendered restrooms. But for transgender and non-gender-conforming individuals, a basic bodily function can become a source of anxiety, stress and even physical danger.
According to a survey published by the Williams Institute, 70 percent of transgender respondents have been denied entrance, harassed or assaulted while trying to use a public restroom of the gender with which they identify. More than half the respondents also reported physical issues like dehydration and kidney problems caused by having to wait until they could find a safe and accessible place to go.
Timothy Kane, associate director of inclusion initiatives in the MSSC, tells the story of an alumnus who was both a trans man and a star athlete. On practice days, the alumnus drank no water from the moment he left his residence hall to the moment practice ended. The ritual carried a risk of dehydration. The alumnus was popular, physically strong and well liked, Mr. Kane said, but still felt unsafe using a bathroom where his identity did not match the sign on the door.
“First and foremost, [GIBI is] about providing safe spaces and making those spaces accessible,” said Ms. Copeland, who is a former student coordinator of the LGBT Resource Center.
To that end, she and her team, including Mr. McCown, Mr. Kane, Nancy Giammatteo of GW Facilities Planning, Harold Speed of GW Facilities Services, student leaders of GW’s LGBT student organizations and representatives from the DC Office of Human Rights designed new signs for all GW’s single-occupancy restrooms.
The new signs say “All Gender Restroom” in English and Braille, with a wheelchair figure to indicate accessibility. The familiar man-in-pants and woman-in-dress labels are conspicuously absent.
Eighty-two bathrooms needed the new signage—and almost all of them now have it. In mid-April, GIBI held a Gender Inclusive Bathroom Week, raising awareness around campus about the importance and the benefits of making restrooms safe and inclusive.
Transgender and non-gender-conforming people are not the only ones to benefit from bathroom inclusivity, Mr. Kane said. “These facilities are important to many different populations, including people with disabilities who have an attendant of a different gender and parents with children of a different gender who need to use a bathroom.”
The next step, he said, will be to increase awareness of and access to these safe and inclusive spaces—which, in the long run, will help increase awareness and inclusion of trans, gender fluid and non-gender-conforming individuals.
“We’ve been living in a world of gendered bathrooms for so long that it will take time to adjust our thinking to embrace a new and more inclusive paradigm. But this is an important step,” Mr. Kane said.