Students at Simon Fraser University (SFU) held a demonstration Feb. 18 in a men’s washroom on the school’s Burnaby campus to draw attention to the need for more gender-neutral washrooms on campus. Protestors occupied the washrooms for two hours and posted signs that stated, “All genders welcome. This toilet has been liberated from the gender binary.”
Though the “shit-in” was the first of its kind at SFU, calls for non-gendered washrooms in Canadian schools go back more than a decade.
The protest sought to bring to light the issue of transgender students’ right to feel safe while in public spaces.
Across Canada, schools have begun to take steps towards creating secure and inclusive environments for all students. Carleton currently has 25 gender-neutral washrooms in 12 different buildings on campus, and in 2007 McGill University introduced a policy stating that every new building on campus must have a gender-neutral washroom, preferably one on each floor. The University of British Columbia circulates brochures containing the location of all single-stall washrooms, identifying which have gender-neutral signs, while the University of Toronto is creating a list of all single-stall washrooms on its several campuses.
Markus Harwood-Jones is the co-ordinator of the Ryerson University Trans Collective, a group that represents transgendered students and is currently advocating for all-gender washrooms on the Ryerson campus.
“There are just so many problems associated with having only gender-specific washrooms on campus,” Harwood-Jones said. “Many trans people don’t feel safe accessing gendered bathrooms for a number of reasons, which can come from past experiences, anxiety—it can also be putting oneself in danger,” he said.
Along with the fear of harassment or assault, Harwood-Jones said inaccessible washrooms negatively impact transgender students’ educations.
“In my experience as a trans student, if I have a class in a building that doesn’t have any bathrooms that I can use I’ll have to leave that building to go find one, which can be totally disruptive to my ability as a student to be engaged in the classroom and with the course material. It’s detrimental to our mental, physical—and I would also say spiritual and emotional—well-being,” he said.
Harwood-Jones said the lack of gender-neutral bathrooms in Canadian schools is an indicator of the larger problem of cisexism and transphobia in universities.
“Universities are not made to acknowledge the existence of trans people, and trans people have either always had to exist in opposition, or entirely without relationship to the university,” he said.
Harwood-Jones said though most students have been supportive of the campaign, the push for non-gendered washrooms has faced some opposition.
“There are some that have fears of trans people accessing their bathrooms, and fears around not being able to access gendered space. I believe that those fears are based in transphobic and trans-misogynist stereotypes, which can be undone through education and awareness around why this issue is so relevant and important to trans students,” he said.
