Advocates for transgender inclusion at Carleton University want to increase the number of gender-inclusive bathrooms on campus this year.
The Carleton Trans Advocacy Group (CTAG) is aiming to host an advocacy campaign in February to raise awareness about the importance of gender-inclusive bathrooms on campus, members said in a Jan. 15 CTAG meeting.
The campaign will be especially important in the context of the rise in anti-trans rhetoric and misinformation enabled by prominent politicians like U.S. President Donald Trump, CTAG members added.
Increasing the number of gender-inclusive bathrooms is a goal advocates have been pushing for since 2018, when CTAG released a series of calls to action to the university.
The calls to action asked the university to convert at least 50 per cent of toilets on campus to be gender-inclusive, with at least one bathroom on each floor of every building. The calls said the 50-per-cent goal for multi-stall bathrooms could be achieved “solely by changing the signs on the doors.”
For example, if the sign for a multi-stall men’s bathroom was changed to a sign for a gender-inclusive bathroom, that would be enough change.
“We want these signs to be in place by April 31, 2022,” the call to action document reads. “This is a top priority for trans and non-binary safety on campus.”
This goal has not yet been achieved, according to advocates at the Jan. 15 CTAG meeting. Currently, 12 of the 37 buildings on campus do not have a single gender-inclusive bathroom, according to the university’s website.
“I feel really passionately about getting more [gender-inclusive] bathrooms on campus,” said Keegan Prempeh, Carleton’s trans and non-binary inclusion co-ordinator, in a Jan. 15 CTAG meeting.
The 50-per-cent goal is attainable, according to Laura Horak, director of Carleton’s Transgender Media Lab.
“I think we can do it,” she said at the meeting. “The signs have already been made. It’s just a matter of political will at the upper administration.”
The university did not reply to the Charlatan’s request for comment on the topic of gender-inclusive bathrooms in time for publication.
To raise awareness about the issue of gender-inclusive bathrooms, CTAG plans to host an informational campaign about the issue’s importance on campus. The campaign will include posters and social media posts.
“Making things gender-inclusive is to everybody’s benefit and not just trans people,” Prempeh said.
Theo Dunn, a master’s student in philosophy and digital humanities, said it is important to inform people how gender-inclusive bathrooms benefit both trans individuals and the larger Carleton community.
“It’s unfortunate that we have to do this, because you should just be able to say trans people deserve autonomy and to literally go to the bathroom,” he said. “[But] a lot of these people don’t necessarily know about how gender-neutral bathrooms benefit themselves as well.”
Pointed to the underrepresentation of women’s bathrooms in historically male-dominated departments such as engineering, Dunn said this is a space where redesignating certain bathrooms as gender-inclusive solves the issue without having to create more bathrooms.
Encouraging cisgender people to “become more aware of cis privileges and that it’s not a universal experience” will also be important to the awareness campaign, Horak said.
She said it’s helpful to frame awareness initiatives as not just understanding trans people, but having cis people “reevaluate [their] own experience walking through life.”
Myth-busting facts around multi-stall and gender-inclusive bathrooms, like the idea that they are unsafe or unnecessary, will also be important to CTAG’s campaign, Prempeh said.
The campaign will also share statistics about the importance of these bathrooms and encourage people to engage building managers in the conversations around gender-inclusive bathrooms on campus.
“There are many benefits for people to use multi-stall, inclusive bathrooms,” they said. “And no one is being forced to use these bathrooms if they don’t want. There’s lots of gendered bathrooms on campus that people can use.”
Featured Image by Maia Tustonic/the Charlatan.
