Though popular media, family hierarchies and tradition construct many aspects of perceived gender differences (such as strength, emotionality, and preferences), gender is a very real issue that is negotiated constantly in everyday interactions. Considering single-person, unisex bathrooms to be a place of complete gender neutrality provides the university with a willful blind spot for gender, denying an engagement with already existing discussions of gender at the school and elsewhere. Ironically, it claims gender to be a non-issue for the university, since transgressing individuals are being placed in anonymous private bathrooms instead of being given the option to be seen as equals to those who are safely able to use male or female bathrooms. It seems that most of the opposition to these types of bathrooms stems from those who are afraid to view the ‘other’ (whether it be the transgender, male, or female body) in a space that was previously gender-segregated. Throughout the history of civil rights in the US, desegregation has been used to provide people with equality and fairness. Multi-person, unisex bathrooms would slowly dismantle the walls of prejudice and inequality that are only reinforced by single-person, unisex bathrooms in conjunction with gender-segregated bathrooms.

SAIC Director of Multicultural Affairs James E. Britt informed me that the school had “been working on a number of initiatives regarding our trans community” and that “the announcement regarding the restrooms was just an initial step,” implying that the school is willing to consider alternatives to the current configuration in the future.

In addition to providing equal rights, for the LGBT community at the school, these multi-person, unisex bathrooms could greatly benefit the entire school community in multiple ways. One crucial point is the increased accessibility of bathrooms to those who need to access them. Currently, the groundbreaking website safe2pee.org, a site that lists safe, unisex bathrooms in any given city, only lists around seventeen single-person, gender-neutral bathrooms in the downtown loop, which is quite small considering the number of gendered bathrooms that exist in the area.

Even more scattered are the unisex bathrooms at SAIC. For example, there is only one “gender-free” bathroom on the first floor of the MacLean Center, while each of the other 14 floors contain both a male and female bathroom. Though other school-owned buildings like the Sharp Building fare better (four unisex bathrooms on various floors), one can only imagine how much more convenient it would be for male, female and transgender students and faculty members to more readily access bathroom facilities. Another key issue is that having increased foot-traffic within each bathroom would cut down on the amount of incidences of harassment and violence. The bathrooms would deconstruct objections that people are using the ‘wrong’ restroom, providing an opportunity to foster comfort and acceptance between differently gendered individuals. The conversion of gender-segregated bathrooms to multi-person, unisex bathrooms would not be a challenging task at all; it would merely consist of removing the already sparse urinals from the men’s restrooms and placing dividers with toilets in their places. This would economically cut down on the resources used to build new, single-person, unisex bathrooms, which have not existed in many buildings until recent times.

It would seem that though many institutional objections come from preconceived notions about how bathrooms should be gender-segregated and other problems with architectural codes. However, it can be theorized that many arguments about gender in relation to bathrooms could be resolved by simply reassigning gender-segregated bathrooms as multi-person, unisex. Not only would this solve existing problems, it would take a step towards a greater familiarity and acceptance of different genders and provide equality and a greater sense of public identity for often-marginalized members of the LGBT community. While multi-person, unisex bathrooms have worked very successfully in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere, the U.S. at large still seems too close-minded and prejudiced, as it is with other issues of gender and sexuality (such its response to gay marriage and the still-developing acknowledgement of transgender equality), to accept wide-scale changes such as multi-person, unisex bathrooms. Though the US needs to become more realistic about providing equality to all people, universities such as SAIC are the perfect testing grounds for ideas that could possibly bring about actual change and acceptance of others for their own identities.