Issue: There is an ongoing debate on whether educational buildings should be required to have gender-neutral bathrooms for students.
Position: Educational buildings should be required to provide gender-neutral bathrooms for students.
- Premise 1. Transgender students are entitled to be able to use a bathroom without being assaulted or harassed.
- Premise 2. Dividing bathrooms into ones for men and ones for women is an obsolete and outdated concept.
- Premise 3. Gender-neutral bathrooms are more inclusive than gender-specific ones.
The First Argument
It is necessary for a student to be in a good mental state to succeed in their education. Being under pressure or stress may negatively affect a student’s concentration and comprehension. When stress levels are constantly high, it can become a basis for developing mental disorders, which may require long years of therapy to recover from. That is why, it is vital for a person that is receiving an education to not be put under too much stress – otherwise, they are likely to experience serious problems in their learning.
There are many factors that influence the mental health of a student – basically anything might have an impact, big or small, on one’s well-being. One of the biggest factors (and one controllable by campus administration, even though not directly) is the presence of discrimination against the student and their close ones. There are many possible ways for a student to be discriminated against, one of which is being denied their access to basic utilities, such as on-campus bathrooms.
Transgender students are especially vulnerable against discrimination and are often targeted by bigoted individuals when trying to use the bathroom. They cannot use the bathrooms dedicated to students of their assigned gender at birth because of severe discomfort and, in many cases, gender dysphoria. Such students are excluded from bathrooms which align with their gender identity by bigoted students and even staff. When using any gendered bathroom, a transgender person is at a high risk of getting assaulted. The only option left for transgender students is to not use on-campus bathrooms at all. The resulting stress might discourage such students from studying, negatively affect their mental health, and even put them at risk of attempting suicide.
All students are entitled to being included in the educational process, but today, many campuses exclude the most vulnerable of students from utilizing their basic needs. The solution for that problem would be requiring every campus to provide gender-neutral bathrooms for the students. That would greatly reduce the toll on the mental health of transgender students and allow them to focus on receiving an education rather than dodging discrimination.
The Second Argument
Firstly, gender-neutral bathrooms are safer for everyone, including cisgender people. People are able to take their friends or family members of other gender with them to a gender-neutral bathroom, which significantly lowers the risks of getting assaulted or harassed. Also, generally there would be more different people in one bigger gender-neutral bathroom than in a gendered one, which would also decrease chances of a crime being committed there.
Secondly, gender-neutral bathrooms are more effective than ones that are gender-specific. Building one bigger gender-neutral bathroom is cheaper than building two smaller gender-specific ones. Gender-neutral bathrooms are also more effective and reduce wait times for people of all genders. Even more so, they basically erase the wait time gap between men and women that currently exists in gendered bathrooms. Already built bathrooms generally need little to no modification to be transformed into gender-neutral ones. It’s almost effortless to convert existing bathrooms, cheaper to build new ones, and, with all those benefits, it seems strange that gender-neutral bathrooms are still not the norm.
Thirdly, gender-neutral bathrooms better align with today’s scientific knowledge about gender than gender-specific ones. The point of receiving an education is to become not only skillful, but knowledgeable about the modern world, its people and technology. That is why, educational institutions should be ahead of the world, not lagging behind. Gender-specific schools are no longer the norm, and humanity’s knowledge about the nature of gender has expanded dramatically in the last 10-20 years. Right now, sixteen countries and several US states allow voluntarily change the gender marker in documents to a third option. Incredibly enough, the people who now can do that, still struggle with finding a bathroom that does not exclude them, especially on campus.
Lastly, gender-specific bathrooms were not always the norm. Dividing restrooms into ones for men and ones for women actually became a popular concept in the early twentieth century, and for no scientific reason. The theories that drove the US states then to pass laws, requiring all bathrooms to be gender-specific, were disproven a long time ago. Since then, people just grew familiar with the idea of gender-based segregation of bathrooms and paid no attention to it. But we can no longer ignore all the problems that segregation causes. It is time to change our restrooms for the better.
The Third Argument
Educational institutions should strive to be as inclusive as possible. After all, all people equally have a right to receive an education. Gender-specific bathrooms are not inclusive at all, and even those people who are not excluded are not equal in their inclusion. Women’s wait times are generally substantially longer than men’s wait times in gendered bathrooms. But men and women are not the only types of persons that might need to use the bathroom. As described earlier, the binary view on gender is not based on scientific evidence and actually goes against it. But it is not only wrong: it is also harmful. People, whose gender identity does not conform to the binary system, are even more likely to get assaulted than binary transgender people. The absence of gender-neutral bathrooms perpetuates discrimination against non-binary and gender-nonconforming people. No gender-specific bathroom includes them, and the only option left is to not use public bathrooms at all when there are no gender-neutral ones available.
The issue of inclusivity, however, is not limited to transgender people, despite popular belief. Disabled people also struggle with using public bathrooms that are gender-specific. Such bathrooms often do not meet the requirements for being usable by disabled people, and caretakers of other gender cannot accompany disabled people in gender-specific bathrooms. Elderly people who might need assistance from another person are also often excluded from using the bathroom. People with children of the other gender also have difficulties with using gender-specific bathrooms. Parents are left to either worry for the safety of their child, or to endure the discomfort of visiting a bathroom that is dedicated to the people of the other gender. Better availability of gender-neutral bathrooms would solve these problems.