Gender neutrality possible for solo stalls

During his campaign, Student Body President Houston Summers said bringing gender-neutral bathrooms to campus would be “a really simple fix.”

Yet there has been no visible movement on that project so far.

“Up to this point, we have identified a map of all the locations of single-use bathrooms on campus that could potentially be turned into gender-neutral bathrooms,” Summers said.

He said there are specific codes and procedures for the signs that go up on gender-neutral bathrooms.

“There’s been concern in the past with other gender-neutral bathrooms,” Summers said. “We really want to make sure that if we’re going to run this out, it’s up to code.”

Student government plans to convert single-stall bathrooms into gender-neutral bathrooms, since that is the least expensive option.

“We’re still slowly chugging away on funding and all the other bureaucratic factors,” Summers said.

While Summers could not give an exact number of bathrooms that could become gender-neutral, he estimated roughly 100.

“There’s all sorts of small obscure bathrooms located around campus,” he said.

Money is the main roadblock for student government to complete the project.

“It is expensive,” Summers said. “Labor aside, these signs range anywhere from seemingly 50 bucks to 300, 400 bucks, so it could potentially be very, very expensive.”

Summers said the issue with taking the money directly from student government’s budget is that this would take away money from student organizations who rely on it.

“We’re getting very close to finding sources for funding,” he said. “We’re going to have to pick and choose. I don’t think it’s feasible at 300 a sign to put in 100 bathrooms on campus. Doing some is definitely possible.”

He said they are not collaborating with any other organizations on the project, so the money is all up to student government.

“We’ve had a couple of conversations with facilities,” Summers said. “But this is virtually a student government-driven project.”

Student government also reached out to UNC’s LGBTQ Center, director Terri Phoenix said.

“Gender-segregated spaces end up getting policed. People look at people’s gender expression and then make judgments on whether their gender is right or wrong,” Phoenix said. “In gender non-specific spaces, anybody can use those spaces.”

Phoenix said although the bathrooms across from their office are gender-segregated, there is a one stall, gender-neutral bathroom on the first floor of SASB.

“In the UNC design standards, there is a requirement that each new building include a gender non-specific bathroom,” Phoenix said.

The Campus Y building installed gender-neutral bathrooms nearly two years ago.

“When the Campus Y first did it, there was of course some pushback,” Campus Y Co-President Vishal Reddy said. “But now we don’t really ever hear anyone complain about it. It’s kind of a staple of our building.”

The building was the first on campus to have these types of bathrooms, Reddy said.

Reddy said he knows gender-neutral bathrooms are a topic of discussion, one that he thinks is important.

“The goal is to take away little aspects of our society that reinforce this idea of gender operating on a binary,” Reddy said. “Bathrooms are just one of many, many things that do that.” 

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