Among the most frequent complaints of transgender students is a lack of gender-inclusive restrooms at college. Nancy Jean Tubbs, director of the LGBT Resource Center at the U. of California at Riverside, inventoried their locations on the 1,200-acre campus. “In my role,” she says, “I realized I had to do it.” Kendrick Brinson for The Chronicle
Nancy Jean Tubbs is the first to admit that she wasn’t eager to update an old inventory of gender-inclusive restrooms at the University of California at Riverside. The project would involve searching building after building on a campus of nearly 1,200 acres for single-occupancy restrooms, as well as checking their signage and mapping and describing their locations. (“Arts Building next to Room 202 — Dance Seminar Room. No room number on the actual restroom.”) It wasn’t a chore you’d expect the director of the university’s LGBT Resource Center to be devoting a lot of time to.
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Among the most frequent complaints of transgender students is a lack of gender-inclusive restrooms at college. Nancy Jean Tubbs, director of the LGBT Resource Center at the U. of California at Riverside, inventoried their locations on the 1,200-acre campus. “In my role,” she says, “I realized I had to do it.” Kendrick Brinson for The Chronicle
Nancy Jean Tubbs is the first to admit that she wasn’t eager to update an old inventory of gender-inclusive restrooms at the University of California at Riverside. The project would involve searching building after building on a campus of nearly 1,200 acres for single-occupancy restrooms, as well as checking their signage and mapping and describing their locations. (“Arts Building next to Room 202 — Dance Seminar Room. No room number on the actual restroom.”) It wasn’t a chore you’d expect the director of the university’s LGBT Resource Center to be devoting a lot of time to.
Nevertheless, she says, “in my role, I realized I needed to do it” — in part because the LGBT Resource Center’s website has a page devoted to restrooms comfortable for those “who are gender nonconforming, have small children, or need an attendant’s assistance.” Since the university had no central restroom database, Tubbs started working off the old inventory, plus “a list that a senior custodian gave me of where they clean single-occupancy toilets.”
Even for colleges committed to welcoming transgender students and faculty and staff members — Riverside has offered students gender-inclusive housing since 2005 — existing facilities present a multitude of challenges. Some just require new signs, but many need difficult and expensive overhauls. Multistall men’s and women’s restrooms abound, offering little in the way of privacy for users of any description. Locker rooms and showers in athletics and recreational facilities often offer even less.
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Surveys of transgender students suggest that the lack of gender-inclusive restrooms is one of their biggest complaints. In California, the issue has even come up in contract negotiations between the university system and the union representing graduate teaching assistants.
And some easy solutions, like making single-occupancy or even multistall bathrooms gender neutral, may run afoul of cultural norms or of building codes that define how many bathroom fixtures must be supplied for each gender. Meanwhile, universities must also accommodate people whose religions require them to remain separate from those of the opposite sex.
Riverside faces all those challenges, says Tubbs. While the residence hall that offers gender-inclusive housing is an all-suites facility that presents no problems, other buildings are a mixed bag. The science-and-engineering side of the campus is particularly short on gender-neutral restrooms — even in several buildings constructed within the past five years (“It’s frustrating,” she says). On the other hand, a recent overhaul of the Student Recreation Center provided a “universal” changing room. It accommodates one person at a time but has several lockers, leading to an unanticipated problem: After your workout, you might have to wait for someone else to clear out before you can shower and change.
By late summer, Tubbs had visited 63 single-occupancy restrooms on the 21,000-student campus — including one in Hinderaker Hall, which houses the chancellor’s office, that she inventoried as “convenient for upper administration and student protesters” and several that earned a “Urinal alert!” She had yet to document some 44 other restrooms that might be appropriate for transgender students and staff members, including two in the Botanic Gardens and one in the Custodial and Grounds office.
But while she was at work on the update, “some amazing things happened” at the UC system headquarters, Tubbs says. Janet Napolitano, the University of California president, issued systemwide “Guidelines for Providing Gender Inclusive Facilities” that took effect July 1. The goal, Napolitano wrote in a cover letter, was “to provide safe facilities for people of all gender identifications.”
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Deadlines were attached for audits of existing facilities and for signage revisions, and policies for future renovations and new construction were spelled out clearly. For restrooms: “Provide at least one gender-inclusive restroom on each floor where restrooms are required or provided in a building.” And for locker rooms: “Construct at least one gender-inclusive changing room in each location in the building where locker rooms or changing rooms are provided, located within the locker room/changing room facility, so the user need not leave the area to use the changing room.”
The guidelines also anticipate that, at least for the time being, some buildings won’t have restrooms that meet the new standards. The solution: Provide a gender-inclusive restroom in a nearby building — “nearby” being defined as “within two minutes of pedestrian travel time between building entrances.” (Some graduate students who teach classes at Riverside had complained about the difficulty of getting classroom assignments near inclusive restrooms.)
Tubbs was thrilled. “This felt miraculous because this was the entire system, and every facilities manager was being given very specific guidelines that will help not just transgender people” but also anyone else who needs a little privacy — parents with small children, for instance, or people with medical conditions that require them to have assistance.
The Student Recreation Center at the U. of California at Riverside includes a gender-inclusive locker room, as called for by guidelines adopted this year by the university system. Kendrick Brinson for The Chronicle
A Q&A document attached to the new policy notes, however, that “there is no budget assistance associated with this initiative and these guidelines.” It describes the cost of updating signs on existing single-occupancy restrooms as “a minimal expense,” and says the “cost for adding facilities during renovations or new construction should be included in project budgets to provide safe, inclusive, and nondiscriminatory facilities in UC buildings.”
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Even absent a new source of funds, says Robert Gayle, the campus architect at Riverside, “we’re very happy to have some standardization.” Without formal guidelines, providing gender-neutral facilities wasn’t something most architects were thinking about, and fierce competition for space in any project would likely eliminate facilities that didn’t have a particular champion.
“For new construction the cost is inconsequential,” Gayle says of what the guidelines require. “It’s a few extra doors and extra fixtures, a few square feet. The challenge is going to be existing buildings in which we have to decide how we triage our investment.” As a ballpark figure, he guesses that each project that requires demolition and construction, beyond just moving toilet partitions, will cost “in the low tens of thousands.”
Deborah Wylie, the California system’s associate vice president of capital programs, headed a working group that looked at possible problems with the new policies. She says another campus in the system spent $150,000 on a new gender-inclusive, single-occupancy restroom, though she notes that those are “California construction dollars” and that projects might be less expensive in other parts of the country.
‘Every facilities manager was being given very specific guidelines that will help not just transgender people.’
For changing rooms in athletics facilities, she says, the university looked to the NCAA, which has published a guidebook called “Inclusion of Transgender Student-Athletes.” The NCAA’s guidelines are clear: “Transgender student-athletes should be able to use the locker room, shower, and toilet facilities in accordance with the student’s gender identity. Every locker room should have some private, enclosed changing areas, showers, and toilets for use by any athlete who desires them. When requested by a transgender student, schools should provide private, separate changing, showering, and toilet facilities for the student’s use, but transgender students should not be required to use separate facilities.”
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A difficulty the university faced, though, was balancing the desires of people who “wanted everything gender-inclusive now” with “some other populations that are equally politically active — conservative religious groups that don’t endorse this much inclusion.”
“While we embrace diversity,” Wylie says, “we can’t meet everybody’s definition of diversity at the same time.” On the other hand, she says, when the Americans With Disabilities Act first became law, “architects groused a lot, but now we don’t think twice about it.” The same is true for sustainability standards, which colleges have been quick to adopt. A current point of contention, she says, is that sustainability advocates want all single-occupancy restrooms to have urinals because they use much less water than toilets.
The university system does have one big advantage, however — as a state agency it acts as its own code-enforcement officer and can work out its own interpretations of code requirements for restroom fixtures. Princeton University, a private institution, is not so fortunate, says Anne St. Mauro, Princeton’s assistant vice president for design and construction. “There’s a fixture count that code says you have to have — so many men’s fixtures and so many women’s,” depending on the size and use of any building. The university has a fair number of single-occupancy restrooms, but if they’re assigned to men or women because they’re included in the count required by code, changing the sign requires getting a variation from the state. “We have to file a variation for every single building — they won’t do it on a campus basis,” she says.
Princeton has “had in our design standards for some time that we include gender-neutral facilities in new buildings and major renovations,” says St. Mauro. For existing buildings, at an institution as old as Princeton and with as many buildings, such a project takes time — and money, she says. A renovation to create an inclusive restroom in a campus center a few years ago was “a $50,000 undertaking.” Interestingly, buildings constructed between about 1950 and 2000 are least likely to have single-occupancy restrooms, she says. Princeton’s older and smaller buildings, meanwhile, are more likely to have restrooms that can be made gender-inclusive fairly easily.
Many smaller colleges — among them Amherst, Antioch, Connecticut, George Fox, Ithaca, and Pitzer — are also working, sometimes in creative ways, to make sure their facilities accommodate transgender students.
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At Ithaca, portable privacy screens are available for changing rooms, says Luca Maurer, program director of the Center for LGBT Education, Outreach, and Services.
“We’ve had a couple of people for whom that’s their preferred accommodation,” he says. And the library responded to complaints that it had no inclusive restrooms by adding hardware that lets users lock the outer doors of two multistall restrooms. Problem solved.
And many institutions have, like Riverside and Ithaca, added web pages to help users locate gender-inclusive facilities. A local group in Ithaca — Out for Health, which is part of Planned Parenthood of the Finger Lakes — even created an iPhone app, Pee in Peace, that helps locate inclusive restrooms throughout the town. After all, says Maurer, “it’s not enough just to have adequate facilities — you have let people know where they are.”
Correction (10/19/2015, 11:50 a.m.): This article originally misspelled Deborah Wylie’s last name as Wiley. It has been updated to reflect the correction.
Lawrence Biemiller was a senior writer who began working at The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1980. He wrote about campus architecture, the arts, and small colleges, among many other topics.