I can’t sit through a three hour-long seminar without having to urinate at least once. What can I say, I try to stay hydrated. Last Thursday, I must have been extra hydrated because I left in search for a bathroom in the middle of my class.
After leaving the classroom on the third floor of Poe Hall, I ended up walking around in circles passing nothing but women’s bathrooms. I quickly found out that there were no men’s bathrooms at all on the third floor.
Rather than jumping to conclusions that the building design of Poe Hall is inherently sexist and associates the College of Education with the female gender, I assumed that it was a mistake.
However, after speaking with other NC State students about this topic, I found that bathroom design has caused issues for many other students across campus besides me.
The biggest problem classmates articulated was the constant reminder that women are living on a man’s campus because of the use of refurbished men’s bathrooms for women. In dorms such as Turlington, Syme and Alexander, it is obvious these buildings’ bathrooms were constructed for men because they still have the urinals intact.
Bathroom design at NC State and in the nation was and still is prejudiced.
We need to address the problem of gendered bathrooms in buildings such as Poe Hall so the space this university provides for learning is not perpetuating stereotypes about an entire profession.
Regardless of Poe Hall’s unfortunate bathroom situation, there is a solution to the problem that NC State and other colleges face with bathroom design: Stop supporting an idea of separate but equal discrimination and create gender-neutral bathrooms.
“Separate but equal” usually isn’t something people go around actively supporting. However, in bathroom design, gender segregation is simply known as common sense. It is not common sense to discriminate public bathrooms simply because that is the norm.
Public restrooms have not always been gender-segregated. Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner note in their book Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender that it was not even until 1739 that the first gender-specific bathrooms popped up in Paris.
Some of the earliest efforts to legislate gender segregation in the United States were through purposeful lack of women’s restrooms in workplaces. Factories for the most part were legally allowed to refuse to install restrooms for women up until the 1920s.
It is already hard enough breaking down historical barriers of gender issues that persist at technical-based schools such as NC State. But it is made even more difficult to combat gender inequality while still enforcing the notion that men and women must have different spaces to do the same bodily function.
Because we will never be able to design spaces that are separate but equal, we need to acknowledge this and create bathrooms that are designed to be inclusive to all students. We need to change the way bathrooms are constructed and the way that public restrooms are understood.
Bathrooms need to be reimagined because there should never be a student, no matter the gender, not being able to find a bathroom to use because they are not “eligible” simply because of his or her gender because that is simply discrimination.
