Dear Editor,
Following the recent publications of articles regarding the status of non-gendered bathrooms at Vashon Island High School, QSA would like to address some of the concerns that were discussed in the opinion section. We understand that creating open, all-gender bathrooms will require a change in thinking and school culture. We value all questions and feedback so that we can quickly address concerns and misconceptions to make this transition go as smoothly as possible.
QSA is concerned with everyone’s safety. At the start of this project, we worked on creating a way to make sure that everyone would feel safe, while also making sure that the needs of all students would be met. To go about this, we are doing several things:
- Maintaining a set of gendered bathrooms, just a level below the all-gender bathroom, so that students can decide which space they’d be more comfortable in. The bathrooms close to the band room will also be left gendered.
- Creating a safer bathroom space by possibly eliminating or enclosing urinals and developing enclosed stalls.
- We are converting the bathrooms, on the second floor, that currently have a camera facing the hallway outside of the bathroom to help monitor possible abuse of the system.
With the current system, non-binary students are not actually given a bathroom. Non-binary is an umbrella term for those who do not identify with either male or female. This makes it impossible to actually choose a bathroom because they don’t actually “belong” in either.
If we choose to neglect LGBTQ+ kids, especially transgender kids, we continue to promote an air of rejection and hostility that has ultimately lead to detrimental mental health side effects. In addition to this, the single-stalled, gender-neutral bathrooms have the potential to out people who use it. It has become a way of singling people out. This is a huge violation of privacy and can potentially endanger them at home. There are groups of people within our school who don’t feel safe using any restroom here. This can be because there isn’t a bathroom available to them, they aren’t out about their identity, or the risk of even walking into the bathroom of their choice is too great.
The 2015 National School Climate Survey by GLSEN found that three-quarters — 75 percent — of transgender students felt unsafe at school because of their gender expression, and they were more likely to experience verbal harassment, physical harassment and physical assault than their peers. On top of this, the GLSEN study also found that 70 percent of transgender students said they’d avoided bathrooms because they felt unsafe or uncomfortable. This is something that we continue to support as long as we traditionally gender bathrooms. The all-gender bathrooms are to protect and empower transgender students within our school and create an environment where everyone gets an equal chance at education.
There was an argument about plumbing codes and the need for separate facilities based on sex. The problem is that we are dealing with gender and not with people’s reproductive organs. Transgender people have an identity that does not align with what was assigned to them at birth, so codes asking what their sex is are not appropriate. Even if we were talking about genitals, intersex people would still be left out — intersex is a term used to refer to a variety of conditions where someone’s genitalia and/or chromosomes do not fit with the typical definitions of male or female.
The same article also claimed that there are only about 30 students who identify as transgender in the school based on statistics from the Williams Institute covering the entire country. The study reports that 1.4 million adults identify as transgender, which only takes people over 18 years of age into account. The study also addresses the fact that an increasing number of young people identify as transgender, so going off of these statistics is not only inaccurate, but irresponsible.
In the end, statistics shouldn’t matter. We don’t need hard numbers because if we want to be the inclusive environment we claim to be, we have to extend the same opportunities to everyone — not just the majority.
We cannot and will not pick and choose who deserves to be treated equitably.
Sincerely,
VHS Queer Spectrum Alliance