QueerAction Campaign:
Gender-neutral bathrooms.

This campaign is focused on encouraging the University to make a low-cost move to further the civil rights and dignity of its community members. The drive to ask for this comes from observing violence, harassment, and intimidation that is directed at some people routinely -- transgender people especially -- when they enter public facilities to undertake a basic human function.

Supporting this campaign does not require you to subscribe to any particular theoretical beliefs about gender, iconography, or identity politics. It is enough to believe that everyone deserves access to comfortable facilities, and that the University can provide it very easily.

If it never occurred to you before that bathrooms could be significant in this way, that is probably because you take for granted the right to use public bathrooms discreetly, anonymously, and without fear of incident. Please take the time to educate yourself more about this campaign and the conditions that led us to launch it.

Materials.

Announcements.

  1. Get educated and entertained at the luscious BATHROOM AVENGERS BOOTYSHAKIN' SHOW... happening on Friday, January 16, 2004 at Hutch Commons in the Reynolds Club (57th and University). It's open to everyone and admission is FREE. The show starts at 9pm.

    We're going to talk about the idea behind this campaign and the great progress we've made so far... then give the stage to CPEG (Chicago Performers Exporting Gender-blending) and friends, veterans of drag and burlesque performance.

  2. Wednesday November 19, 2003, a PANEL DISCUSSION on "The Importance of Gender-Neutral Bathrooms" was held at the Center for Gender Studies (5733 S University Ave), featuring: Mary Anne Case... Red Vaughan Tremmel... Nate Claxton... and Naomi Sobel.

    Read the Chicago Maroon coverage and subsequent editorial.

    There were two letters to the editor in response to that coverage.

  3. PRESS COVERAGE:

Links.

(mostly off-campus; identified by quotes from the sites)

Others make the case for gender-neutral bathrooms.

In a transgender focus group, the Gay Straight Alliance Network found that the lack of safe bathrooms is the biggest problem that gender non-conforming students face.
Dr. Barger says her dean wanted her out immediately because he felt she threatened the young engineering program and its 122 students. "He told me that if I was seen coming out of the women's restroom, every mother would pull their child out of school and the department would collapse."
When I started taking hormones and looking more ambiguously gendered, no one wanted me in "their" restroom.
...police pushed him against a wall, charged him with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, and then held him for 23 hours.
...the University, as a community, can offer a relatively more sensitive environment while incurring a negligible cost to the student population.
We believe that all people, regardless of their gender identification or presentation, have the right to access safe and dignified restroom facilities without fear of harassment, judgement or violence.
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Let's just call this next batch "unsympathetic."

(Really the best we could find for articulating the case against. Please read at own risk, as some are inflammatory.)

So what? Get a life.
Where does this all lead? "If you're going to recognize the transgendered you're going to recognize pedophiles who seek after children and give them special treatment as well," Trueman said.
If you've just got to play dress-up, do it at home, in your own damn bathroom.
By removing the sacred distinction between men and women, GLBT activists hope to gain credibility and social acceptance for their deviant behavior.
A traditional family values advocate says a proposal to provide "gender neutral" restrooms at colleges and universities is the latest example of the decline of society.

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Coalition for Queer Action