A.S. Council unanimously approved a resolution in favor of unisex bathrooms on campus during its Nov. 6 meeting. With the resolution coming soon after similar resolutions were passed at UC Berkeley and UCLA, it seems as if UCSD’s council jumped on the bandwagon before carefully considering the ramifications of the position it supported.
The resolution claims gender-specific bathrooms are bad for UCSD, advocating the construction of unisex bathrooms in all new buildings and the conversion of current single-stall bathrooms to unisex bathrooms.
Unisex bathrooms, their supporters argue, are good for transgendered individuals who feel uncomfortable choosing a gender-specific restroom. However, these bathrooms have the potential to single them out as different: Transgendered individuals would be subject to more scrutiny by passing up gendered bathrooms en route to a unisex stall, opening themselves up to more ridicule than if they went into a gendered bathroom.
They also argue that the bathrooms would benefit parents with children of the opposite gender; for example, a woman with a 7 year-old son who may not be comfortable with taking the boy into a women’s bathroom but cannot accompany him into a men’s bathroom. However, the number of people on a college campus in such a situation is small.
This resolution also has the potential to do harm to a large portion of UCSD students. Since the university is required by law to provide a certain number of stalls per square foot of building space, it would follow that the unisex bathrooms the resolution says should be built in new buildings would have to be installed in addition to existing gendered bathrooms.
Plumbing new bathrooms is expensive, so that cost — most likely passed onto students — will go up; and the space taken up by the unisex bathrooms can potentially take away from classroom space.
In short, this resolution was hastily passed in order to follow the hyper-individualistic trend of a society that is increasingly — perhaps overly — sensitive to gender issues. The interests of the entire student body were not considered. Even the select few that this proposal claims to help stand to lose from this resolution.
