The map on the second floor of Lawrence Hall at the University of Oregon displays a men’s restroom and an all-gender restroom across the hall from the window at room 277. In reality, the window sits across from a men’s restroom, a women’s restroom and a railing overlooking the first floor.

Although UO’s interactive all-gender restroom map reflects that reality, it has its own inconsistencies, with some all-gender restrooms missing from the map and some depicted on the map even though they don’t actually exist. That, coupled with the fact that many UO academic buildings only have one all-gender restroom, poses issues for transgender, nonbinary and gender nonconforming students.

“More often than not, I’ve given up looking for a gender neutral bathroom,” Matthew Hampton, a UO student and the education and activism coordinator at the LGBTQA3, said, “and I resort to using the men’s restroom, crossing my fingers that no one’s in there.”

But not every trans or nonbinary student feels comfortable using a gendered restroom and hoping for the best. According to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey — a survey of almost 28,000 trans individuals in the United States — 59% of respondents “avoided using a public restroom in the past year because they were afraid of confrontations or other problems they might experience.” 8% reported experiencing a urinary tract infection, kidney infection or other kidney-related problem in the past year due to avoiding public restrooms.

The survey also found that 9% of respondents reported “that someone denied them access to a restroom in the past year” and that 12% were verbally harassed, 1% were physically attacked and 1% were sexually assaulted when accessing a restroom.

Beyond threats of violence, trans and nonbinary individuals can experience dysphoria when they’re forced to use a restroom that doesn’t align with their gender or feel unsafe if they don’t “pass” as the gender of the restroom they’re in.

“Gender-inclusive fully-accessible restrooms meet a critical need for a range of individuals with diverse access and safety concerns,” UO spokesperson Saul Hubbard wrote in a statement to the Emerald. These include including trans and nonbinary individuals, families with young children and people who have attendants or mobility constraints.

Hubbard said there are over 250 gender-neutral restrooms on campus.

On-campus advocacy

Students and faculty have been asking for more gender inclusive restrooms on campus since 2003, according to Laura King, the student resource coordinator for UO’s LGBT Education and Support Services.

The ASUO senate passed a resolution to create more gender-accessible restrooms on campus in October 2014. The UO faculty Senate passed its own resolution in February 2015, with the support of groups including ASUO, the LGBTQ Alliance, LGBTESS and the gender-neutral Greek life group Theta Pi Sigma. The document largely mimicked the text of the ASUO resolution.

“Many of the buildings, including the one we’re in right now, don’t have gender inclusive bathrooms,” then-ASUO gender and sexuality advocate Elle Mallon said at the 2015 faculty Senate meeting. Lawrence, the building Mallon was speaking from, now has six gender-neutral restrooms, although all but one are on the third and fourth floors, where fewer large classes are held.

The lack of accessible restrooms means that trans students often have to leave the building their class is in to find an accessible restroom, Mallon said. “For example, I have an hour long lecture in McKenzie,” they said, “and I have a terrible time not using the bathroom at least every half hour or so. But if I have to leave that class, the nearest bathroom that I can feel safe entering is all the way over in Deady.”

Deady — now renamed to University Hall — is two buildings over from McKenzie Hall. “If there’s an hour-long lecture, and you have to go two buildings down to find a bathroom, you probably just missed at least a quarter of the instruction time for that class period,” Mallon said.

McKenzie now has one gender-neutral restroom on the first floor and two on the fourth floor, which is primarily a lab space. 

Mallon said gender-neutral restrooms are especially important given that UO markets itself as an inclusive campus for LGBTQ students. “I think it’s really reasonable for a university that says that it wants to make people feel safe on our campus to actually do the things that make people feel safe on our campus,” she said.

The ASUO and faculty Senate resolutions asked UO “to create a gender-inclusive restroom in every building,” convert all gendered single-stall restrooms with a locking front door to gender-neutral restrooms and provide printed instructions to a nearby all-gender restroom on every restroom door.

The resolutions also stated that UO should “support its transgender and gender nonconforming students by maintaining an updated map of gender-inclusive restrooms on its campus.”

Both ASUO and UO Senate resolutions serve as formalized statements of support for a given issue and do not bind UO administration to any concrete actions. Still, UO announced it would convert between 115 and 140 single-user restrooms to gender-neutral restrooms by fall 2015.

Former LGBTESS director Maure Smith-Benanti said that queer and trans students had been working to convert single-user restrooms to gender-neutral restrooms before the UO Senate resolution. “But once that resolution passed,” she said, “it moved much, much faster than anything had ever moved.”

Max Jensen worked on creating gender-inclusive restroom maps with the LGBTQA3 and LGBTESS. Students would go out in little groups, he said, and locate both gender-neutral restrooms and single-user restrooms that could be converted.

“The buildings weren’t made for queer and trans students,” Jensen said, “and that was expressed through just a fucking little sign on the bathroom.”

Hubbard said UO created a map of the gender-inclusive restrooms on campus during the 2015-16 academic year and launched it in fall of 2016. “I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” Smith-Benanti said. “I was so excited about that option.”

Smith-Benanti said prior to the interactive all-gender map, the LGBTESS had an online list of gender-neutral restrooms on campus. “The fact that nobody would ever have to come to the queer and trans office to find out where they could go to the bathroom was amazing to me,” she said. The map meant people could “preserve privacy” around their identities and still access restrooms that were affirming to them.

Current-day conundrums

Hampton said she regularly refers to the all-gender restroom map when students come into the LGBTQA3 office and ask about where they can find gender-neutral restrooms.

“It’s kind of frustrating that for cisgender people who can feel comfortable using a gendered restroom, they can just find one when they see ‘restroom,’” Hampton said. “Like, that’s what it means. And then nonbinary or trans people have to use a map to find a bathroom that they could use.”

And the map isn’t perfect. Places on the map that are labeled as all-gender restrooms — including one of the two on the second floor of Johnson Hall and one on the third floor of Anstett Hall — don’t actually exist.

In 2019, UO updated its building code to require that every new building contains at least one gender-neutral restroom — and ideally one on each floor.

Newer buildings, like Unthank Hall and Knight Campus, have gender-neutral restrooms, but none are identified on the map. Hubbard said a team of UO students annually visit the gender-neutral restrooms on campus as part of a larger survey. However, the COVID-19 pandemic means that students didn’t review the map in 2020 or 2021. Hubbard said restrooms in buildings like Unthank and Knight Campus will be included in the map’s update this fall.

Other restrooms are labeled as all-gender restrooms but require a key to enter, like those on the third floor of the EMU, in the basement of Knight Library and two restrooms near the soccer field inside the basement of the Student Recreation Center. The gender-inclusive restroom on the first floor of Knight Library closes at 5 p.m. on weekdays and is locked on weekends, despite the library being open until midnight Monday through Thursday, open until 7 p.m. on Friday and open on the weekends.

“My experience in gender-neutral bathrooms has, unfortunately, been that I haven’t really had direct access to a lot of them in a lot of the buildings that I’ve been in,” UO student Sofia Bajenaru said.

Bajenaru said they know most buildings do have gender-neutral restrooms and that buildings like the EMU are especially accessible to trans and nonbinary students. The five gender-inclusive restrooms that students and faculty can access without a key in the EMU includes a multi-stall restroom across the hall from the LGBTQA3 room.

As an environmental studies major, Bajenaru said they spend a lot of time in Columbia Hall. They know there’s a gender-neutral restroom on the second floor, but most of their classes are in the basement. “That’s not super convenient to get to when I’m just trying to hop out of class really quick, and I don’t want to leave for a long period of time,” they said.

Bajenaru said they generally use whichever restroom is closest to where they are; they’re jumping out to use the restroom rather than to cut class.

“I’ve accepted that, in most buildings, I’m not going to be able to go to a bathroom that is catered toward my identity,” they said, especially when they’re trying to find a restroom that’s close to their classroom.

Simon Scannell, a UO student and the education coordinator at LGBTESS said he’ll use a gender-inclusive restroom if it’s there, but if not, he’s fine using a men’s room. And his experience accessing gender-neutral restrooms has been pretty smooth. Most of his in-person classes have been located near a gender-inclusive restroom, he said.

“Our bodies have biological needs,” Smith-Benanti said. “That’s why public restrooms exist in the first place. That’s why drinking fountains exist in the first place.” She said it’s important that an institution provides for those needs in its community.

“Being able to provide a space that is affirming and planned for is a signal to people who are on a campus that we have anticipated you,” she said. “And that is the next level when you’re talking about inclusion.”