Catharine SO I went to two colleges. The first one, Oberlin College, is considered one of the most liberal colleges in the United States. I absolutely loved it! In fact, though I later switched to a private Christian college, Pepperdine, I found the Christian community at the more-secular school to be much more vibrant and authentic than at the “Christian” college. But that’s a topic for another post.
Today I want to talk about the fact that while at Oberlin I used- and survived- gender neutral bathrooms!
There were bathrooms everywhere… as there tend to be… and students in dorms would vote on which portions of bathrooms would be designated for specific genders. Some bathrooms were 100% gender neutral, including showers, and others would have gender-neutral sinks, for example, but the showers were for say, women- only. In practice, this could get somewhat confusing. There were signs on some doors with a sign with a moveable arrow on the door- and you could go into the bathroom, and change the sign to indicate whether you wanted people of other genders to be able to be in there too, or not. This was back in 2005, so I imagine that in the last 15 years things have become less confusing (at the time, I had not even heard of anywhere else experimenting with the concept of gender-neutral bathrooms).
So in the dorms, things could be a little confusing, and some parts of bathrooms were often sequestered for certain genders, depending on a silent vote at the beginning of the year where students on that floor would say what they wanted. But beyond the dorms, most, if not all bathrooms, were gender-neutral. Anyone could use them.
I will confess that at the time, I was more conservative than I am now, and I was kind of uncomfortable with the idea. The bathroom that I have the clearest memory of didn’t have a urinal- which I think was helpful to everyone who would use that bathroom- to just have privacy no matter what was going on in each stall.
So what was it like using the bathroom?
I walked in.
I went into a stall. I did my business.
I walked out of the stall.
I washed my hands, dried my hands, and left.
I confess that I waited a minute, until I was alone, to come out.
I’m pretty sure the other thousands of students who have used those bathrooms have had similarly boring experiences. Using the bathroom is, after all, kind of a simple thing.
Yay bathrooms!
