<p>I am not offended that someone would want a single sex bathroom, but as someone who has been dealing with periods since I was 14- that isn’t really a big deal to me, if I am having a lot of stomach trouble, I would appreciate someone who could help if needed and it wouldn’t matter if they were born male or female as long as they were helpful.</p>
<p>I also don’t think schools are necessarily in the position of " reducing stress", this would come under more the lines of - so many schools out there- you decide on criteria and pick the school you need-</p>
<p>I wouldn’t expect Donna to go anywhere, emeraldkity. Because I’d have a higher comfort level changing in front of her or you or any other female, than I would in front of JHS in this hypothetical.</p>
<p>JHS, I appreciate the post in response to mine. To respond to other posts, if I was in the hospital and going to have something done that I was uncomfortable having a male nurse do, I might ask for a female nurse (depending on how uncomfortable I felt) and I would not feel bad about doing so because it’s my body. In my field (psychotherapy) we deal all the time with people’s preferences. For example, therapists understand that a Holocaust survivor might not want to work with a German therapist, or that a woman who was raped might not want a male therapist. We don’t judge that. We know that therapy is scary and that people are vulnerable and that they are paying for the service and that they have the right to make decisions about what they are or are not comfortable with. </p>
<p>While some might be comfortable in a mixed bathroom, it’s worth realizing that there are a lot of women in the world who have been violated by men and that it may not feel safe to be naked in a shower with a man a few feet away. I think that merits some consideration.</p>
<p>emerald, I interpreted what Pizzagirl wrote as saying she would expect me, a man, to leave, but would not expect Donna, a woman, to leave. I would have the same expectation.</p>
<p>MWestMom, it is true that I have not had the experience of being a young woman, although I have known young women all my life, lived among them for many years, and raised one. I think your stereotype is probably accurate, relatively, on average, but it’s hardly a matter of “biology and experience”, and there are plenty of young men who have strong modesty preferences, too. (Also – a great number of my children’s female friends have, at some point during their teens, passed through some stage where any use of “modesty” to describe their behavior would have been stretching the term past recognition.)</p>
<p>Anyway, I don’t mind if kids prefer private or single-sex bathrooms. I only mind when that preference is so strong that they make decisions they would not otherwise make because of it. One of the things that always brings me up short on CC is the degree of concern many high school students – male and female – have about bathrooms. I think it’s fundamentally immature, and that people can adapt to a whole variety of bathroom arrangements that may be sub-optimal but not harmful. And the testimony of the college students here bears that out, for the most part.</p>
<p>I would be horribly embarrassed if one of my children said he or she was choosing a college based on bathroom configurations in the dorms. I don’t think that’s appropriate; I don’t think that’s normative.</p>
<p>I should have said “unnecessary” stress and where the situation can be controlled to end up with a better experience. Obviously there is and should be stress about work.</p>
<p>Well, we have to remember that a lot of these kids are fundamentally immature. Maybe not your kid, but many are.</p>
<p>Coming of age in the “hippie days” I experienced a lot of communal nudity, not necessarily just in bathrooms. After seeing some of these “spring break” videos, I’m pretty sure college students will find adequate time to be naked around each other, regardless of bathroom arrangements. So I don’t really think there is a big deal with the coed bathrooms.</p>
<p>But it strikes me as somewhat funny the notion that every student, or even a majority of students, are going to assiduously respect the modesty and privacy of other students in these situations. They should, but this is just another opportunity for them to forget those social niceties, and I think we need to be aware of that.</p>
<p>Particularly after reading one post on here from some kid who listed a criteria for his school as “girls hot and ready like buffalo wings.”</p>
<p>Again, you’re at the same time trivializing the differences between men and women and distorting the context in which those differences are relevant. I’m not talking about preferring male tech support people to females – I’m saying that in contexts in which the male-female differences are INTRINSICALLY RELEVANT, it’s not appropriate to question whether considering those differences is worthy of “respect.”</p>
<p>Please consider how ridiculous and borderline offensive you sound.</p>
Sorry, should have made myself clearer. The excluded students I was referring to are transpeople, not homosexuals. Good to hear from you, DonnaL; I was thinking mentally of someone I know who–for whatever reason, I don’t know what stage of op they’re at–does not identify as either gender. It was a big deal on LJ recently, when the company tried to remove “Gender Unspecified” as an account option.</p>
<p>I’ve never played a high school sport, so that may be skewing my own experiences, but even after swimming in gym class the girls (no clue about the guys) shower in swimsuits and use towels to preserve modesty when changing. I have experienced a different cultural norm–in China, pool locker rooms are full of completely nude women of all ages–but I admit that it discomfited me.</p>
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<p>If you only know 6 of the females, what of the other 394 unknown females? That’s a pretty big group to judge on statistics and not fear harassment from, if you think there’s a significant danger posed by 400 unknown males.</p>
<p>That said, the unisex bathroom solves the issue of inclusion, although it’d be nice to have it every floor for parity with single-sex. And I don’t mean to belittle anyone’s sense of modesty, only to express surprise at Michigan’s security practices. I suppose, if they’re going to have an 800-person megadorm, it makes more sense.</p>
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This. The issue I have with many posts upthread is that coed bathrooms are dismissed as unnecessary–it should be an option available to those who want it, just as single-sex bathrooms are.</p>
<p>Baelor - Not going to get into this side conversation, personally, but I’d like to point out that not everyone sees biological differences as being “intrinsically relevant” differences in society.</p>
<p>And why is this a concern of yours? Can you simply not accept that certain things are important to some students while others may not be?</p>
<p>There is a very entertaining thread about colleges crossed off the list after visiting. If you read it, there are a whole host of reasons, many you and I would laugh at, for students ruling out a college. To me, being forced to share a co-ed bathroom where it makes one uncomfortable is far more of a valid reason in making a choice on where you are going to live the next 4 years - than a lot of other reasons people give in choosing colleges.</p>
<p>Even though I have agreed with you on some other threads on different subjects, I must say i find some of your comments on this thread quite offensive</p>
<p>I think it’s possible to have a preference, though. My D is investigating single-sex schools. Maybe that will pan out for her, maybe it won’t, who knows, we haven’t yet begun to visit. Certainly that’s at a much larger level than bathroom configurations, which don’t even enter into the equation, but I don’t think that someone who does desire to attend a single-sex school needs to “get over it.”</p>
<p>I’m glad Donna weighed in; I certainly don’t have the knowledge and experience she does, but I would have assumed a trans person would use the bathroom of whatever gender they are identifying with / now living or transitioning to - whether or not surgery has actually been done seems beyond the point. It doesn’t need to be coed for that to happen. But, I may be speaking out of school here.</p>
<p>But, they ARE unnecessary. Let’s posit a campus in which every dorm has both males and females on each floor, and there is a men’s bathroom and a women’s bathroom within reasonable reach on each floor (so, we’re not arguing that anyone is unduly inconvenienced). Are the benefits of a coed bathroom enough that the campus is behind the times if they don’t tear down the two and combine them?</p>
<p>Plenty of things are “unnecessary.” Singles are unnecessary (except for those with medical issues, I suppose). Suite-style living is unnecessary. A cafeteria in every single dorm is unnecessary.</p>
<p>I’m not arguing about their place. I’m arguing that women and men are different biologically. I didn’t realize that this was a point of contention. Do men and women use the restrooms in the exact same ways? No. So their differences are “relevant” in that they exist at all. These differences are NOT relevant, say, for a corporate position or something else. </p>
<p>Again, I am talking about a VERY specific context here – one in which biological differences are CLEARLY exhibited. One such context is restrooms.</p>
<p>Anyone here remember the bathroom scene from the novel Charlotte Simmons?! </p>
<p>Many schools, including S’s will tell you that coed bathrooms are an option. The reality, however, is that if even one person on a hallway objected, the bathroom remained single sex. In fact, despite the option to dispense with them, most of the bathrooms in his dorm remained single sex. After first year he lived off campus. One summer a couple of girls rented rooms in his fraternity house for the summer - girls used the single bathroom set ups with doors shut and locked. D, at another college, had an in room suite bathroom her first year shared by four women. This year she is in a two bedroom suite for four women, with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. She has never come across this issue, either. So, while coed bathrooms have become more common than they were, the fully coed kind that we seem to be discussing here are probably not quite as ubiquitous as you might think - and in some cases all it takes is one dissenting vote against.</p>
<p>I think it would be interesting to know why college students vote in favor of coed bathrooms, when given the opportunity. Has anyone on this board been involved in one of those discussions?</p>
<p>Other than for reasons of convenience (i.e., males/females might have to walk down another hallway to use a farther bathroom), are there any other reasons given for wanting these arrangements?</p>
<p>Having a men’s room and a women’s room on every hall does not always accomodate everyone. Trans men and trans women who are beginning to transition may be uncomfortable using a gendered bathroom if their physical appearance is androgynous. Some people do not identify as men or women, and (regardless of what you think of their identity) deserve safe, comfortable, non-gendered spaces to pee. And often masculine women or feminine men often experience harassment in gendered bathrooms.</p>
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<p>Although there are anatomical differences between sexes, everyone’s basic needs are the same (toilet, sink, soap, towels, trash can) and can be satisified by a single space. As a trans man, I switched from women’s rooms to men’s rooms without undergoing any physical change, and found that the facilities were identical (with the exception of urinals, but folks with *****es can pee just as well in a toilet), and both were as adequate for my anatomy as for anyone else’s. Physical differences do not inherently necessitate separate facilities.</p>
<p>(And once again I’ll register my amusement that CC bleeps p-e-n-i-s, but not vagina… I guess the former is vulgar, but the latter is a reasonable topic of conversation?)</p>
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<p>For the past three semesters, my dorm has voted to keep all three of our bathrooms all-gender (or as we put it, “just bathrooms”). It was a remarkably simple discussion – there were folks in the house who were uncomfortable with gendered bathrooms, and no one who felt strongly that they should not be all-gender, so that was that…</p>
<p>Yes, we had a vote every year at the beginning of the year, but it was a formality. As there had never been a problem attributed to having co-ed bathrooms, there seemed to be no reason to change the existing status quo. Any anxieties a freshmen might have were likely quelled by the upper classmen’s reassurance that it was really no big deal.</p>
<p>We had a long hallway with bathrooms on either end. To walk to the other end everytime to use the facilities would certainly have been inconvenient. </p>
<p>I vaguely recall a parent being upset by discovering this upon arrival. I think they were assured that there was a female only bathroom in the womens dorm that their daughter could use (two interconnected building over, including travel through the mens dorm :)) but I don’t think their daughter ever made the trek.</p>
<p>It is true that most of the time, bathroom was empty. I remember having conversations with male dormmates as we were walking down the hall, and continuing as one of us used the facilities, and beyond. No different than if I were talking to a girlfriend. But this was much closer to the 60’s than we are now.</p>
<p>What really bothers me about this discussion is the presumption on the part of some that because some people aren’t bothered by or see value in coed bathrooms, those who are more comfortable with single gender bathrooms (at age 17 or 18, the first time away from home!) are somehow backward or not progressive in their thinking or something.</p>
<p>Um, not all kids have ever shared a bathroom with ANYONE, much less someone of the opposite sex. I can imagine MANY kids not being comfortable with coed bathrooms in the dorms. Also, think of the large number of “wierd roomate” stories that have been told on these boards. Not every student is an enlightened, hold-hands-and-sing-kumbayah paragon in our Utopian gender-blind society . </p>
<p>For students who are happy with such and arrangement, fine. But I hate that folks are criticizing those would would not be as “less than,” somehow. So much for diversity, I guess.</p>