Proximity … if the existing bathrooms are pretty far apart then students are closer on average with coed bathrooms than with separate men’s and women’s bathrooms. The way to make single sex bathrooms as close as coed bathrooms would be to wipe out dorm rooms to double the number of bathrooms … and I doubt many colleges are trying to deduce the number of dorm rooms on campus.</p>
<p>One last thought … one of the objections raised about coed bathrooms is having to be in a bathrobe or towel in the bathroom with someone of the opposite sex … however in the single sex bathroom set-up students will be traveling much further in the hall with their bathrobe or towel.</p>
<p>(PS - in a set-up with single sex floor or wings then single sex bathrooms would be just as proximate).</p>
<p>My daughter’s dorm was coed by floor. She got a little fed up with the half-wit guys knocking on her door asking her if she wanted to do shots. She would have just loved having these clowns in her bathroom.</p>
<p>“And some of us are saying – though no one appears to be listening – that ours weren’t set up with changing areas / anterooms outside the showers, so they would have to be retrofitted.”</p>
<p>Well, there’s non-listening on both sides.</p>
<p>I’ve never said that all bathrooms could easily be made co-ed. Just that most, if not all, of the dorm bathrooms I personally have seen could be. So that I would not assume that there was a big expense involved every time a previously single-sex bathroom was made co-ed.</p>
<p>I watch enough home improvement shows to know anything is possible. What’s practical is another matter. Why would schools go out of their way to co-mingle the sexes in bathrooms. I just don’t get it.</p>
<p>Ha, EK we did have a transgender engineer at my work 20 years ago. He was still a he at the time, but wearing womens clothes. We had a bigwig customer in the building one time who needed to pee. I guess he wasn’t happy peeing next to someone in a skirt. Our management subsequently tried to have this person use the womens floor on the 1st level (my level). I was the only women who worked on that floor and I guess they felt it was easy to inconvenience one than many.</p>
<p>Well most of the dorm bathrooms that I have personally seen were at colleges which were single-sex colleges (mostly male) at the time the dorms were constructed. Therefore there was no presumed need for a lot of privacy, other than for the shower, and most showers had a shower curtain and outside the shower, a hook to hang a towel or bathrobe. There was no anteroom for changing and no room to add one. My most recent experience was with the Harvard Dorms (not the Houses) where the dorms were co-ed by floor, but bathrooms were single-sex by floor with only one on a floor (men - first and fifth floors, women - second through fourth floors). The bathrooms there were simply not big enough to add all of the privacy measures that most seem to think are always present.</p>
<p>An example. A person I know was born male and until a few years ago had a full beard and lived as a man, although he always felt he was born in the wrong body. Since then this person has decided to live as a woman. She has had hormone and laser treatments and is a very pretty, very feminine woman. You would have a hard time picking her out as different among a crowd of women. She has changed her name but has not yet had gender reassignment surgery, so is still legally a male. Her sex is male, her gender female. Which bathroom should s/he use?</p>
<ol>
<li> Coed dorms with coed floors are more popular with students. When I went to college, the coed dorms had the minimum number of single-gender floors (one male and one female), with the rest coed, reflecting student preference (the coed bathrooms on coed floors were disclosed when asking the students whether they wanted single gender versus coed floors).</li>
<li> It gives the school more ability to fill dorm space. No having men on the waiting list while the all-women dorms have space available, or vice-versa.</li>
</ol>
<p>During a college tour, when the guide stated that the floor was coed, I asked her if the bathroom was also coed and so many parents rolled their eyes up in their heads as if to say “What a dumb question…coed bathrooms”. I had to tell them that yes, they do exist.</p>
<p>The 8 story dorms had 2 single gender floors and 6 coed floors, meaning that they only made the minimum number of single gender floors when assigning rooms because one floor or less of each gender wanted a single gender floor (the preference questionnaire did say that coed floors had coed bathrooms).</p>
<p>Would you (if you’re male) or your son feel comfortable sharing open bathroom facilities with someone named Hannah who had breasts and dressed in skirts?</p>
<p>It’s not as simple as saying he’s male and should use the men’s room.</p>