• Joel Brown

    Staff Writer

    Portrait of Joel Brown. An older white man with greying brown hair, beard, and mustache and wearing glasses, white collared shirt, and navy blue blazer, smiles and poses in front of a dark grey background.

    Joel Brown is a staff writer at BU Today and Bostonia magazine. He’s written more than 700 stories for the Boston Globe and has also written for the Boston Herald and the Greenfield Recorder. Profile

Comments & Discussion

Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.

There are 12 comments on Class Project Brings All-Gender Bathrooms to Questrom

  1. Students should use whichever bathroom goes with the parts that they have associated with going to the bathroom. No need to encourage this behavior of everyone who “isn’t sure” if the parts they have are correct and deciding they want to be identified as a different sex for a day. Grow up people.

    1. These are single-stall bathrooms. Why does it matter to you?

      Also if your “parts” are ambiguous, this seemingly simple solution to tell which bathroom to use becomes extremely complicated. And if you’re worried about people being uncomfortable in the bathroom, imagine a trans person who has not undergone any surgery walking into a bathroom designated for people of the opposite gender- they will feel uncomfortable (probably out of place) and it sounds to me like you probably wouldn’t want them in there either. All-gender bathrooms are a solution to feeling out of place, especially if they are single-stall!

      Basically, why does it matter to you what toilets other people use to pee?

    2. As a student of Boston University I would think you would have the intelligence to educate yourself on the matters discussed in this article before you told the royal “you” to “Grow up”.

      Gender non-confirming and trans-gender students may be more common than you think. Many of these students may not be open with the fact that their gender identity does not reflect their assigned gender at birth. Creating a SINGLE STALL restroom that permits students, faculty, visitors, etc of any gender identity to use is an easy solution to a rather complex issue. And a solution that can alleviate (very quietly) what can be an absolute HUGE burden on a student.

      Also, this is not an issue of people “deciding they want to be identified as a different sex for a day”; this is an issue of people that Have a gender identity that does not correlate with a gender assigned at birth. And that is a long, ever evolving life challenge that people have to face every day. Having a restroom like this in no way, shape, or form harms anyone yet it can exponentially help those members of the University community that face a daily struggle.

      It would seem that you have a lot more growing up to do while you are at Boston University. I can only hope that BU is able to broaden your life experiences and educate you on how to properly research issues before commenting upon them.

  2. This is great! Thank you to the students for bringing this project forward. All single-stall bathrooms across campus should be updated like this. No reason not to!

  3. This is good. In regards to the concerned student, I would say it’s not about students constantly changing there sexual identity and being all like “today I want to be a girl”. I believe it has more to do with removing labels and the categorization between male and female. Questrom has taken a big step towards accepting humans into their community, not stereotypes.

  4. I thought Sociology did this decades ago! (Yes, during the Silber presidency).
    It seems like the only all-gender bathrooms on campus that matter are in recently renovated buildings.
    P.S.: What color are the washrooms? In sociology red figures prominently and it doesn’t force a person to think three times as they enter.

  5. My company’s building has had a neutral bathroom for three years. It’s been nothing but problems- assaults and harassment going on in there 24/7, lawsuits every other week, a hugely overstaffed HR department to handle all the complaints, brawls between gay recruiters trying to make people be gay and Christian Conversion Camp radicals-

    Wait no, none of that is true except for having the bathroom. The only thing that ever happens is that staff and clients occasionally feel a little more comfortable. Other than gender issues, there are many with physical or psychological conditions that benefit from a more personal space.

  6. These bathrooms accommodate people of every gender, but exclude those who don’t identify with any gender. Very ignorant of Questrom and these students to overlook agendered individuals.

Post a comment.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *