By Maxwell Pisciotta
For Pride Month, the PSPDG blog is collaborating with students from LTBGS and Lambda Grads for a series of posts highlighting the LGBTQ+ community and related matters at Penn and beyond.
It is no secret that if you’re looking for a gender-neutral restroom on the University of Pennsylvania campus, they are often difficult to find. The difficulty, of course, depends on your department, the buildings which you occupy, the age of those buildings, and the school that owns those buildings. Ultimately, this is to say, that yes, there are gender-inclusive restrooms throughout campus, but if you happen to be in a building that does not already have one, you may have to go as far as two or three buildings over to locate one. For faculty, staff, and students who do not have to leave their “home” building often or who spend hours in lab, this can pose a substantial inconvenience.
In response to the less than adequate access to gender-inclusive restrooms throughout campus, many student activists have started to converse amongst themselves, and with UPenn Facilities (University of Pennsylvania Facilities and Real Estate Services) to discuss the potential for building more or retrofitting existing bathrooms to better accommodate gender-nonconforming folks. However, in my experience witnessing and being a part of these conversations, they are often circular in nature. This is in-part due to a lack of understanding with how UPenn Facilities is able to address these additions and/or retrofits and the requirements from the city of Philadelphia that makes these additions and/or retrofits difficult to implement. Ultimately, it is not that the resources for these projects do not exist, but these projects are often expensive, and locating the appropriate budget for them is more convoluted than it appears.
To begin, it is important to student activists, myself included, to understand what is being asked of UPenn Facilities when a gender-inclusive restroom is being proposed. According to Philadelphia city code, multi-stall, gender-inclusive restrooms must have individual stalls that include:
Floor-to-ceiling walls (PM-503.1)
Waste disposal bin, and (§6-402)
Fire alarm/smoke detector (B-907.2.3.1)
In addition to these provisions, each stall must also have its own ventilation system, in which an unobstructed opening that is equivalent to at least 8% of the floor area is required (PM-403.1). In multi-stall gendered restrooms, the ventilation system is often shared between stalls because the walls on each stall are not required to be floor-to-ceiling. These HVAC requirements alone have the potential to make retrofitting existing bathrooms to accommodate gender-inclusive restrooms quite costly.
It may seem pretty hard to believe that money would be a problem, provided that the University of Pennsylvania endowment reached a valuation of $20.7 billion in 2022. However, with cost being one of the biggest hurdles in these projects, it is crucial that the budgeting structure is understood. UPenn Facilities primarily pursues projects that are paid for by other entities within the institution. This is to say that UPenn Facilities is allocated money from other budgets to implement projects. So, when proposing or asking for a gender-inclusive restroom in any one building, the budget for that project is supposed to be allocated by the school that owns the building. For example, if a gender-inclusive restroom is proposed in a building owned by the UPenn SEAS (School of Engineering and Applied Sciences), that restroom is financed from the UPenn SEAS budget, not by UPenn Facilities or the overarching UPenn Institution, which is made up of 4 undergraduate schools, 12 graduate schools, each comprising multiple departments, and is the primary holder of the current endowment.
Some schools have gotten creative with ways in which they implement gender-inclusive restrooms at a significantly lower cost. One example is in the anthropology department, on the third floor in the back of the Penn Museum. There were two, two-stall restrooms adjacent to each other, one labeled for “men'' and one for “women.” Now both bathrooms have gender-neutral designation and a lock on the main door. This allows for a single user to lock the bathroom while it is in use, with only one stall not being occupied. Provided that both of these spaces met the Philadelphia code when they existed as gendered restrooms, they also meet the code as gender-neutral restrooms, now that the main door locks. In this particular case, outfitting these smaller restrooms with a lock is a much less involved and less expensive task than retrofitting each of them to house two gender-neutral stalls. It is possible that there are other locations across campus that could do the same, resulting in low-cost gender-neutral restrooms.
So where do these city policies, budgeting structures, ad-hoc implementations, disgruntled student activists, and an inappropriately villainized UPenn Facilities department leave us? They leave us at a crossroads where it is crucial to work together to navigate the barriers that we all face to make UPenn more accessible. Despite the intricacy and multifaceted nature of the collaboration required for this project, here are some invaluable recommendations to get started:
Recommendation 1: Starting with the example of ad-hoc, relative low-cost, gender-inclusive restroom implementation in the anthropology department, a similar survey to identify buildings that have 1-3 stall restrooms that could be easily retrofitted with a lock should be conducted. This survey can be done either physically by walking the space or virtually by looking at blueprints. Once these restrooms have been identified, it should be determined if they are the only restrooms available within the building, in which case it may make the most sense to keep them gendered. In the case that they are not the only restrooms within the building, proposals to add a lock to these restrooms and new signage can be developed and presented to the school that owns the building. The budget for this project should be presented alongside the counterfactual case of making each of these bathrooms multi-stall gender-inclusive restrooms to illustrate the benefit of access and significant cost savings.
Recommendation 2: Survey buildings that have high frequency use to determine if there are gender-inclusive bathrooms that are accessible from inside. If not, survey the existing bathrooms to identify if there are any that would fit into an ad-hoc implementation case, as outlined in Recommendation 1. If not, determine if there are other structural constraints to retrofitting any of the existing restrooms to be multi-stall gender-inclusive restrooms. Once retrofittable restrooms have been identified, in conjunction with UPenn Facilities, evaluate the work that must be conducted to retrofit the space to accommodate a multi-stall gender-inclusive restroom. Based on the evaluation, a budget can be determined and a proposal made to the appropriate school. It should be emphasized that this project may take more than a year, and therefore, the funding for it could be spread over that time, in an attempt to make it more financially accessible and attractive to the school being asked to fund the project. Depending on the buildings owned by the school receiving the proposal, a roadmap can be determined to prioritize the restroom locations that would service the most students.
Recommendation 3: Through the outcomes of both Recommendation 1 and 2, we can develop a roadmap, (including a timeline and budget, both with ample contingency planning) illustrating the implementation of gender-inclusive restrooms for many, if not all, buildings across campus. The timeline and budget should account for all actors included in this endeavor and for the motivations and constraints experienced by each. The roadmap can be developed for either individual schools or the UPenn Institution, based on what the actors involved believe is most impactful and realistic for accountability.
The glaring gap in these recommendations is the allocation of human resources and time to this endeavor. It is too often that already tokenized students, faculty, and staff are asked to do unpaid labor to ensure they have adequate access to this university. This is where all parties who want to see these restrooms come to fruition can collectively advocate for the UPenn Institution to allocate benefits for those involved. One method that may be acceptable would be for this work to count toward the “Committee Involvement Requirement” for faculty pursuing tenure. For university staff, involvement on this committee should be counted towards their working hours, even if their role does not have an explicit DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) purview. For the students involved in this committee, a generous stipend should be offered to acknowledge the efforts expended (similar to that offered to students participating in the Perry World House Graduate Associates Program). At a minimum, a committee or organization involved in enacting the above recommendations should include representatives from: The LGBT Center, UPenn Facilities, Student Life, Architecture, UPenn DEI, UPenn Undergraduate and Graduate Schools, and student activists.
Overall, making gender-inclusive restrooms accessible on the University of Pennsylvania campus is an endeavor that will expand the DEI initiatives on campus, but must be pursued with respect for all actors involved. One way to develop this respect is to forge relationships between actors to first understand their motivation and constraints in pursuing this shared goal, and share resources.
Interested in locating existing gender-inclusive restrooms on campus? Check out the Gender-Inclusive Restroom Map!
Editor’s note: This post was updated on July 27, 2023 to include a recommendation for compensation for students involved in a committee working for gender-inclusive restrooms.