Bathroom Quest

[graveexcitement]

in today’s episode of Gender Neutral Bathroom Quest:

i have class in building J. building J is a large building, with three main sections: the main section (which includes classrooms, auditoriums, learning center, and cafeteria), and the east and west dormitory wings.

i have two classes on the second floor of building J, and with a spare ten minutes between them, i think, maybe this is a good time to use the bathroom!

now, with such a large building: surely there are gender neutral bathrooms. and checking the handy dandy site that documents gender neutral bathrooms at my uni, i find that indeed, there are several! two even appear to be on the second floor, which is great, because my classes are on the second floor!

so i walk around the second floor of the main section, clueless. then i see it: a gender neutral bathroom sign! it’s just on the other side of a set of clear doors that lead into the West dormitory wing!

these doors, however, are locked, i guess because they want people to only enter the dormitory wing from the ground floor. so… i can see the gender neutral bathroom. but to access it i would need to go down the stairs, cross into the west dorm, then go back up the stairs to reach this bathroom. and then either go out through the clear doors (if the lock is only one way) or back down and up the stairs (if it’s locked both directions) to get back to class.

(possibly there are first-floor gender neutral bathrooms in the west wing, in which case it would be descend stairs -> use bathroom -> ascend stairs again.)

at this point i got fed up and decided i would just use the bathroom after class. so, after class, i wandered around the main section of the building and confirmed: all of the gender neutral bathrooms are in the dormitory wings.

i ended up using a gender neutral bathroom in the ground floor lounge of the east dorm wing, which was possible because (as signs on the doors to the dorm proclaimed) you did not have to swipe your card to enter, which meant i did not have to worry if the card swipe was checking for students or for dorm residents.

pro: there was a piano in this lounge, so i could listen to the muffled sounds of piano while i used the bathroom

con: i don’t live in this dorm, and it’s also not very convenient if i want to use the restroom between classes, though it’s all right for after class, since i have time before catching the bus home.

in conclusion: Building J is a pretty modern building. (ok, apparently it was built in 1969, so maybe not as modern as i thought, but it’s def more modern than say, the Liberal Arts buildings.) it should have gender neutral restrooms in the main section of the building, and not just in the dormitory wings. possibly the second-floor bathrooms were once meant to be easily accessible from the main section, but that changed when they locked those doors to restrict dorm access (not sure if this was a recent restriction or not.)

there are other buildings on campus with more easily accessible gender neutral bathrooms -- including the art building, which actually has a set of multi-stall gender neutral bathrooms, as opposed to the normal single-toilet bathrooms. i like the multi-stall bathrooms! but this semester i'm nowhere near that building.

the other building i have classes in this semester, building P, apparently has gender-neutral bathrooms on the fourth floor only, and given the age of that building i'm not all that optimistic about how convenient they will be to access (according to the gender-neutral bathroom website, the elevator only goes up to the third floor?? what the heck.)