Title IX protects students’ right to use restrooms matching gender identities

ANJALI BHAT

Students, activists discuss gender-neutral bathrooms in university settings

For thousands of transgender students across the country, a trip to the restroom is a far more difficult task than most of their cisgender peers could ever imagine. Apprehension over this topic can lead to anxiety, dysphoria and in extreme cases, serious problems with mental and physical health for many of those students.

Equal access to restrooms has always been a prominent topic in the LGBTQIA community, and over the past few years, also a prominent topic in the U.S. This year, 16-year-old trans student Gavin Grimm sued the Gloucester County Public School District after being denied access to the boys’ restroom in Gloucester High School, Virginia.

In June, the U.S. Department of Justice expressed that denying him access to the restroom violated Title IX, a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity. With this, the Department of Justice officially affirmed that Title IX protects a student’s right to use the restroom that matches their gender identity.

“With my identity as a genderqueer person, I don’t feel comfortable using a women’s restroom. There’s a lot of anxiety for me surrounding that,” said Ruby Curiel, a LGBTQIA Center community intern and fourth-year sociology and Chicano/Chicana studies double major. “In this whole campus there are only two bathrooms I feel comfortable going in.”

These two bathrooms are the ones located in the Student Community Center (SCC) and the Women’s Resources and Research Center (WRRC) – both of which are gender-neutral. Restrooms designated only as male or female can become violent spaces for individuals who prefer to self-identify outside the binary.

For this reason, University of California (UC) President Janet Napolitano appointed a task force to closely examine the issue of equal access to restrooms across the UC system earlier this year. Napolitano also issued a directive on June 10 (which came into effect on July 1) requiring inventory of all single-stall restrooms on every UC campus and the conversion of these restrooms to gender-neutral ones by Feb. 28, 2016.

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[Source]: The California Aggie