Building Empathy for Transgender Students
DC Public School All-Gender Restroom, taken 2018
A few years ago, after we developed the transgender guidance at DC Public Schools, my team and I really wanted to see our school district live up to the expectation that every one of our schools had all-gender bathrooms available for and accessible to transgender students. We knew, anecdotally, that our transgender students often didn’t use the bathroom at all during the school day because they were so afraid of being denied access or harassed. Imagine that, not using the bathroom all day long. A transgender colleague of ours confirmed this, and said that when they were in school, they used to carry a pee jar around, so they could pee when necessary without using a school bathroom. My colleague said that during track practice, they would often run off the track into the bushes to pee, since they didn’t feel safe going at school. I have friends who remember their parents keeping pee jars in their cars growing up, long after segregation, the legacy of similar fears.
Back to the main story. We wanted to see all-gender restrooms in all our schools, so I set up a meeting with the two people who made all the decisions when it came to how our schools were going through facilities modernizations. We talked through how this aligned with our transgender policy guidance, and how it would reflect the spirit of DCPS’s own nondiscrimination law. Then, we told them our colleague’s pee jar story. And they almost didn’t believe me because it was so horrible. But they got it, they got it to their core. At the end of the meeting, they told me they would follow up in a month or so.
A few months later, they reached out for a follow up meeting. They told me that they spent $4 million over the summer to have every architect and project manager redo all plans for bathrooms in the dozen or so schools scheduled for modernization. They added single user all-gender bathrooms in all of the plans. And added our first-ever multi-use, all-gender restroom in one of our newly renovated high schools, and they were collocating all-gender restrooms next to boys’ and girls’ bathrooms. They understood that going to the bathroom during breaks was a time for socializing, so they made sure that students would be able to walk in the same direction to get to the bathroom. Some bathrooms even had a hall of single-user restrooms, with a shared hand washing station. What!?! They fully internalized the needs of our students, and came up with the student-centered solution.