This week in the News section, Assistant News Editor Connor Hoffman reported on how the university changed the unisex bathroom signs to all-gender bathroom signs. This project, which is to be completed by summer, will cost the university $680.
After getting funding for a $60 million science center, it seems like it would be easy to get sizeable funding to do more than just change the signs to some pre-existing bathrooms. Maybe the university could build some single-stalled bathrooms in the Science Center, which currently has none.
The Leader staff does acknowledge how great it is that the university is taking steps toward being an all-inclusive campus. This campus does work hard to try to provide resources for every type of student, like offering gender-inclusive housing. But putting new signs on pre-existing bathrooms is like putting a new Band Aid on an old wound. It’s time to upgrade from bandages to some real solutions.
SUNY Geneseo, SUNY at Albany and SUNY Stonybrook provide easily searchable campus maps showing where the single-stalled, all-gender bathrooms are located. On the Fredonia Women’s and Gender Studies website page, you can find the company from which the university purchased the new signs, but there’s no map to be found on that page pointing out where they are.
And we’d love to see more all-gender bathrooms. Not just one in every building (which we pointed out earlier hasn’t happened yet) but one on every floor, one with every set of male and female facilities. Bathrooms should come in threes, not twos. While that’s not a Fredonia-specific grievance, why not be trailblazers?
It’s great to see new signage — something some students have felt is a long time coming. But show us some new bathrooms; that’s when we’ll get truly excited.