Wits ‘flushes away’ separate toilets

929 25/05/16 One of the toilets at Wits university which are combined female toilets ans unisex disabled toilets. Picture:Nokuthula Mbatha

929 25/05/16 One of the toilets at Wits university which are combined female toilets ans unisex disabled toilets. Picture:Nokuthula Mbatha

Published May 28, 2016

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Johannesburg -

Alaine Marsden was right that she would be attacked for using a female bathroom, but wrong about who would attack her.

One year ago, the third-year transgender student was meeting people at the Wits Transformation Office for the university’s Pride celebrations when she stepped down the hall to use the bathroom.

There, just feet away from the office dedicated to helping marginalised students like herself and on a day celebrating the LGBT community, Marsden encountered a woman who was furious to see a “boy” in the female bathroom.

“I was more afraid of students, but it was actually a staff member - who is supposed to be interested in the safety of the students - that called the campus police.

“The irony was quite tragic. My safety is not guaranteed by the institution, and people seem to think that trans people don’t exist.”

So the molecular medicine student with long blue hair began lobbying with a collection of LGBT advocacy groups for Wits to change their bathroom policy.

After a year, she won.

This month Wits announced they would be opening a handful of gender neutral bathrooms around campus.

Pura Mgolombane, the manager of diversity, ethics and social justice at the Wits Transformation Office, says the gender-neutral bathrooms are “a victory for social justice”.

“It’s not gender one day and race the next - we have to address these intersections all at once, and we’re trying to do that with our gender-neutral bathroom policy,” he says.

But Wits is not the first place in Joburg to implement gender-neutral toilets, nor will it be the last.

Restaurants, clothing stores and gyms have also created gender-neutral spaces as the country shifts towards adopting more trans-friendly policies.

For example, a restaurant in Maboneng named Canteen offers only a unisex bathroom.

Nestled in the corner of a tree-filled courtyard, the clean white bathroom has a row of individual stalls, a long communal sink and a vase of white daisies in a circular window.

“You use a unisex toilet at home, so why can’t you use a unisex toilet here?” says Njabulo Ncube, a manager at Canteen. “I think you could call this activism.”

But are we ready?

Ncube says that female restaurant-goers frequently complain and then he directs them to a female-only bathroom down the street.

However, not every business feels as comfortable sticking to its gender-neutral policies in the face of customer demands.

Virgin Active, which has had unisex saunas in many of its gyms since the company started in South Africa in 2001, is now moving away from the model because it received so many complaints.

“South Africans didn’t like our unisex saunas very much,” says Les Aupiais, head of strategic communications for Virgin Active SA. “We might be more conservative now, but are listening to what our members said and putting separate-gender saunas in the new gyms that we’re building.”

Even at Wits, some students are resistant to the gender-neutral bathroom policy, according to Mgolombane.

“A few people are uncomfortable with gender-neutral bathrooms, because some people are still grappling with the notion of gender being non-binary.

“It’s what people have been socialised in, and disrupting that will take awhile.”

Marsden says the hardest part about instituting gender-neutral bathrooms at Wits has been seeing how many people didn’t think that they are necessary or important.

She says that “there has been a lot of conservative and religious pushback where people say we’re legalising sin”.

Wits is in the process of deciding what signage it will put on the gender-neutral bathroom doors, and where exactly the bathrooms will be located.

They are expected to open at the university in the coming months.

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Saturday Star

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