On February 14, Vice President for Enrollment Management and Student Affairs Marybeth Murphy announced that Stevens is currently in the process of converting 34 single occupancy restrooms to gender-neutral restrooms, seven of which will require additional work to add locks. It is still unclear when the conversion will be completed, but it is expected to be soon.
According to former Torch President and former Student Government Association (SGA) Vice President of Student Interests Dakota Van Deursen, Stevens first began an initiative to convert some of the bathrooms on campus into gender-inclusive bathrooms during the spring semester of 2016.
According to a student who is non-binary, meaning they identify as neither male nor female, the number of gender-inclusive bathrooms was previously low enough that it could take up to 12 minutes to get to an appropriate bathroom and back to class, which is close to one-fourth of a one hour class.
By November of 2017, over a year after the initial progress made by the school, the SGA determined that the number of gender-inclusive bathrooms was below what was ideal. On November 5, 2017, members of the SGA passed a proclamation declaring that Stevens should expand its program to develop gender-inclusive bathrooms.
According to the proclamation, gender-inclusive bathrooms are “few in number” despite a large number of students that declared their desire for more “gender-inclusive and/or gender-affirming spaces.” The proclamation further states that “there are many current bathrooms on campus which meet the Stevens mold for ‘Gender-Inclusive Bathrooms’ (that they be single-stall and lockable) and many more which could be transformed with minimally-invasive construction.”
The proclamation also included a chart of bathrooms with information on which bathrooms had the highest priority to be converted, as well as whether the bathrooms in question already had a lock. A year after the proclamation passed, members of the SGA ran another round of analysis and found that the majority of academic buildings still did not have gender-neutral bathrooms.
In order “to further protect the civil rights and dignity of our transgender, gender non-binary, and queer residents and visitors,” the Hoboken City Council passed Ordinance B-29 in early May.
The ordinance stipulated that “All single-occupancy restrooms in any business establishment, place of public accommodation, and City-owned building or facility shall be designated as all-gender for individual, family, or assisted use. This includes single-occupancy restrooms intended for use by City employees or employees of a business or public accommodation.”
In order to adhere to the ordinance, Stevens continued their work on setting up gender-neutral bathrooms on campus.
Murphy wrote in an email that “Stevens is committed to creating an inclusive and welcoming environment for our students and employees and will be converting all single occupancy restrooms on campus to gender-neutral. Our goal is to accomplish this as soon as possible. Signage is being ordered and Facilities is surveying each restroom to install locks where needed. In some cases, due to the fire code, new doors may have to be ordered, which might delay a few conversions. During the time that Stevens has been working on this initiative, the City of Hoboken passed an ordinance requiring this change. We are working to be in full compliance with the Hoboken ordinance as quickly as possible.”
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