Jay DiEdwards took a job at American University for guaranteed accommodations, security and safety. DiEdwards said they are now considering leaving the University for the same reasons.
For as long as DiEdwards could recall, the College of Arts and Sciences, housed in the Battelle-Tompkins building, has been a haven for the LGBTQ+ communities. As an undergraduate student at the University, DiEdwards said they often felt uncomfortable navigating life as a “visibly queer” person.
DiEdwards said he experienced dismissal, exclusion and explicit hate as a student because of their gender identity, and that this was particularly magnified when it came to using the restroom.
“I was very aware of when I could use the bathroom or if I could use the bathroom,” DiEdwards said. “I’d have to trek all the way to SIS and go in the basement or have to go to the library and go all the way to the back of the building.”
Formerly as a CAS student, and now as the College’s senior administrative assistant, DiEdwards has relied on the consistency of safe and accessible gender-inclusive bathrooms in Battelle-Tompkins.
The University replaced unofficial signage designating bathrooms in the Battelle-Tompkins building with official signs marking them as gender-exclusive restrooms, labeled as men’s and women’s, during the week of Nov. 18, 2024, according to the University. The change sparked fear and confusion among faculty, staff and students.
Sign change sparks concern during Transgender Day of Remembrance
Toby Aho, a senior professorial lecturer of Critical Race, Gender and Cultural studies, noted particular concern surrounding the day of the sign change, as community members discovered it on Transgender Day of Remembrance.
Transgender Day of Remembrance is marked on Nov. 20 of every year and serves as an opportunity to remember and honor transgender individuals whose lives have been taken due to transphobic violence worldwide.
The week before Transgender Day of Remembrance, Nov. 13 through 19, is designated Transgender Awareness Week, during which individuals and organizations advocate against discrimination toward the trans community.
“I am sure whoever actually put up the signs had no idea that it was [Transgender Day of Remembrance],” Aho said. “And to our students, that doesn’t make a difference because that’s how they experienced it. And it was a real harm. It was really traumatizing.”
DiEdwards agreed that the harm, doubled by the day on which community members came across the sign change, was an unintentional oversight. However, she said the change points to a larger issue of disregard toward trans community members.
Khatharina Vester, an associate professor of History and American Studies, heard about the change from a student who arrived at Battelle-Tompkins early to use the bathroom and entered her classroom in shock.
That student was Devon Benaroya, a junior in CAS.
“I went to the bathrooms and I was like, ‘I know that these are gender-neutral bathrooms. So why are they binary now?’” Benaroya said.
Aho said they were confused by who put this new signage up and when. They said they believed that the University had designated the bathrooms as gender-inclusive.
They said they thought that the switch back to gender-exclusive bathrooms during the week of Nov. 18 had not been cleared by the administration. Aho said they learned later that this was not the case.
“We actually, later on in the day, heard from administration that [the new signs] were actually official signs and that the signs that were there before, that had been there for a year or two, that those were actually not AU signs but that somebody had put them up,” Aho said.
“The signs that were taken down in November 2024 had not been there for years and were non-compliant with DC code requirements for restrooms in public buildings,” said Elizabeth Deal, assistant vice president and deputy chief communications officer in a statement to The Eagle. “Unapproved and non-compliant signs had been found at the location of these restrooms on at least one occasion prior to November 2024.”
Benaroya said they also were under the impression that the gender-inclusive bathroom signage had been longstanding. While one of the bathrooms had urinals and the other did not, they thought the bathrooms were gender-inclusive because of the signs.
“It was just very strange that for so long it had been completely fine for the bathrooms to be gender-neutral, and it wasn’t until like this year, when for previous years it was allowed, that they decided to change it back,” Benaroya said.
“When we were contacted and made aware of the presence of unapproved and non-compliant signs at this location, we worked to replace them with compliant signage as soon as possible,” Deal said in a statement to The Eagle.
The shock hit even closer to home amidst the national context of the new presidential administration, which Vester said presents a threat to the trans community.
On Transgender Day of Remembrance, Vester planned her lesson to center the transgender experience, with particular attention to the first transgender individual elected to Congress, Sarah McBride. McBride, an alum of the University, has been the target of attempts from Republican lawmakers to restrict trans individuals from using the bathrooms on Capitol Hill.
“Bathrooms get weaponized to exclude trans people from participating in public life,” Vester said.
She wanted to use McBride’s story to exemplify this. Instead, Vester witnessed her students experience the exclusion in real-time.
“I thought it was a joke because I was just getting ready to teach that,” Vester said.
Faculty, students are frustrated with the lack of communication, transparency
The same day those in Battelle-Tompkins discovered the change back to official signage, DiEdwards began the quest for answers on who made the decision and why.
DiEdwards first emailed Bernadette Storey-Laubach, the associate director of Facilities Operations in CAS, to ask if she knew whether the change was officially approved.
Storey-Laubach told DiEdwards that she was unsure if the change was officially approved. Storey-Laubach said the sign change reflected not CAS, but a University decision, in a message to DiEdwards from Nov. 20, which was obtained by The Eagle. When contacted, Storey-Laubach referred The Eagle to University Communications and Marketing.
Storey-Laubach also sent DiEdwards a link to the page of a working group created in 2022 that was established to address gender-inclusive bathrooms on campus.
The University created the working group after students expressed concerns over the replacement of gender-inclusive restrooms with gender-exclusive restrooms on the second floor of the Mary Graydon Center in 2022. This change was ultimately followed up with renovations that added multiple all-gender bathrooms elsewhere in the building.
The construction of new gender-inclusive bathrooms has since been completed in MGC. DiEdwards said it’s a great step in the right direction, but communication remains an issue.
“This just goes back to the overall lack of transparency that happened when I was a student, and it’s continuing today,” DiEdwards said.
The most recent update to the working group was posted on Feb. 15, 2023, and noted Battelle-Tompkins as the first building on which a “feasibility study” would be conducted to examine the implementation of multi-stall all-gender restrooms.
The University did not respond to questions regarding whether the working group is still active, nor if any plans exist to address the need for gender-inclusive bathrooms in Battelle.
Elizabeth Deal, assistant vice president of University Communications and Marketing and deputy chief communications officer, said in a statement to The Eagle that “The two restrooms on the first floor of Battelle-Thompkins are designated as male/female per the current code. During the week of November 18th, it was discovered that non-compliant signs were posted and hence those signs were taken down.”
Deal’s comment is consistent with the University’s comprehensive document, last updated in 2022, listing the locations for all “gender accessible restrooms” on campus. Battelle-Tompkins is not listed on this document.
It is unclear both who initially designated the bathrooms as gender-inclusive and who within the administration made the decision to change the signs now. Regardless, community members have expressed a reliance on the seemingly gender-inclusive bathrooms to use the restroom safely.
Benaroya expressed frustration in communicating with administrators, saying that any information they received felt like a “complete shutdown.”
“The way the school responded was very bureaucratic, and you had to go to multiple people,” Benaroya said. “Nobody really had a definitive answer about what could be done.”
Aho met with Jonathan McCann, assistant vice president of planning and project management, and Storey-Laubach on Monday, Dec. 2, 2024, and said the administrators emphasized the work done to renovate MGC, which now has gender-inclusive restrooms.
While strides to improve access in other buildings are steps in the right direction, Aho said they are not sufficient.
Neither McCann nor Story-Laubach responded to The Eagle’s requests for an interview.
Bathroom changes pose accessibility issues
At the Dec. 2, 2024 meeting, Aho said they tried to explain to administrators the accessibility barrier created by the absence of gender-inclusive bathrooms in Battelle-Tompkins.
“We have some disabled and chronically ill, genderqueer and trans students and staff and faculty who can’t walk to MGC every single day,” Aho said. “Like if I walk to MGC to use the bathroom and come back, that’s like 30 to 40 minutes out of my day.”
However, Aho said the fault does not lie solely with the University. The most recent update to the All-Gender Restrooms Working Group references the 2021 International Building Code, of which Section 2902.1 provides regulations on “Minimum Plumbing Facilities.”
According to the code, gender-inclusive restrooms are only required in buildings that already have single-stall restrooms. The code also states that a building must have several gender-exclusive restrooms depending on the number of building occupants.
“They of course don’t count people who either don’t identify with either, or who feel unsafe in these restrooms because of their gender presentation or how they’re interpreted by other people,” Aho said.
The working group memorandum noted that despite the allowance of multi-stall all-gender restrooms, the process of implementing such restrooms would require “feasibility studies, applications, and approvals.”
“So D.C. code is a major issue in this, it’s not just the University,” Aho said. “D.C. code is kind of the stumbling block I guess.”
Findlay took issue with the regulations of the D.C. code, noting numbers should not outweigh negative community impact. She said many students rely on gender-inclusive bathrooms in the building.
“But even if there weren’t that many, it’s also just an equity issue,” Findlay added.
With restricted mobility, DiEdwards is acutely familiar with the barrier to access.
“I will not be able to walk to another building multiple times a day to go to the bathroom because one: I shouldn’t have to. And two, I have a disability,” DiEdwards said.
The barrier does not just inconvenience DiEdwards. She believes it may be a violation of best practices according to guidelines by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
According to OSHA’s Best Practices Guide to Restroom Access for Transgender Workers, published June 1, 2015, “Employees generally may not be limited to using facilities that are an unreasonable distance or travel time from the employee’s work site.”
DiEdwards said the additional 20 minutes it would take them out of their work day to use the restroom constitutes an “unreasonable distance.”
Robert Dinerstein, the founder and former director of the Washington College of Law Disability Rights Law Clinic, said that employers should accommodate their employees, but OSHA guidelines can be difficult to enforce.
In general, when an accessibility issue is raised, Dinerstein said that there is typically a dialogue between the worker and administration to discuss potential accommodations.
He explained this includes some back-and-forth between the parties over some time. Legally, it’s not clear-cut either.
“There’s a question of what is ‘unreasonable,’” Dinerstein said about the language of the guidelines.
Dinerstein explained that the regulations exist within a hierarchy of legal enforcement. The highest level, and most legally enforceable, are statutes. Below statutes come guidances, and below guidances are best practices.
Best practices, also referred to as good practices, provide recommendations from agencies. The recommendations are “desirable, but not required,” Dinerstein said. “Some of the concerns that are in OSHA are at best policy concerns.”
He noted that President Trump’s administration could impact these current guidelines as well.
“Even if these OSHA best practices had some force before now, I’d have to think that they would be on the chopping block,” Dinerstein added.
As it exists now, the OSHA guide notes the importance of bathroom accessibility as a matter not of preference, but of public health.
“Bathroom restrictions can result in employees avoiding using restrooms entirely while at work, which can lead to potentially serious physical injury or illness,” the guide reads.
DiEdwards said they did not use the bathroom the entire day on the Wednesday after the sign changes. He left his work day early and in physical pain.
“I’m considering if this is a permanent change, that we don’t have all-gender bathrooms in this building, I may have to quit my job,” DiEdwards said.
University messaging disconnect
DiEdwards said her disappointment stems from a place of connection to Battelle-Tompkins and what it represents at the University.
“When you work for a university and study at a university and come to grow and love the people here and what the department stands for, it is just very heartbreaking to see that what the university claims to support is not actually being supported at all,” DiEdwards said.
Findlay also described the importance of the change back to original signage in relation to the history of Battelle-Tompkins as a space for inclusion.
“This has been a gathering place for students and faculty,” Findlay said, noting an example of the student lounge which, she said, serves as an “explicitly anti-racist, feminist, queer-friendly space.”
Benaroya said having accessible bathrooms might not seem top of mind for some, but it is an integral aspect of fostering the inclusive space that Battelle-Tompkins champions. For them, the ability to engage in greater change must begin with accessibility.
“Yes, it’s a really small aspect of what trans resistance and liberation looks like, but having access to a bathroom in the same way that all the other students at our school do is really important,” Benaroya said.
Findlay further emphasized that the oversight poses a health and safety risk, one that directly targets trans and nonbinary community members.
“The folks who changed the signs don’t seem to understand that this is really a human rights issue,” Findlay said.
Benaroya noted particular disappointment in what they described as a disconnect between the University’s public presentation and what community members experience on campus.
The University’s 7-Year Strategic Plan: Changemakers for a Changing World campaign catalyzed the use of the language of “changemakers,” which is utilized by both those who market it and those who criticize it to discuss advocacy efforts.
“Sure I’m a changemaker, but the changes that I want to happen are in direct opposition to the programs or policies that the university is enforcing,” Benaroya said.
Aho expressed similar concerns about contrasting institutional messaging and action.
“I think it is really heart-wrenching because AU logs itself as a progressive institution that is shaping the next changemakers in a changing world, but changemakers also have to go to the bathroom,” Aho said.
Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified the gender-inclusive signage to be official signage. It has been updated to reflect that the restrooms in Battelle-Tompkins are gender-exclusive and signage deeming them gender-inclusive were unofficial. A previous version of this article misspelled Jonathan McCann’s last name. It has been updated to reflect the correct spelling.
This article was edited by Walker Whalen, Tyler Davis and Abigail Turner. Copy editing done by Luna Jinks, Olivia Citarella, Ella Rousseau, Ariana Kavoossi, Hannah Langenfeld and Sabine Kanter-Huchting.
