BOSTON — The state ruled this week that a residential dorm catering to LGBTQ people at the University of Massachusetts Amherst can have two gender-inclusive multistall bathrooms back.
The ruling, made Wednesday by the Massachusetts Board of State Examiners of Plumbers and Gas Fitters, came after nine students and UMass officials testified in Boston in favor of a petition asking for a waiver from state plumbing code regulations for the restrooms in question at Baker Hall.
The board said yes, meaning the restrooms in the hall can be converted back to all-gender, as they were last school year. University officials over the summer had removed the “All Gender” sign and converted it to a women’s bathroom to bring the university into compliance with the state’s plumbing code.
“This is very much focused on meeting the needs of the spectrum community within Baker, because many of the residents identify as transgender, gender nonconforming, or as no gender,” UMass spokesman Edward Blaguszewski said. “These bathrooms did not serve the resident population as they were.”
The Facebook page “UMass Get Our Bathroom Back” posted a message after the ruling.
“This has been a hard fight, and I want to thank those who were involved in writing the variance, and most importantly I want to thank the students who got involved, stood up, spoke out, and refused to back down. It’s from our work and our dedication that this was able to be achieved,” read the post.
Jackson Quincy Luckner, a senior studying public health and women, gender and sexuality studies, testified at the hearing. Luckner was a primary organizer for the UMass Bathroom Committee and helped lead several student meetings to discuss the issue prior to the hearing.
Luckner said in an email that the board decided to grant the same terms to UMass as it did to another case at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. MIT students won a variance for four on-campus restrooms to be designated as “all gender,” as reported by the Massachusetts Daily Collegian.
The Board of Plumbers accepted both UMass and MIT’s requests as one-year pilot programs, after which the students will check back in with state officials to assess how the changes were implemented.
Several university and state officials wrote in support of the petition, including state Representative Solomon Goldstein-Rose and UMass Amherst Chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy.
Marty Smith, a project executive at UMass Facilities and Services, submitted the variance request for the plumbing regulatory law known as the “potty parity.” The law requires any multi-stall restrooms to be designated as either male or female, in equal numbers, or be single-user gender neutral restrooms.
While UMass Amherst has 135 gender-neutral restrooms on campus, including two already in Baker Hall, these are all single-stall restrooms with full doors. Multistall restrooms with partial doors, like the disputed Room 112A in Baker, must have a gender designation, the law states.
“What we have done and will continue to do is grow the number of gender inclusive bathrooms across campus,” Blaguszewski said. “We have been working on that for a couple of years.”
While UMass plans to expand its accommodations for gender nonconforming students, students involved with the issue want to bring about changes on the state level.
“The next steps immediately is determining how we’ll collect and use that information over the next year,” said Luckner in an email. “Beyond that, we’re looking at options for how to expand the rights, health, access, and safety of transgender people in Massachusetts.”
Sarah Robertson can be reached at srobertson@gazettenet.com