The gender-neutral bathrooms are both horrible and amazing. I am so glad we have them, but they are disgusting, mostly because of the way students treat them. The issue mainly comes from how small and how few they are, and it’s not uncommon that the four small bathrooms are filled with sex, drugs or vaping. We need to address these problems, or the gender-neutral bathrooms will continue to be the most disgusting in the school.

I would like to preface this with the fact that I am never in any building other than the main building, and I have never used the theater’s gender-neutral bathroom. However, I have used the other four gender-neutral bathrooms, so I know which to use and why.

I consider everything in the third floor bathroom a biohazard. Almost every time I make the mistake of going in, I leave trying to purge my mind of the horrors I just witnessed. Whether it is people having sex, poop smeared on the walls, or the toilet being clogged with an entire roll of toilet paper, horrible things have happened in that bathroom.

The first-floor bathroom is better, but it is inconvenient to get to and it is often full of people vaping. The first-floor bathroom is separated from the rest of the floor since the atrium is not connected to the first-floor STEM Commons. Though it is nowhere near as gross as the third floor, it is just not always the easiest to get to.

Up three flights of steps, the 4th floor bathroom is usually the cleanest, but that’s because there are fewer people on the 4th floor. There is often a line since it is the floor’s only bathroom. Most people in the school don’t even know how to get to the 4th floor, and will never have a class up there. This, in my opinion, makes it the most inconvenient bathroom.

The best gender-neutral bathroom is on the second floor. There is a big vaping problem, and people just hang out there sometimes. However, it has two stalls. It is the only gender-neutral bathroom with multiple stalls. It doubles the stall count of any other gender-neutral bathroom at an astounding two.

The smallest gendered bathrooms have three stalls, and there are four of them per floor. Because I’m genderqueer, I have to think about the availability and quality of the bathrooms I can use, which consistently makes me late to class. All the gender-neutral bathrooms are on one side of the school, and most of my classes are on the other. I just can’t use the bathroom between classes if the bathroom I go to is full. At this point, I have given up going to the bathroom between classes because of the new tardy policy. Now, I am put into a position where I have to weigh detention or going to the bathroom.

There are two solutions to the problem that I can think of. The easier solution is getting rid of the tardy policy. It doesn’t address the underlying problem, but I would be able to use the bathroom between classes. The other solution is converting a bathroom on the other side of each floor into a gender-neutral bathroom. The sex and vaping that is currently concentrated in just four gender neutral bathrooms would be spread between six bathrooms instead. This isn’t a perfect solution, and it may not even be the best one. However, we need to do something to mitigate the issue that many students, including myself, deal with every day.