Lynton Grace: Pulling doors off school toilets is dumb, cruel and potentially dangerous
Ripping doors off decades-old toilets just to “mimic” new gender-neutral cubicles is dumb, cruel and potentially dangerous, writes Lynton Grace.
Opinion
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It’s another case of baffling bureaucrazy.
A second Adelaide high school appears to have ditched its toilet doors, with Modbury High joining Golden Grove in opening up what should be closed.
In Golden Grove’s case, it’s a move to match existing toilets with new gender-neutral toilets, which are part of its $15m upgrade, according to a letter from principal Peter Kuss.
Gender-neutral toilets should be essential for every school.
It’s vital to create a safe space for students, visitors or staff who are transgender or identify as non-binary.
Imagine how a teenage transgender girl would feel being forced to use boys toilets, or vice versa.
And it’s a testament to the education department that these toilets are part of the upgrade at Golden Grove – “lockable, non-gendered, individual cubicles”.
But those toilets were purpose-built as gender-neutral toilets.
Ripping doors off old toilets, just to make them retroactively “mimic” the “new standards” doesn’t work.
It’s a bonkers bureaucracy-gone-wild response that genuinely fails the most basic test – common sense. If you can’t create the same amount of privacy in both toilets, then just don’t do it.
Inclusivity – for everyone – is essential. Inclusivity isn’t a lefty, woke idea. It should be treated as a basic human right.
But so should privacy for a 13-year-old kid wanting to use the toilet.
The fact that, at Modbury, you can see kids urinating from the hallway pretty much sums up the problem – someone, somewhere, didn’t think enough.
Modbury’s even gone to the length of locking outside cubicles, one mother says, forcing children to use toilets without their external doors. That’s just astonishingly cruel.
High school is hard enough for some kids. Bullying, growing up, puberty – as if there isn’t enough stuff going on without have to worry someone walking past in the hall is going to see you taking a whiz.
The Education Department’s response, is, interestingly, markedly different to the letter from Mr Kuss.
It said the toilets at Golden Grove were still private.
“Students’ privacy isn’t compromised. All the cubicles have lockable doors and only hand washing areas are visible from hallways or foyers,” they said.
That’s not the case at Modbury.
“This was a decision made by school staff to limit students congregating in the toilets,” they said.
If a school has such a problem with students hanging out in the toilets, ditching the doors seems like it will just send them elsewhere. It doesn’t solve that problem.
Students of all genders, or non-binary, deserve privacy. It’s up to the schools to ensure that.
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