Wednesday, May 31, 2017

UC Berkeley to offer gender-inclusive locker room

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
UC Berkeley will become the first college in California to build a large-scale gender-inclusive locker room inside its campus gym.

Supporters say that when the 4,500-square-foot room opens next year at the Recreational Sports Facility, it will allow transgender students and disabled students whose aides are of a different gender to access fitness services from which they otherwise would abstain. Men, women and gender-nonconforming individuals will all be able to use the locker room, which will include private changing rooms and lockers as well as partitioned showers and bathroom stalls, campus officials say.

Funding for the $2.7 million locker room comes from a new fee, $54 per student each semester, designed to create more equitable health services that students approved in a 2015 campus vote.

Project plans call for construction crews to carve out space from the existing men’s and women’s locker rooms, so that when it’s completed in fall 2018, the gender-neutral locker room will sit between the two.
Why have sex segregated sports teams?