Feeling safe and supported to be unabashedly yourself at school should be a given, and the Queer-Straight Alliance (QSA) at Seaquam Secondary is working to make that idea a reality for their school’s 2SLGBTQ+ students.
This past school year, the QSA’s main focus was to secure a second gender-neutral washroom in the school and increase access to menstrual products across all bathrooms – both of which they were successful in.
The call for the second gender-neutral washroom was motivated by the existing one on the ground level of the school being unreasonably far for students who had classes on the second floor, especially when following the hallways’ social-distanced foot traffic directions.
“It was really awkward for me to go in either [the women’s or men’s] washroom as a trans guy ... I sometimes feel afraid because there are some people who know I’m trans, and I get weird looks because of it. So, having a gender-neutral bathroom is just a really nice thing to have, and it makes me a lot more comfortable using the washroom at school,” says Oscar, who is part of the QSA executive team.
A big part of that fear using gendered washrooms comes from not knowing how others in the washroom will perceive you, he and fellow QSA executive Cameron explain. For trans folks who don’t “pass” as a cis person, bathrooms are often sites of transphobic, discriminatory confrontation and violence.
“A safe space, to me, means that everyone there can be themselves without fear of experiencing problems like encountering people who hate them based on their identity ... A safe space generally refers to anywhere that we don’t run into these issues as much, if at all, because we have created a situation where we don’t have to deal with those problems,” says Eliza, who is also part of the QSA executive team.
By offering trans and gender non-conforming students an option to use a gender-neutral washroom, this can lessen or eliminate this safety issue altogether for them, she explains.
Seaquam Secondary vice-principal Ian Close reflects on the whole process of opening the school’s second gender-neutral washroom, which began in October last year and ended in May this year.
“I feel my biggest role as a vice-principal is to maintain a safe environment for all my kids. A lot of the decisions I make are gauged through that, and if I have a group of students coming forward saying ‘Hey, we don’t feel safe doing this’, I’ll do my best to create that safety for them,” he says.
Close, teacher-sponsor of Seaquam’s QSA Toby Mundy, Delta School District’s SOGI coordinator Trevana Spilchen and the QSA, itself, worked together to make the second gender-neutral washroom and more wide-spread access to menstrual products a reality.
The QSA also celebrated Pride Week by selling pins and flags in the cafeteria.
Though it was encouraging to see how many other queer students were among him, Cameron says it was nerve-wracking to run the table in such a visible, busy area of the school.
“I was scared that I would lose some friends or that people wouldn’t talk to me as much because they would see me there, [at that table]. I do have non-queer friends, and I don’t know what they think about queer people,” he says. “I still did it anyways, though, because I know other people’s comfort and younger people’s comfort is more important than my own. Because I know if I can go up [and be visible], we can have so many other people feel safe and welcomed in this school.”
