American report: Universities are building dozens of gender-neutral restrooms as Title IX lawsuits pile up

The debate over gender-neutral restroom facilities on US university campuses is flaring up again. In early July, investigative platform CriticalRace.org, a project of the foundation behind Legal Insurrection, mapped out how many American higher-education institutions now offer multi-stall restrooms without sex-based separation — and the figures are higher than many students and parents might expect. At least twelve prominent institutions, including five Ivy League universities, have restrooms shared by students of both sexes, sometimes in facilities containing dozens of stalls side by side.

Cornell and UC Santa Barbara lead the way

The report shows that Cornell University and the University of California, Santa Barbara each have more than forty locations with this type of gender-neutral restroom. The University of Pennsylvania has more than ten multi-stall facilities, and some campuses even publish interactive maps showing fifty or more such locations. What often starts on paper as a single, separately designated option alongside the existing facilities has, in practice, developed on some campuses into a dense network of shared spaces — not as an exception, but as a permanent part of the restroom infrastructure.

"No woman should have to undress where a man is present"

Researcher Kemberlee Kaye, who contributed to the report, sums up the objection succinctly: no woman should be forced to change or wash in the presence of a man. To the report's authors, this is not a controversial position but a basic boundary that many universities' policies now ignore. They point out that multi-stall restrooms — unlike a single, fully enclosed room — no longer provide physical separation between men and women, even though that separation was originally the reason for introducing separate facilities.

More lawsuits expected after ruling on women's sports

The report comes at a time when the US legal system is once again considering the boundaries of Title IX, the federal law intended to guarantee equal treatment for men and women in education. The same law is at the heart of the investigation into women's college Smith's admissions policy. After the Supreme Court ruled in late June that individual states may use sex as a criterion for admission to girls' and women's sports teams, observers expect similar cases involving restroom facilities to follow. In Idaho, a federal judge has already suspended a law that criminalized restroom use based on gender identity. According to the report, institutions that maintain fully shared restrooms risk not only lawsuits from students and parents, but also the loss of federal funding if a judge rules that the policy disproportionately disadvantages women.

A recurring issue in Europe too

The debate is not unique to the United States. In the Netherlands and Belgium too, shared or gender-neutral restrooms regularly appear in schools and universities, often introduced with good intentions toward non-binary and trans students, but without broad prior discussion of what this means for the privacy and sense of safety of women and girls. The American report shows that what starts as a minor adjustment can, without clear guidelines, grow into the norm — a lesson that is also relevant to European educational institutions.