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Before COVID, I lived in a dorm at my university. Our dorms are fully unisex and so are all our bathrooms, which means women have to shower & use the toilet around men (there are stalls, ofc). Most of the time, it’s been fine, but there have been a few incidents:
During the first few weeks of freshman year, I was taking a shower when a guy who lived down the hall came in. He asked who was in the shower, and I, a bit weirded out, answered back with my name. Despite the fact that I barely knew him, he proceeded to stand outside my stall -
- door for the duration of my shower & ask me non-stop invasive questions. When I finally said “well, it’s been nice talking to you, have a good rest of your day!” he ignored me & asked me to judge his singing, then literally sang for about 10 more minutes. I’ll admit, it’s a -
bit amusing in retrospect, but at the time, I was naked & felt vulnerable/uncomfortable. He was ~6’3” & could’ve easily gotten through the flimsy door if he wanted to.I felt trapped bc I couldn’t leave until I finished showering. He even referred to me as his “captive audience”.
This same male student had a propensity to invade the space I shared with my female roommates. A group of girls lived down the hall from us & we’d leave hangers in our suite door so that they could come & go as they pleased. This period of female harmony was short-lived though, -
because the same guy would frequently walk in unannounced & uninvited. One day, my roommate (a devout Catholic who felt no shame in nudity around other women) was changing her bra in her room with her door slightly ajar. Unbeknownst to her, he had slipped into our suite and was -
standing outside her door, gawking at her for who knows how long. He yelled at her and said “what the hell are you doing?” She was startled, scared, and embarrassed, but still apologized for her “immodesty” IN HER OWN BEDROOM.
He would also frequently just hang out in the common room of our suite, even if we weren’t there. It became a regular occurrence for him to “fall asleep” on our couches and pretend he couldn’t hear us ask him to leave or say he was too exhausted to move.
We should’ve been more aggressive with him or reported him to someone but we were afraid of being seen as “bitches” or prudes. We didn’t want to get anyone in trouble - we just wanted our privacy to be respected.
Other female students weren’t as lucky to just have weird stories like us. In another dorm, a male student intentionally flashed a girl and cornered her in the bathroom. That incident was kept quiet & the bathroom policy didn’t change. He was just transferred to a different dorm.
Many female friends of mine have heard male students obviously masturbating (moaning, slapping sounds) while they knew a female student was in an adjacent shower. Sure, it’s not physically violent, but it sure as hell is dehumanizing and disgusting.
I’ve lucked out in that I’ve primarily lived on floors that had only a handful of men, most of which were respectful (tidy/clean? not so much). Despite all being unisex, the bathrooms ended up self-segregating in that there became a de facto male & female bathroom.
For these reasons, I feel it’s necessary to preserve sex-segregated spaces like these. Yes, most of the time it’s totally fine, but why even put women at any risk at all? Why wait for something bad to happen?
Just to be clear - my college changed our spaces to unisex explicitly to be trans-friendly. While I’m happy they don’t have to be misgendered by a sign on the door any longer, we (women & transwomen) are all now at more risk. Is the reward really greater than the risk?
