Dear Old Macalester
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006
I was feeling slightly nostalgic today, so I typed the name of my college into Flickr. On the top page was the following photo of a woman protesting the homophobic design of the new gym. Now, in many places these sorts of protests would come from bigoted football players harassing their peers or hateful graffiti. But I have never known Macalester to suffer from those. This protest was about a gym design that enforces separate-gender bathrooms:
Buck called the planned athletic facility “a homophobic, heteronormative space” due to the absence of gender-blind bathrooms in the building plans.
Along with confusion surrounding the college’s new Institute for Global Citizenship, Buck said that the athletic facility construction “shows Macalester is moving in a racist, heteronormative direction.”
The funny thing is that of all the design choices to criticize a building for, this is one of the easiest to remedy after it has been built. All you need to do is put a ‘Unisex’ sign outside the bathroom. We de-gendered the bathrooms on our own in my dorm.
At least the school hasn’t changed too much.
