Stop bathing for men and women: at the University of Pisa the students of “neutral” services
Traditional symbols are covered with “genderless” posters. The university: “You’re right, we’ll make one for each building”
PISA. “The revolution is not a gala dinner,” reads a quoted phrase from Mao Tse-tung, but who knows how many belonging to the generation that fanned the Chinese Communist’s red book in the squares could have imagined that, in the end, it would start from the bathrooms.
So it will be at the University of Pisa. After the initiative of the universities and universities of the Left For list, which covered the traditional male-female icons with posters in favor of gender-neutral bathrooms, the official announcement of the university arrives: each building on the campus will be equipped with at least a genderless bathroom. At the end of November activists and activists of the Left Per decided to “bypass” the administration on the theme of gender policies, placing posters in favor of neutral bathrooms to cover the icons they represent and men in the bathrooms of the university departments.
Together with the posters, the “tampon boxes” make their appearance, cardboard boxes where anyone can take a sanitary napkin or leave it at the disposal of those who need it. “Take one if you want, leave one if you can”, reads the writing on each box. Despite some resistance from the workers, posters and tampon boxes flourish in several buildings. And they stay there for a few days, despite some zealous advocates of the status quo hastening to remove them here and there. “This is a neutral bathroom, are the bathrooms divided by gender in your house?”. This is the message printed on the flyers posted in the bathrooms.
Anna Fabbri, student of the University of Pisa and academic senator of Sinistra Per, explains the reason for the initiative. «We wanted to bring people to think about the subject. In everyday life we tend to think rigidly about the man-woman division, in a binary way. Not all people are men or women, there are those who identify themselves in a different gender role. In any case, this net is not functional for men and women. Are the bathrooms divided because they are used differently? No. You go in and you are alone, if you need the urinated people you put them in a separate part. Others say: “if a woman enters a bathroom where there are men, then she runs the risk of being harassed”. Well, it’s the men who don’t have to harass. Not women to worry about. ” Anna Fabbri continues: «People who have a non-binary identity and who when they see themselves in front of the men’s and women’s toilets must be protected:“ Where am I going? ”. Why not make a more functional division? It extends rights and does not take away from anyone ».
Sinistra Per has the merit of having given visibility to the question, which however found attentive ears in the university. Arturo Marzano, delegate for “Gender studies and equal opportunities” (Gender Studies and Equal Opportunities), explains that the question has been on the table for some time and will find a solution. “There has been a slowdown due to the pandemic, just think that we met on March 3, 2020 with the rector Paolo Mancarella. And we talked about this. We had set up a mapping of the bathrooms department by department, building by building. On March 4, the Covid problem broke out and we slowed down. Now the mapping is ready and in each building we are identifying a bathroom that becomes genderless (genderless). Whether it is a single bathroom or inside the collective bathrooms, in that case by removing the identifier from the entrance door and leaving one of three options that we will choose: only written “Wc”, leave it blank or a mixed symbol, as done in Oxford . A third sign between masculine and feminine “. When? “I hope soon – he announces – by June 2022 we will be ready”.
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