"I don’t get it, why don’t Muslims and Buddhists go home to pray or meditate? What is the importance of having prayer spaces, meditation spots and moreover ablution facilities and foot wash areas on campus?" - Asked by a student during Muffin Madness at the Multi-Faith Centre, an event in which faith based groups and clubs share free muffins, fruit and coffee to causally meet and talk. I knew he wasn't asking with malicious intent. The answer is that we, and specifically I am at home. I spend more time at the University than I do at home. I learn here, eat here, am with my friends and community here. It is so important to a space on campus to pray so that students like myself can practice our faith, an integral part of our identity, like we are at home. We then learn to sincerely love the university more, and feel that it in itself is a part of our identity as well. This will lead to us doing our best in benefiting and helping the University community.

What we can learn from The Question of Access by Tanya Titchkosky, is how the “average” individual under appreciates the ability to use public washrooms. There has been a long history of ableist ideals in our society that reinforces a sense of inferiority to those that don’t fit these standards. By not being able to provide some simple changes to accommodate different disabilities, we as a society fail to encourage these members of our community to feel like they are not defined by their disabilities.  It is in this regard that projects such as WIP become more significant than adding a pole to a washroom. Instead, we are helping to inform the University of any changes that would not affect the lives of the general population, but is significant to the process of empowering those in need.  When you start by addressing easy solutions, you give the individual with disabilities the ability to be more ambitious and fight for more complex needs. We believe that the University of Toronto is a school that encourages their students to be the best they can be and where all students feel comfortable enough to accomplish their goals. Titchkosky Tanya, The Question of Access, Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 2011

As a way to understand the range of needs from the different departments involved in this project, we were each asked to share an article that highlights their specific concerns. When it was my turn to choose an article for the group, I had a lot of trouble narrowing it down to one. I wanted to be able to show the ways in which transgender people are denied access or forced into the wrongly gendered spaces, but in a way that stressed that gender neutral space is only a partial fit. In the end I decided to cheat a little and go with two articles. Gendered Restrooms and Minority Stress: The Public Regulation of Gender and its Impact on Transgender People’s Lives by Jody L. Herman, was chosen because it presented hard numerical data regarding the harassment and assault that visible transgender people risk whenever they enter a gendered facility. The second article Genderism and the Bathroom Problem: (re)materializing sexed sites, (re)creating sexed bodies by Kath Browne was based on interviews with women who had experience being misgendered as men within women's washrooms. I felt that the sentiments of these women, who encountered verbal harassment and physical ejection parallels in some important ways the feelings of trans people who have faced similar treatment. The first article was to show the group that the threat was real, that trans people really do encounter harassment in these spaces. The second was to explore the feelings of being ejected from a space in which you know you belong. This is why neutral washrooms are only a partial fit, when trans men and women are denied access to spaces in which they know, intuitively, that they belong, they are encountering the same sort of misgendering as the women in Kath Browne's article. This idea that gender neutral washrooms are only part of the solution to making spaces inclusive of trans people has been the overarching theme of my participation in the Washroom Inclusivity Project and it is something that I will write more about in future posts.

In the 90's there was a surge of acceptance for gender, racial, and sexual differences that drew its roots from previous generations. Religious differences, albeit a social decision and not physical reality, is a new contention line students and faculty differ over. Eboo Patel, and myself, believe that religious accommodation and acceptance is an opportunity that has been, and should be continued to be, promoted. By accepting our ideological differences, we gain to learn very much from each side. By facilitating faith based needs, we facilitate the loyalty and comfort of religious students in a secular school. We strengthen the bonds of the University community to deeper roots, and therefore our graduates are able to go to society and connect bridges with communities that they have learned about, here in University.  

WIP started, just a few months ago, when it was warm outside and I didn't have to struggle with my kids for half an hour to put on their jackets and mittens.  I did some research to find out what other universities were doing to support student parents. I came across a journal article* reviewing campus resources across North America, that was quite surprising to me. There is simply not a whole lot that universities in this continent seem to offer for student parents. It actually made me feel quite lucky: U of T has a whole office with a reasonable budget devoted to family issues for students, staff and faculty. The Family Care Office  not only offers tons of groups and workshops to support parenting, they also help with practical things such as childcare, parental leave and so much more. It’s actually a great place to get some help adjusting to the dual demands of academia and parenting. And there sure is some getting adjusted needed. As the authors of the study quite nicely put it, there are many similarities between the demands of raising a child and being an university student: “If one were offered a purview into homes across the country in the wee hours of the night, one might find both academics and parents pacing the floors, searching and pleading for that elusive cocktail of soothing strategies to lull a crying baby to sleep or the rhetorical flourishes needed to complete that vexing chapter.” But when it’s both of those things at once, it takes some juggling and a whole lot of support to work it through. * "Making Space for Graduate Student Parents” by Kristen W. Springer, Brenda K. Parker and Catherine Leviten-Reid, published in the Journal of Family Issues on April 2009.