UC Berkeley opens large-scale universal locker room

From Berkeleyside:

A first in California: UC Berkeley opens large-scale universal locker room

Like many transgender students at UC Berkeley, Juniperangelica Cordova would get anxious each time she considered a workout at the campus gym.

“I wondered, ‘Am I going to use the locker room? Take a shower?’” says the ethnic studies major. “I like to work out, but I’d often avoid the locker room and go home with dirty clothes, or not go to the gym at all.”

While Cordova says Berkeley has become “a safer place for trans people to voice our needs and concerns,” she adds that students can’t fully participate in college life if there are places where they fear stares and harassment.

The opening Sept. 26 of a 4,500-square-foot universal locker room at the campus’s Recreational Sports Facility (RSF) — it’s believed to be the first large-scale collegiate universal locker room in California and one of just a few in the nation — will help change that experience. Any students or other RSF members needing more privacy, including those who are transgender, non-binary or have disabilities or body image struggles, will find a welcoming facility next door to the men’s and women’s locker rooms...

Remarkably, the new space is being paid for entirely by students. In a 2015 Wellness Referendum, the student body voted to impose an annual fee of $146 upon themselves — the fee contains a built-in escalator tied to inflation and is currently $160 — for 30 years. Those fees go into a Wellness Fund that, according to the fund’s website, is for “new, innovative mind-body services” that “address the concerning rise of mental health complications on campus and provide new support for minority student groups.”

So far, the fund has provided for initiatives that include counseling services for historically under-resourced student communities, medical care for student survivors of sexual violence and a pilot program for emergency housing...

Full story at https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/09/26/a-first-in-california-uc-berkeley-opens-large-scale-universal-locker-room