After nearly an hour of debate at the Monday, Nov. 3 Student Government Association Senate meeting, the senate tabled a bill that favored the implementation of unisex restrooms in future buildings on campus.
Senator India Napier, senator for the College of Veterinary Medicine, sponsored the bill, citing unisex bathrooms could benefit a variety of people including families and transgender people.
"These restrooms give privacy to those people who need it," Napier said. " If a baby vomits on itself or a child with a disability needs to use a restroom, these unisex restrooms are perfect for that, especially in the family setting."
The diversity and multicultural affairs committee's bill would make it University protocol to implement unisex restrooms in newly constructed buildings across the campus.
According to Jeremy Wiley, director of the diversity and multicultural affairs committee, campus currently only has 178 unisex restrooms, eight of which are in the Auburn University Medical Clinic.
"Yes, it is a fact that there are 178 unisex bathrooms on Auburn's campus," Wiley said. "However, eight of those alone are in the medical clinic and only faculty are allowed to use those. Most of the unisex restrooms on this campus are for faculty use only and students are not authorized to use them."
When the debate turned monetary, Wiley said SGA approved bills in the past, which called for larger funds for not as good of a cause, using SGA senate approval of the funds to bring author Steve Forbes to campus as his example.
"Last year, we approved a bill that spent $5,000 of student tuition money to bring Steve Forbes to campus," Wiley said. "We can pay that kind of money for something which has little or no impact on my education, but we cannot approve something that would better the lives of Auburn students as a whole. That's not right."
Daniel Hess, senator for the College of Engineering, was one member who opposed the implementation of unisex restrooms citing there were no numbers to back up Napier's claim that unisex bathrooms benefit families.
"It talks about families and disabled persons and there are no numbers right now to back up the idea that this is actually a demand for families and disabled people," Hess said. "If there are, I would like to see them."
After the bill was tabled, Max Zinner, political director of Spectrum, said SGA senators appeared to not have enough information despite having ample amount of time to review the bill.
"I am concerned that there seems to be a lack of information," Zinner said. "They had at least a week since this was essentially read and the bill did not change significantly like they said in there. They had plenty of time to look it up and they failed to do so yet they still come here to debate against it. It seems kind of wrong in my opinion. If they don't care enough to look into it they should not have a problem with it."
Will Youngblood, director of event planning for Spectrum, said his peers' actions are disrespectful.
"I feel in many ways that it is kind of disrespectful to those members of the Auburn Family," Youngblood said. "We are supposed to be a family. It is very exclusionary."
In the end, Zinner said there could be reasons behind why some senators did not want the bill to go through, but in his mind, he did not hear a good enough reason.
"It's possible someone had a good reason to be against it, but I did not hear one in there," Zinner said. "Those that are against it should maybe be doing a better job."
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