Quebec schools must have designated boys and girls bathrooms: education minister

Quebec Education Minister Bernard Drainville said on Wednesday that individual universal or gender-neutral bathrooms are allowed in schools and will be planned for, as long as there are also designated boys and girls options.

Drainville made the announcement in a news scrum ahead of the Quebec committee on gender identity's report and recommendations.

"It's a decision that's well-balanced," said Drainville. "It's a decision that aims at creating environments that are safe, that create a sense of well-being, a sense of intimacy.

"These are the values or these are the principles that we've founded the decision upon and we think it's well-balanced because you have [sanitary units] for boys and for girls, for men and women, and we're going to have individual toilets for universal use that are going to be mixed."

According to the Quebec Official Gazette, "school service centres must ensure that individual, universal and accessible toilets are available for students who need or wish to use them. These facilities must be appropriate, safe and strategically located for adequate supervision, such as in a common circulation area."

New policy is discriminatory: trans activist

Celeste Trianon is the director of Juste Trans, a legal clinic supporting trans and non-binary people across Quebec.

She finds the new policy, which only allows for solo mixed-used bathrooms, discriminatory.

"It's basically a regime of separate but equal against trans and non-binary students and really anyone who would not feel safe using a gendered washroom. This directive does not respond to any problems. It does not respond to the fact that there are assaults, sexual assaults, and so much more happening in school bathrooms," she said.

She said the policy creates more problems for trans and non-binary students without making bathrooms any safer. She is organizing a protest on May 10 against the directive.

Quebec's advisory council on gender identity will make its recommendations in December, but Drainville said he made a commitment before the committee was formed and wanted to stand by that.

"We're living up to our word, and we're respecting the commitment we made," he said.

He said that 11 per cent of washrooms in schools are mixed already and that the level will be maintained.

"For the schools where there are mixed washrooms, yes, they will be maintained because we're not going to start demolishing schools for that," he said. "This is a pragmatic decision, so we're not going to start undertaking major repairs for that."

Schools at beginning planning stages will need to follow mandate

For those schools that are in the planning stage, if they are less than 30 per cent in progress, the plans will be altered to have boys, girls and individual universal washrooms.

Those beyond 30 per cent planned will continue to be built without change.

"Our conviction is that these spaces need to be preserved because it's a question of well-being, it's a question of intimacy, it's a question of privacy and this is our position," said Drainville. "We're sticking by it and we're very proud of it."