The Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) announced this week that it’s smashing the bathroom binary by making all of its facilities gender-inclusive. The announcement was made on May 17, which has been celebrated as International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia since 2004.
“People are entitled to use a washroom in peace,” Haran Vijayanathan, the museum’s director of equity and strategic initiatives, said in a press release. “Taking a gender-inclusive approach for all our washrooms, not just designating one or two as gender-inclusive, is a way to create safer spaces as well as a culture that accepts and celebrates people of all genders.”
The museum’s restroom signage has already been updated, for both public and staff facilities, as CTV News reports. Signs indicating gender have been replaced with lists of each washroom’s amenities, such as urinals, toilet stalls and changing tables. All bathrooms will also include free menstrual products and disposal facilities.
While the museum has had single-occupancy bathrooms for some time, these were not labelled as gender-inclusive. The facilities will remain unchanged for people who would prefer a solitary bathroom experience.
“The gender-inclusive bathroom announcement comes as part of CMHR’s years-long reckoning with its institutional discrimination.”
Vijayanathan tells Xtra in an email that the bathroom overhaul came as part of wider-reaching changes, which included mandatory staff training on bias and discrimination, more LGBTQ2S+ people hired to leadership roles, staff-led groups—like its internal Rainbow Equity Council—and a new code of conduct.
If a visitor were to complain about the gender-inclusive restroom policy, Vijayanathan says staff will try to find a peaceful solution, but will ultimately ask visitors to leave if necessary. “Our approach is rooted in practice: we know that safer spaces won’t be achieved by ticking things off a list and then moving on,” he says. “Transphobia isn’t welcome, period.”
The gender-inclusive bathroom announcement comes as part of CMHR’s years-long reckoning with its institutional discrimination. The museum deliberately censored some of its LGBTQ2S+ content between 2015 and 2017 at the request of certain tour groups, according to a June 2020 CBC News report.
The museum swiftly issued an apology, but it has continued to come under intense public scrutiny. Within a week of the censorship allegations, the LGBT Purge Fund nonprofit announced that it planned to suspend negotiations to create a museum exhibit memorializing Canada’s decades-long purge of LGBTQ2S+ federal employees. (The negotiations resumed that November, with the exhibition now expected to launch in 2024.)
Pride Winnipeg also cut ties with the museum in June 2020. The LGBTQ2S+ organization was scheduled to host its Canada Pride 2022 Human Rights Conference at CMHR, but moved locations to a hotel instead.
CMHR’s troubles only continued to linger from there. An August 2020 review of its workplace culture found that racism, heterosexism and sexism were present throughout the institution. A 2021 follow-up report found that those same equity issues had persisted in the intervening year, with both documents providing recommendations for improving equity moving forward.
Amid these controversies, human rights attorney Isha Khan was appointed CEO of CMHR in August 2020, becoming the first woman and first person of colour to hold the position, according to the Winnipeg Free Press.
Khan said in a statement that making all bathrooms gender-inclusive was “overdue.”
“It is important we join the growing number of organizations taking gender-inclusive approaches to make their washrooms safer and more accessible for everyone,” she said in a statement.
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