In relation with the controversy around Restroom For All movement in college.
English Translation: 동치
Translation review: 피웊, Miguel
Writer of the original text: 권태
Review and amendments to the original text: 레이, 에스텔, 희중, Miguel
Did you ever happen to use any restroom in a college building? In most of Korea’s universities, restrooms are mostly divided by male and female restroom. The structure of the restrooms depends on the region and the building with some equipped with toilet for the disabled and the partition inside. Such a system may be a great convenience to some, but is not for everyone.. This applies to non-binary queer members in college especially, and that is one of the reasons “Restroom For All” movement started out in Korean college society.
In 16th March, 2022, the ‘Restroom For All’ was finally installed in Sungkonghoe University 5 years after the start of the discussion. According to Diversity Korea’s definition, a restroom for all jumps over a hurdle that restrooms designed by the binary standard in the past - the disabled and the non-disabled, the adult and the young, the male and the female - had due to its limits. That is to say, a restroom for all is a very personal place for one who is outside of any social norm, the place where the disabled, the young, and the non-binary could use with ease.
Nonetheless, Korea’s press reports focused more on the conflicts than the concurrence until the installment. The gender neutrality and its criticism were particularly highlighted among all the other traits, and it accounts for the lack of understanding of queer community, and the sprouting transgender-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) camp.
Such a system may be a great convenience to some, but is not for everyone.. This applies to non-binary queer members in college especially, and that is one of the reasons “Restroom For All” movement started out in Korean college society.
In fact, it is not surprising that a gender neutral restroom would strike a chord in many people. We have already experienced it in house, or airplane where the sex does not matter using restroom. Just like we had no problem using those facilities, there is nothing to feel out of place when we encounter very personal toilet with no boundary between sexes in which we practice the acts of hygiene and discharging. Nevertheless, the opposition of ‘Restroom For All’ movement deliberately misled the word ‘gender neutral restroom’ and created a battle field that the movement violates the rights of non-LGBTQ+ citizens.
The queerphobic groups have opposed to the installment claiming that it would ‘promote homosexuality’ and increase the risk of ‘sexual assault towards women’. They have regarded the place open for LGBTQ+ as a threat to women several times before. As there have been multiple attempts to legislate the Comprehensive Anti-Discrimination Act in Korea, the hate groups have made issues of some LGBTQ+ related articles assuming that the sexual and gender minority groups are incompatible with the safety of women.
Korea’s transgender exclusionary movement also often holds a two-way race between the LGBTQ+ rights and the safety of women. In February, 2022, a Male-To-Female transgender student who had legally gone through gender reassignment backed out on her enrollment facing severe backlash inside and outside of Sookmyung Women’s University. Sookmyung Women’s University is one of the women-only schools in Korea founded to expand the rights of women, and students of some other universities including Sookmyung formed a TERF group around that time. In a joint statement, they insisted that they could protect ‘the women’s right and place’ by keeping the transgender student out of the school. This also can be explained in line with an attempt to shush LGBTQ+ rights movement based on binary opposition between women and sexual, gender minority.
As in the gender neutral restroom case, sexual and gender minority’s rights easily get treated as political and controversial. Though the right to go to bathroom is one of the essentials that have to be guaranteed in one’s college life, “Restroom For All” is labeled ‘political’. In the same context, ‘the right to urinate’, somewhat vulgar expression used in the Restroom For All movement, successfully deconstructs the unwanted political nature, and portrays the very fundamental nature of bathroom – the place where one “with a bodily needs and a right to freely use the bathroom” can go.
Park Kyung-Tae, the head of the Students Service Affairs of Sungkonghoe University, said in an interview that he was able to develop the project into the school’s headquarters in that there was ‘rarely any opposition according to school’s public sphere’, and that was how he could have completed the ‘Restroom For All’. Now the movement needs to spread over other universities, and through the Korean society at large. It needs to go on until the discussion about the arguments raised against the LGBTQ+ and the un-uttered rights that are yet to be fully expressed sets forth.
English Translation: 동치
Translation review: 피웊, Miguel
Writer of the original text: 권태
Review and amendments to the original text: 레이, 에스텔, 희중, Miguel
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