About 20 MSU students wearing blue shirts gathered in and near the public bathrooms in Wells Hall on Wednesday afternoon in an attempt to raise awareness about transgender issues on campus.
The students — members of TransAction, a discussion group for transgender individuals and allies, and Phi Tau Mu, an organization for female-to-male transgender students — were part of a "bathroom crawl."
They traveled to a number of bathrooms across campus spreading information about such issues as creating gender-neutral bathrooms in university buildings.
Mathematics senior Courtney Couvreur helped spread pamphlets at the event. She said an issue that seems simple, such as choosing which bathroom to use, is a problem transgender individuals face on a constant basis.
"People are threatened daily for going into a bathroom that they feel is right," Couvreur said. "Gender is completely a social construction. It's nobody but your doctor's and your lover's business."
Jordan Furrow, a co-founder of Phi Tau Mu, said the issue is more extensive than just bathrooms. Furrow said the university has a policy prohibiting harassment against transgender individuals, but there is no anti-discrimination policy in place.
"Someone could beat me up and call me harassing names, and that would be prohibited," he said. "But if I were to be fired or failed in my class (for being transgender), those are the things that aren't protected."
Paulette Granberry Russell, senior adviser to the president for diversity and director of the MSU Office for Affirmative Action, Compliance & Monitoring, said there is a committee composed of students and staff to review the protection policy for transgender individuals and consider broadening it.
Granberry Russell said if someone were to be fired based on his or her gender expression, the matter would be looked into whether or not it's protected by the policy.
"We are not an institution that capriciously endorses the termination of employees on that basis," she said. "If someone alleges they were fired simply because of gender identity, that's something we'll look at."
TransAction members said two female students received tickets at the event Wednesday as they exited a bathroom in the International Center.
MSU police officials could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Furrow said the group researched the Department of Student Life Web site beforehand and saw no rules concerning who can be in which bathroom. Furrow said he heard the information was on the MSU Board of Trustees' site.
The ordinance states, "No person shall knowingly enter into, engage in peeping into, open the door of, or knowingly be in any rest room or locker room which has a sign posted indicating or designating that the rest room or locker room is for the use of the opposite sex," with exceptions made for police officers, children aged 8 years or under, employees who work in the bathrooms and people with disabilities who are being escorted by an adult of the opposite sex.
Claudia Gonzalez, one of the women who said she was ticketed, said the ticket only highlights the issue Phi Tau Mu and TransAction are trying to spread.
"This is exactly what we're paying attention to. It's ridiculous that people could go to jail for being in the wrong bathroom," she said.
The group had another confrontation with MSU police in the Administration Building, Furrow said. Biological males were in the men's bathrooms and biological females were in the bathrooms designated for women, but he said an employee still called the police. No one was ticketed during that incident, he said.
