Earlier this month, City Commissioner Amanda Fritz caught hell for her opposition to Portland's experimental multi-user, gender-neutral restrooms.
While Fritz last June supported converting two multiple-stall restrooms on the second floor of the Portland Building to allow users of any gender, she'd come to see them as unsafe and threatening, according to an email obtained by Willamette Week.
It turns out Fritz's change of heart (which she's since changed again) wasn't due to any local instances involving the types of leering perverts opponents of gender-neutral restrooms sometimes conjure.
Instead, they were inspired by the bathroom etiquette of a Portland police officer.
Last October, Fritz received an email from a community member that the commissioner has credited with helping form her thoughts.
The identity of the sender was blacked out in a version of the email the Mercury obtained via a public records request (reason: "personal safety"), but it appears the sender is female, and was probably attending a meeting of the city's Citizen Review Committee on October 5. The committee deals with police discipline issues and meets near the restrooms in question.
"You may be aware that the group restrooms on that floor were converted to all users mode," the sender wrote to Fritz on October 6. "I entered what used to be the women’s room and found one of the uniformed male police officials in there using the toilet with the stall door ajar. I know men are accustomed to using the facilities in view of their fellow restroom users, but I’m not. The situation made me pretty uncomfortable."
The writer continued: "I don't know if I'll ever be ready to share group restrooms with men."
Fritz wrote back that she'd have "similar concerns if I had had a similar experience, and I hope this issue will be discussed as one where many women would be deterred from using the facilities if we can't figure out how to make restrooms comfortable for all." She copied Commissioner Nick Fish, who helped pioneer the restroom project, along with the city's then-chief administrative officer, Fred Miller.
Update: Fish tells the Mercury that the complaint might actually have been about a uniformed security guard, though the complainant said it was a police official.
Original:
When she sent an email months later voicing anger and threatening a council resolution about the all-user restrooms, Fritz said she'd stood on a toilet and determined it was too easy to peer over the partitions (or under). "Women and trans people in Portland have to be hyper-vigilent every day, in our goal of getting through each week without being physically or verbally assaulted," she wrote, Willamette Week reported.
But when the Mercury asked about her concerns, Fritz first mentioned the October e-mail. She characterized it at the time as describing a man with the stall door open and his "pants around his ankles," though the email doesn't mention any such detail.
Fritz also mentioned that the group PHLUSH had submitted a report [PDF] that suggested changes that could make the experimental restrooms to feel more safe. The restrooms began as a pilot project last year, as part of an effort to make city-owned facilities more welcoming to transgender citizens. Along with the two multi-user experiments, roughly 600 single-use restrooms were converted to accommodate all genders.
Though she has now apologized for the impact her comments had had, they've led to changes. One of the two experimental restrooms in the Portland Building has been converted back to a women's room. The remaining restroom has had new permanent barriers installed to block out a pair of urinals.
Update 6:10 pm: Fish calls to correct. An all-user restroom was installed on the Portland Building's first floor to replace the one removed on the second. Fish says those restrooms will become permanent and state-of-the-art when the building undergoes an approaching renovation.