I'm sorry if this turns into a bit of a rant. I am now fully out at school (yay). My issue is that my school wants a 2 week waiting period between coming out and using the male facilities. This is extremely frustrating because I have to use the nurses bathroom. I go to a really small school and it has about 300 students in preschool through 12th grade all in one building. The nurses office is in the elementary wing. Since coming out teachers are more hesitant to let me out of class to use the bathroom since it is extremely out of the way and takes longer I also only have access to this bathroom durin school hours. Now this isn't a problem in Monday's and Friday's but every other day I usually stay after to work concessions. There is a bathroom in the kitchen area I can use but I only have access to it from 5 to 9 this leaves about a 2 hour gap where I don't have access to the bathroom thankfully this is only for 2 weeks so I won't have this problem long but it is still really annoying. I also have some issues with the lockerroom thing. I don't have access to a space to keep my gym clothes. I am given a bucket in the bathroom to keep everything in. I find this a problem because I don't trust leaving my phone in there during class so I'm playing gym with a phone in my pocket and a lot of little kids use the nurses bathroom and there have been problems in the past with them going through other people's things. I also don't see the point in a 2 week waiting period. Once my friend came out she didn't know about the law saying she was allowed to use the girls bathroom and lockerroom so she used the nurse then when she did she was given a 2 week waiting period from talking to the principal and using the girls facilities. It makes some sense for me because I just came out so they kind of need time for people to hear about it but for her everyone had known for months and it would have taken one day for the girls in the lockerroom to be notified which is all they needed. Now my principal also knows I'm the one who told my friend about the law so he was quick to tell me that if I wanted to start using the men's room before the 2 week period ended than I just had to notify him and I could but it would cause some chaos. I'm not going to do this because I don't want to cause conflict but I don't see why it has to be a full 2 weeks. Does anyone else's school do things like this.
It sounds like a load of crap to me. I mean, I get wanting everyone to know about your coming out and understand why you're using male facilities now, but waiting two weeks to ensure everyone knows? That's what we had assemblies for, and if someone wasn't in that day, you can be damn sure the news would have gotten to them through others. Personally, I'd go to the principal. To at least talk about why this two week period is the rule. Potentially getting it to stop might just be a bonus.
