REGINA, Canada – A rural Saskatchewan school district is following a trend of Canadian schools going to all gender-neutral bathroom facilities at all schools, including elementary schools.

The Prairie Valley School Division recently installed black and white “washroom” signs with a picture of a toilet on all facilities in the district after spending a year crafting a new diversity policy to create more inclusion for transgender students of all ages, director of education Ben Grebinski told the Times Colonist.

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“You can’t differentiate between 5-year-olds and a 17-year-old. When you become familiar and aware of their preference, you have to be able to accommodate that preference,” Grebinski said.

No special requests or complaints prompted the change of policy, he said, district officials simply created the gender-inclusive bathroom policy on their own volition, with input from parents.

“There was a little bit of opposition in certain circumstances because people felt kind of uncomfortable with this,” Grebinski said. “And what we found was that as soon as people became aware of the purpose and our intent here just to provide humanity, with an opportunity to be expressive and to be who they were on an individual basis without any kind of alienation, people were very willing and accepting, so frankly we didn’t have any challenges or issues.”

The change in Prairie Valley schools follows a wave of Canadian schools catering policies toward transgender students with gender-neutral facilities. The Central Okanagan School Board in British Columbia voted unanimously in November to formally establish all single stall bathrooms in the district as gender-neutral, CBC.ca reports.

“We’ve been putting gender-neutral washrooms inside our schools for quite some time now … if we had space or if a student requested it,” school board chairwoman Moira Baxter told the news site.

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“It needed to be formalized that this was something the board was committed to and also that everyone in the school district knew this was something that we were working towards,” she said.

Baxter said many folks urged the board to make the gender-neutral policy official, and nobody challenged the change.

“The public, one after another, stood up and said to the board this is something you’ve got to do and this is a basic right and hopefully you make the right decision,” she said.

Kristopher Wells, assistant professor of sexual minority studies at the University of Alberta, told the Times Colonist more schools are accommodating transgender students at a younger age, an effort he’s helped to facilitate with a guidebook he co-authored with two transgender teachers for the Canadian Teachers Federation, Canada’s teachers union.

“It’s now not uncommon to be working to support transgender youth as young as six or seven,” Wells said. “Ultimately, it comes down to issues of safety and inclusion in schools and if students don’t feel safe and they don’t feel included, they’re not going to be able to learn.”

The Times Columnist also highlighted many other public places in Canada that have also switched to gender-neutral bathrooms:

  • Washrooms at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto had signage with a half-female and half-male logo above the words “We Don’t Care.”• The City of Regina says the new Mosaic Stadium, home of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, will have nine gender-neutral bathrooms.• On Parliament Hill, 37 out of 188 total washrooms are unisex. The Saskatchewan and Manitoba legislatures each have a gender-neutral washroom for the public. Most other legislatures say gender-neutral washrooms are not on their radar right now.

    • The Royal Ontario Museum has three all-gender washrooms and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights says it has at least one universal washroom on virtually every level.

    • The University of Victoria, McGill University, the University of British Columbia, Carleton University, the University of Alberta, the University of Winnipeg, University of Western Ontario and Ryerson University all have some form of all-gender washrooms.