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City Commissioner Amanda Fritz, who previously backed the city's efforts to install gender-neutral bathrooms, has behind closed doors been sharply critical of the city's experiment with a multi-stall restroom on the second-floor of the Portland Building.
In fact, she said last month she'd refuse to attend City Council meetings until the Portland Building restroom was changed back to single-gender—a threat she retracted late Tuesday night.
The city converted its 600 single-stall bathrooms in September 2016 to allow access for all users. That's intended as a boon to families, elderly and disabled folks in addition to transgender, non-binary and gender-fluid people.
City Council also approved the all-gender multi-stall restroom in the Portland Building last year in an effort to help transgender people feel safer.
But in her Feb. 23 email, Fritz said she was speaking out on behalf of transgender people—and that the multi-stall restroom would only make a transgender person feel more threatened.
She considered the all-user restroom a danger, she wrote, in part because when she stood on the toilet, she was able to see into another stall.
She complained that this was a key issue given that City Council was to begin holding its regular meetings at the Portland Building's auditorium last week while updates are made to the City Hall council chambers.
In fact, Fritz warned that she would not attend those council meetings if the bathrooms weren't changed. (Fritz was out of town for last week's meeting.)
"I refuse to use unsafe restrooms," Fritz wrote in Feb. 23 email. "I will not attend these meetings if this matter is not resolved for me and other bathroom users. If I am afraid, how much more would a trans person using a structurally unsafe bathroom feel threatened?"
There are gendered bathrooms on other floors in the building; it's not clear why Fritz wouldn't use the restroom elsewhere instead of skipping Council meetings, except as a protest.
Fritz responded to questions from WW late Tuesday night, reiterating her concerns but saying that she would continue to attend City Council meetings.
"The 'pilot project' of 'all user' restrooms in the Portland Building, that provide no real changes in the facilities to accommodate that goal other than signs outside the doors, should end," she said in an email.
The national move to create all-user bathrooms is part of an effort to make restrooms a nonthreatening place for transgender people among others.
Fritz outlined the threat as she saw it in the Feb. 23 email:
The email was sent a day after President Donald Trump revoked President Barack Obama's executive order requiring schools to allow trans students to use the bathroom of their choice.
After obtaining the emails, WW contacted Commissioner Nick Fish, who brought the resolution to Council last year. Fish says he believes the Portland Building restrooms are safe for transgender people and women.
Fish noted the national context that has "transgender people …feeling targeted by the Trump administration." He tells WW the city as of 10 days ago had not received complaints from the public about the Portland Building restrooms.
"I think it's so important for the City of Portland to stand on principle," he tells WW.
Fritz's email includes a reference to an attachment to her email, a report on recommendations from the group PHLUSH, which advocates for all-user bathrooms.
The report was not provided to WW.
But PHLUSH program manager Carol McCreary said the new restrooms were neither better nor worse than the old- single-gender bathrooms.
She said the group was critical of the restroom's narrow entrances, lack of sight lines and lack of privacy in stalls—criticisms McCreary said applied "whether they [bathrooms] were all women or all men or all user." McCreary also noted that "no stalls in America are private enough."
In a Feb. 24 follow-up email, Fritz argued for converting at least the formerly women's bathroom back to its gendered status, citing PHLUSH's objections to its physical problems. She also offered another reason for gendered bathrooms.
"Taking away gender-specific bathrooms may have the result that some members of our community can't use either, due to cultural norms or religious convictions," she wrote.
When she sent the emails, Fritz was about to leave Oregon to attend a diversity training meeting for her entire staff, as The Oregonian reported.
"I am very perturbed that my concerns have been disregarded to date," she wrote in the Feb. 23 email. "If I need to file a Council Resolution directing OMF to return these restroom to gender specific, I will do so."