Last fall, the oldest building on the Cooper Union campus underwent a sudden renovation. A group of students, agitating for their transgender classmates, stripped the words “men” and “women” off the doors of the Foundation Building’s restrooms.

The act expressed years of pent-up frustration that in lower Manhattan, at one of the most liberal colleges in the country, students who failed to conform to gender norms nevertheless risked harassment whenever they went to the bathroom.

But then, the unexpected happened. The signs were never replaced. And in an apparent first for a US college, the Cooper Union administration this month moved to remove the gender designations from all the bathrooms on campus by taking down the rest of the men’s and women’s signage from bathrooms.

To the students involved, it was victory.

“A public facility shouldn’t have to ask if you’re a man or a woman,” said Rio Sofia, one of the students who put pressure on the administration. “It should just ask, do you need to pee or poop?”

In less scatalogical terms, the interim president of Cooper Union recently made clear that he agrees. “From a practical standpoint, very little will actually change in our day-to-day use of restrooms,” the president, Bill Mea, wrote in an 18 March email to the campus announcing the change. “But it reflects where I believe Cooper Union needs to stand.

“I cannot change the outside world and how it treats transgender and gender non-conforming people,” he continued. “But I can change the Cooper Union environment to help everyone feel safe when they are inside our buildings.”

The decision stands in contrast to many of the bitter fights over bathroom and locker room access transpiring across the country. This year alone, states have considered more than two dozen bills to restrict transgender individuals from using bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity.

While some proposals are rooted in privacy concerns, others are based on fears, not shown to have any basis in reality, that freer restroom access invites sexual predation on women and children. And even privacy concerns, transgender advocates note, are based on the misconception that trans women and men are not “real” women and men.

The announcement at Cooper Union came just one week before North Carolina governor Pat McCrory signed a law that will force transgender people to use facilities corresponding with the gender they were assigned at birth in all public spaces, including hundreds of schools. The sponsor of the law, which is contested in court, referred to trans individuals as “cross-dressers” who threaten “the right of women and girls to peace of mind”.

By contrast, Cooper Union’s decision was not the product of a bruising legal battle or a drawn-out showdown before the media. And although it took nearly two years of urging by the student activists for the administration to act, the campus of 950 engineering and arts students doesn’t exactly feel battle-scarred.

On a recent Friday afternoon, several Cooper Union students said they were unconcerned by the coming switch or only vaguely aware of it. The most fervid reactions came from Facebook – comments that mocked the student activists for taking on bathroom politics while the school is in the throes of a tuition crisis.

“Cooper Union has always been on the forward edge of social justice issues,” Mea said in a recent interview. “From the start, in 1859, we admitted women, African Americans. It has always been an institution that promoted equality amongst people.

“I never got any overt bigotry or nastiness,” he added. “Some would have preferred to keep things exactly as they were. But the majority of them were very supportive. People thought, ‘Why is this an issue at all?’ As in, why aren’t we already doing this?”

With fights over bathroom access growing so virulent, it is striking that the changes coming to Cooper Union go even further. Rather than enforce the right of transgender students to use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity, the administration will strip the bathrooms of any signs that they are for men or women only.

Students sit in front of Cooper Union: ‘A public facility shouldn’t have to ask if you’re a man or a woman.’ Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The school has ordered the signs but hasn’t yet placed them in the buildings. Placards outside what was formerly the men’s room will read “restroom with urinal and stalls”, and outside the former women’s room, “restroom with only stalls”.

Several single-occupancy bathrooms that were formerly set aside for faculty are now open to the general student body – a change that was already under way in order to satisfy a law recently passed by the city of New York.

“When there’s a gendered space, there’s a sense of ownership to that space,” Mea said, explaining why the school chose to remove the men’s and women’s signs altogether. “When people see someone who they think doesn’t belong there, it can create stress for everyone. So we thought, let’s just take that away.” Almost all students and faculty are continuing to use the same bathrooms without issue, Mea added. “Visitors are figuring it out pretty quickly, too.”

The change represents a triumph even as the student activists say that the campus can still be an unfriendly place for transgender individuals and those who do not identify with either gender. The dorms remain divided by gender, although the school says it is accommodating of students who request different arrangements.

Sofia, one of the activists, said she had been “policed out” of bathrooms before by her fellow students. Other students who helped push the change were seated around her, and they nodded emphatically.

Finding a restroom where they didn’t feel as though they were under observation, they said, was a constant disruption in their lives. Andy Overton, a senior art student, grew accustomed to walking several blocks off campus to use the single-occupancy restroom in the Starbucks.

Even inside 41 Cooper Square, a dazzling campus addition that opened in 2009, the engineering labs were eight floors above the nearest gender-neutral bathroom. “For a couple of months, I stopped doing work in the lab,” said L, a senior engineering student. “It got to the point where I couldn’t do any schoolwork.”

It was not unheard of for trans students who were struggling to gain acceptance at Cooper Union to drop out, Sofia said.

Even as the group’s demands grew louder, the administration initially offered to open up only the school’s single-occupancy restrooms – a shift that was already required under city law.

“‘Well, we can change the signs, but that’s not going to change how you’re going to be policed,’” was how Sarah Schmitt, a student, recalled the administration’s hesitation. “And what we said was, it doesn’t really matter if it changes right away. The icon on the bathroom is no longer validating that policing.”

Finally, the student activists tore down the signs themselves, from bathrooms in the oldest building on campus. In place of the signs, the students hung up a banner that read “Bathroom :)” and scrawled “Degendered” on the door. On a recent visit to campus, the signs had disappeared, but the lettering that once spelled “Men” and “Women” remained.

The administration made the change following a well-attended public meeting which seemed to assuage most skeptical students’ concerns about “de-gendering” the campus bathrooms.

In addition to state bills to restrict transgender bathroom use, a growing number of schools are revolting against the Obama administration’s decree that federal non-discrimination laws protect transgender students’ access to such facilities in schools. In one high-profile case, Illinois’ largest high school district flirted with losing millions in federal funds because it would not allow a transgender student to have unfettered access to the locker room.

In Gloucester County, Virginia, a trans boy, Gavin Grimm, and his school are wrangling over bathroom access in court. Members of Grimm’s community referred to him as a “freak” and compared him to a dog wanting to urinate on a fire hydrant, during a public meeting at which Grimm was present.

Cooper Union is not the only east coast college making a point to accommodate its transgender students.

“But I don’t know of any other colleges that are doing this, specifically,” said Mara Keisling, the president of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

Keisling noted that in addition to transgender individuals, parents with young children and people with caretakers often struggle to find accommodating facilities when they need them.

“Gendered facilities can make it rough for anyone who doesn’t fit the stereotypes of everyone else who’s using those rooms,” she said. “There are lots of different reasons why we as a society have gendered our bathrooms. And we should consider that they probably shouldn’t be.

“I’m going to tell you something that will shock you,” she added. “Many of the bathrooms in my home are gender-neutral.”