What’s gender-neutral housing?

What’s gender-neutral housing?

Everyone wants to live with people they feel comfortable with. Sometimes that means living with people of different genders.

Gender-neutral housing options provide students with choices for housing that aren’t based on gender. Such options, increasing at colleges across the country, can help everyone find the housing they find most comfortable, but are particularly important for intersex, transgender, and genderqueer students who feel uncomfortable being paired by gender. Gay students may also appreciate options that allow them to choose roommates they are less likely to be attracted to.

Gender-neutral housing options can mean a number of things, and increasing such options isn’t just about what options are available on a campus, but how they are made available and who they are made available to, like whether there is a bureaucratic petition process for exceptions to policies or if options are limited to returning students.

Increasing gender-neutral options can mean a number of things. It can mean allowing students to choose roommates of a different gender or allowing students to choose to be randomly assigned roommates without consideration of gender. It can also mean making mixed-gender halls and dorms available to students, even if rooms remain single-gender.

Other options are not strictly “gender-neutral,” but have similar affects for making college campuses more comfortable for all students. One option like this is guaranteeing the availability of singles to students who feel uncomfortable being paired by gender. Another is allowing students who identify as neither male nor female to pair with each other, rather than trying to lump such students into these groups.

Traditional housing options create a division between male and female which is not only a disservice to anyone who doesn’t want to be divided, but marginalizing to those who fall outside the division, like students who are intersex, transgender, or genderqueer. Creating gender-neutral options is an important step in making colleges welcoming, safe, and comfortable for such students. Housing policies should reflect schools’ commitments to diversity by being inclusive of everyone.

Increasing gender-neutral options doesn’t mean forcing anyone into a housing situation they are uncomfortable with. Gender-neutral options can remain entirely voluntary. Students who want to live with a particular student of the same gender or be randomly assigned a roommate of the same gender can still be given these options and single-gender dorms and halls can be preserved.

Gender-neutral housing options are being adopted by many colleges, spreading from schools like Bennington and Oberlin to more than 30 campuses across the country, now including Bard, the University of Pennsylvania, Skidmore, Oregon State, and Stanford. These changes have come after student-lead campaigns on campus.

Some general information about gender neutral options is available from the National Student Genderblind Campaign at genderblind.org. Their research on the gender-neutral options available at other colleges is available at http://genderblind.org/research.pdf. A couple articles about Stanford’s program are available at http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/april9/gender-040908.html and www.stanforddaily.com/cgi-bin/?p=533.

Recommendations: Three books on gender deviance, intersexuality, and genderqueer.