Empower students with gender-neutral housing

Morgan Warners Guest Columnist

Though the residential environment at Vassar attempts to be gender-neutral in some ways, we are still not doing enough. Our policies and practices continue to cling to certain norms and assumptions about gender when it comes to double- and triple-occupancy dorm rooms. By changing this, Vassar can empower all students to select a living environment that is fully inclusive and conducive to each individual’s intellectual and personal growth.

At the end of the fall semester, the Office of Residential Life completed a preliminary proposal to move to gender-neutral housing, and Vassar Student Association (VSA) leaders have been working to implement this policy. In a nutshell, the policy would allow every student to choose any other student as a roommate in a double or triple.

Sex separation may seem like common sense, but at Vassar we dig deeper than that. Sex, gender and related concepts such as sexuality are complicated. Students have diverse gender identities and sexualities to which policy and practice must respond.

For instance, a student may have a biological or legal sex that doesn’t match the gender with which that student identifies. This means that although a student’s legal sex may be female, he may identify as male. Others may disregard the male/female binary entirely.

Some might say that the sexes need to be segregated for reasons of appropriateness. But if a person’s legal sex and gender identity don’t match, then who gets to choose what’s appropriate for purposes of rooming?

Current practice does not allow sufficient choice for transgender students in this situation, and it doesn’t work for all gay, lesbian or bisexual students, either. If you’re a gay male, for example, there may be reason to live with a female friend instead of another guy in order to sidestep big issues such as homophobia and attraction between roommates.

It all depends on who your friends and potential roommates are, which is why providing choice is so important. Vassar housing should be adapted to the community we have—not an idealized, heterosexist vision in which we pretend that “men” and “women” can be unproblematically separated.

The change to gender-neutral housing would be valuable for all students. Why is gender or sex somehow a more relevant characteristic for selecting roommates than study habits, work schedules, neatness or personal hygiene? “It just is” cannot suffice for an answer.

Student Fellows know from the conflicts they arbitrate that gender separation isn’t a magical tool for establishing harmony between roommates.

So why does Vassar imply, before room draw even starts, that although students all use gender-neutral bathrooms, all live on mixed-gender hallways (except in Strong House), and are for the most part comfortable with this, that men and women cannot responsibly choose to live together in the same room?

Some will be uncomfortable about men and women living together. However, no one’s forcing these people into choosing mixed-gender rooms themselves.
Others will say that it’s inappropriate for a couple to live together. Maybe, but current practice leaves that option wide open for gays, lesbians or bisexuals.
In initial discussions about this policy, some worried about opening the door to abusive relationships (read: heterosexual relationships) in which one partner coerces the other into cohabitating.

The door to that danger has been open in same-sex relationships since this institution’s foundation, and abusive relationships are certainly not only heterosexual phenomena.

The reasons for separating the sexes in room assignments simply don’t hold water if we acknowledge reality: that our students are capable of deciding what constitutes an appropriate and safe living environment. Isn’t that the kind of responsibility Vassar should encourage? The purpose of Vassar’s residential environment is that it “obliges students to master the art of living cooperatively in a diverse community.”

In the end we’re faced with two challenges. The first is the conceptual hurdle of being universally gender-neutral. The second is the relatively small practical change of opening rooms to differently gendered roommates. Today we have housing practices for students in doubles and triples that are geared more toward an ideology that promotes gender separation than the reality of how students identify and live.

Residential Life can handle the practical issues—they crafted the policy, after all. The conceptual hurdle can only be surmounted through conversation. Part of that discussion took place when the VSA Council unanimously voted on Sunday, Jan. 27 to endorse the proposed policy.

Anyone with objections or support should come forward and let someone on the Committee on College Life know. Students can send an e-mail to vsastudentlife@vassar.edu. Say what you have to say clearly and respectfully—say it now. Then we can move forward in considering the policy. I hope that gender-neutral housing can be established for the 2008-2009 year.

—Morgan Warners ’08 is Vassar Student Association Vice President for Student Life.