Why, of course! It’s creating Gender-Neutral Student Housing.
An “ad-hoc committee†of administrators is investigating the possibility of gender-neutral housing on campus, Dean of Administrative Affairs John Meeske said this week.
The committee, which was convened late last semester around the same time the Yale College Council formed a gender-neutral housing committee of its own, will spend the 2008-’09 academic year drafting a recommendation about the housing option, committee chair Meeske said. …
Meeske said the administration began exploring the issue after attending Ivy League housing conferences over the past two years and discovering that gender-neutral housing was “an ‘in’ thing at other schools.†Still, given the distinctiveness of Yale’s residential college system, all decisions will be made with Yale specifically in mind, he said. …
LGBT Co-op student coordinator Benjamin Gonzalez ’09 said Yale’s current housing policy ignores the needs of transgender students. Gonzalez said he knows of no openly transgender students currently at Yale, which he said is the result of the University’s policies — policies that do not promote a comfortable environment for such individuals.
“Yale,†Gonzalez said, “is failing in its basic mission not to discriminate on gender identity and expression.†…
Some form of gender-neutral housing is available at more than 30 colleges and universities nationwide, according to the nonprofit Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, including the majority of the eight Ivy League universities as well as nearby schools like Wesleyan University and the University of Connecticut.
When ten Congregationalist clergymen gathered at Samuel Russell’s parsonage in Branford in 1701 and contributed 40 precious folios for “the founding of a Collegiate School,” the poor misguided fools thought they were founding a school to train ministers of the gospel.
Of course, now we know that the real mission of their undertaking was avoiding discrimination on gender identity and expression and providing a comfortable environment for the transgendered.
Adam Ross Solomon
The Yale Free Press blog has been nice and active about this, Jake McGuire especially. As a pretty immoral person, I’m fine with the idea of gender-neutral housing so that men and women can live together – if they can deal with the sexual awkwardness (and the perils of agreeing to live with a lover for over a year), then fantastic, and if not, well, you made your own bed. The problem – indicative of a clearly scary trend in the liberal university today – is to justify it instead on grounds of meeting the desires of a small, if noticeably existant, minority of “transgendered” students, lest the LGBTQXYpiomega label you a homophobe or somesuch. As the YFP has been lamenting, the pages of the YDN in the last week or so have been hit unusually hard with terrible political correctness. Wonder if it’s a fun new trend to have three front-page articles on the LGBTQ in a day?
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