Recommendation to include TG

To the Editors:

Recently the Advisory Council on Transgender Student Needs, an offshoot of Student Senate, released to senior administrators and major campus offices a report containing recommendations for making Oberlin College more inclusive of transgender, transsexual and genderqueer students. TG/TS/GQ students, who may make a transition from living as one gender to living as another, or who may not identify as either male or female, meet with frustration and alienation in the face of campus policies which do not account for their needs, and faculty and staff who may not understand or accept their identities. The Council made a number of concrete recommendations for improving this situation, including:
Sex-segregation in public facilities causes significant anxiety for many transgender, transsexual and genderqueer youth, particularly the anxiety that they will be singled out for using the “wrong” bathroom. For this reason (among others), all residential and academic buildings should have public bathrooms which are not sex-segregated.
If the College is to continue recording the sex or gender of students (which to us seems largely unnecessary and intrusive), it should develop a clear policy regarding changes of recorded sex. We strongly recommend that this policy not mirror the strict guidelines maintained by many government agencies in this area, such as requiring documentation of genital surgery or other medical treatment, which create serious hardships for some and have no compelling rationale. Rather, we favor a policy of change on demand. In particular this policy should allow students to be identified as neither male nor female if they wish.
Students who have made a gender transition, or are in the process of one, and require a new OCID photo because their old one no longer resembles them and/or would cause confusion or embarrassment, should be provided with a new OCID photo at no cost.
Sex-segregation in campus housing assignments creates some fairly obvious dilemmas for trans students. We recommend that sex-based restrictions on campus housing be eliminated. Failing the wholesale elimination of such rules, housing assignments should be based on the gender with which students identify.
All faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Conservatory should be aware that if they have not already had TS/TG/GQ students, they will. Furthermore, they must understand that some students will not identify as their birth sex, that some will identify as neither male nor female; that they may undertake a gender transition during their college years, that their preferred personal pronoun may change, and finally, that professors must show respect for these students and their identities. At the least, a memorandum could be addressed to all faculty on these issues; in-depth training on these and other issues related to student diversity could also be integrated into faculty orientation (as well as student orientation).
The above also applies to all campus offices. At a minimum, campus offices should ensure that staff show respect for the identities of gender-variant students by addressing them by names and pronouns with which they identify.
Student Health Services and the Counseling Center should attempt to identify psychiatrists, endocrinologists and surgeons in the area experienced with gender-variant clients.
Several of our peer institutions are already implementing some similar policies; Oberlin can and should take the lead in this direction. While thus far we have only heard a response from one administrator, we look forward to a fruitful dialogue on these issues in the near future.

—Harper Jean Tobin
College senior
–Sarah Saunders
College senior
–Kathleen Salerno
College sophomore