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
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