Brown and White Vol. 128 no. 24

              The Brown and White
Vol. 128 No. 24
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
‘All the Lehigh News First’
experiencing a serious act of discrim­ination and 41 percent of respon­dents reported attempting suicide, compared to 1.6 percent of the gen­eral population. Additionally, respon­dents were four times more likely to have a household income of less than $10,000 per year.
“It’s a tough world to be a trans­gender person for sure,” said Trish Boyles, the director of the Pride Center. “(A huge percentage) of transgender people say they’ve been rejected by their family when they come out with respect to their gender identity, and all of that sort of trickles down into other arenas of life such as healthcare, housing — there’s just massive amounts of discrimination. People are denied services and not able to find places to live purely based on their gender identity.”
Residential and facilities obsta­cles
According to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, transgen­der individuals attending a univer­sity have also reported high rates of harassment, with 35 percent of respondents reporting bullying, 5 percent reporting physical assault, 3 percent reporting sexual assault and 2 percent reporting expulsion due to their gender identity or expression.
The task force also reported 5 per­cent of respondents being denied cam­pus housing, 20 percent being denied gender-appropriate housing and many respondents being denied suit­able bathroom facilities. According to Boyles, some of the biggest challeng­es for transgender students relate to these housing and facilities issues.
Last year, Evan Boyle, ’15, refused to use restrooms on Lehigh’s campus. He tailored his day around finding com­fortable restroom environ­ments, often simply waiting until he was able to go back to his dorm room.
“When I was identifying as a female…I still dressed the way I dress now, which is very masculine, and I was told ‘Hey you’re in the wrong bathroom’ by girls and it’s very uncomfortable,” Boyle said. “So for a period, I stopped using public restrooms unless I knew it was gen­der neutral or unisex.”
Lehigh alumnus Zz Riford, ‘14, who is now a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, said despite the fact that his new school has some gender-inclusive bathrooms, he still has trouble finding a comfortable atmosphere. He does not have access to a gender-inclusive restroom in his office building, and he said he often goes to the less-frequented bathroom on the first floor of the building so he can “hide out.”
“As soon as you start thinking about it, all of a sudden, you can’t even use the bathroom in public with­out worrying about someone kicking you out,” Riford said. “It’s a horrible thing.”
Eli Rosenberg, ’17, said he often felt uncomfortable using the men’s bath­room. He said that he was worried he would see someone else and receive a “weird look” or be kicked out.
“No one ever said anything, so some of this might have been in my head, but knowing that you don’t look like you’re supposed to be there, it weighs on your mind,” Rosenberg said.
Finding comfortable restroom envi­ronments is just one of the many obstacles transgender individuals face on a daily basis.
Nationally, transgender individu­als face high levels of discrimination, harassment, unemployment, poverty, homelessness and suicide, according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. A 2011 study conducted by the task force found that among its sample of 6,450 transgender and gender non-conforming individuals, 63 percent of respondents reported
“Big challenges for transgender students have mostly to do with things that we kind of take for grant­ed about our living environments,” Boyles said. “For example, we’ve not had any true gender-neutral hous­ing that was a safe space for trans students, and that’s unfortunately common at a lot of universities.”
According to Boyles, one of the challenges with creating safe living environments for transgender stu­dents is the result of the inherently gendered nature of college campus­es. Many college campuses, includ­ing Lehigh, divide living arrange­ments by gender, with the exception of gender-neutral housing options. Rosenberg said that one of the issues associated with housing that he has encountered at Lehigh stems from the Common Application, which prospec­tive students use to apply for admis­sion to the university. Rosenberg said that when he applied to Lehigh, the application required that he check a box indicating whether he was male or female. There was no transgender identity box or an option to explain special circumstances. At the time of applying, Rosenberg decided to check the box for the sex he was assigned at birth: female. As a result, Rosenberg was placed with a female roommate in first-year housing.
“Those little boxes annoy (me) to no end because I never really know what to put down,” Rosenberg said. “I ended up putting down female at the time… and because of that, I was treated as female throughout the entire housing process. Thankfully, my roommate was absolutely won­derful when I came out to her and it didn’t faze her at all but I can see a lot of ways where that may not have worked out as well as it did.”
The strictly male-female aspect of housing is also amplified on college cam­puses with Greek life. Social Greek organizations are separated by gender, with females joining sororities and males joining fraterni­ties. Additionally, as is the case at Lehigh, many of these Greek chapters are given living spaces on campus, with the genders once again separated.
“I think in a lot of ways, Lehigh can be a little tougher environ­ment than other universities,” Boyles said. “One, because of the pre­dominance of Greek life here and the residential nature of Greek life... It’s not necessarily that any individuals in those programs are doing things to make it so, it’s just the way it’s set up. It’s very gendered. It’s very heter­onormative. There are clear expecta­tions for men, clear expectations for women, and so a student at Lehigh’s campus that kind of transcends those boundaries, that can be a much more dangerous thing to do at Lehigh.”
Megan McMichael, ’17, a member of Greek Allies, also said it is dif­ficult to make the Greek system a spectrum because the organization is inherently gendered. She said that because of this binary, the choices for transgender students might be limit­ed in terms of joining a social Greek organization.
“The campus is something ridic­ulous like 40 percent Greek, and then you think about a lot of the people who aren’t Greek are (on) sports teams, and sports teams are also inherently binary,” Elizabeth Campbell, ’15, the president of Greek Allies, said. “So you have very little organizations on campus that are not one sole gender typically. I do think that’s got to be very difficult to figure out where to fit in.”
According to Carter Gilbert, an assistant director in the Office of Sorority and Fraternity Affairs, the process for a transgender student looking to join a Greek organiza­tion would be highly individualized, and would depend on factors such as individual circumstance regard­ing identity, legal documentation and
By KELSEY ALPAIO
Editor in Chief
See TRANSGENDER Page 3
Courtesy of CBS Chicago
Lehigh considers obstacles, resources for trans students
Clarifying misconceptions about transgender identities
By KELSEY ALPAIO
Editor in Chief
According to Trish Boyles, the director of the Pride Center, com­ing from a place of understanding is essential for creating a safe environment for transgender stu­dents, but there are many miscon­ceptions regarding transgender identities.
According to GLAAD, a non-gov­ernmental media monitoring orga­nization founded by LGBT individ­uals, the word transgender is an umbrella adjective that describes people whose gender identity or expression differs from what is generally associated with the sex they were assigned at birth.
Boyles, however, said that one major misconception regarding this term is the idea that trans­gender individuals must fall into the gender binary.
This is the concept that there are only two gender identities: male and female.
“That does describe a large part of the transgender community, but there are a lot of individuals that identify as transgender that identify outside of that binary of man-woman,” Boyles said. “That
See DEFINITION Page 2