Transgender students who had pushed for more "safe and comfortable" housing options say they feel betrayed by the university.

01:00 AM EDT on Monday, April 26, 2004

BY JENNIFER D. JORDAN
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Luke Woodward perceived Brown University as a progressive place where he would feel comfortable. As someone who came out as homosexual in high school, an accepting, nonjudgmental atmosphere mattered to him.

So Woodward came to Brown, and in many ways, it has been a good fit. Now a senior, he has found close friends and support during a pivotal time -- his transformation from a lesbian with a female name he no longer uses to a transgender male named Luke.

"My gender expression got more masculine as time went by," Woodward, 23, said. Eventually, it made more sense and felt more natural to become male. Last summer, he had surgery to remove his breasts. Later this year, Woodward plans to start taking testosterone to further alter his appearance.

As a transgender student, Woodward is at the forefront of a student movement at Brown and several other colleges that is pushing for a "gender-neutral" housing option for incoming students.

The policy allows students with non-traditional gender identities and expressions -- such as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender -- to specify their preference for a gender-blind residence hall assignment on Brown's housing questionnaire. It also signals an institution's openness to such students, Woodward said.

Students can opt for a dorm room with its own bathroom -- an important issue for transgender people who are sometimes harassed or assaulted when they try to use bathrooms marked "male" or "female." They can also be matched with a roommate comfortable with different kinds of sexual and gender identities.

But after months of negotiations with Brown administrators, Woodward and other student activists now feel betrayed. Brown is backing away from its decision last month to include the gender-neutral option on housing questionnaires that all 1,400 new students complete over the summer. The questionnaire and accompanying letter went to print several weeks ago, and the gender-neutral option doesn't appear on either.

Brown administrators said that in the end, listing several options, such as gender-neutral, single sex, etc., didn't seem fair to other groups, according to David A. Greene, interim vice president for campus life and student services. Only "disabled" is listed as a special group, as in past years.

"We were concerned about other groups who may be excluded, and we thought about what sorts of groups we regularly get calls about," Greene said. Gender issues were not among the most numerous, he said.

Instead, the new form asks students with any special "housing needs" to jot down their concerns. Brown also added its nondiscrimination policy and changed the way students list their gender, substituting male and female checkoff boxes with a blank line, so students can self-identify.

But such gestures fall far short of what students who pushed for the new housing policy had hoped for. They say they feel misled by Brown's administrators.

"It just feels like the status quo," Woodward said. "They're asking for someone who's 18 years old to defend their gender and needs at a time when that person might not be sure and might not have parental support."

Understanding that it is a potentially delicate subject, Brown should make it easier for such students to "have a safe and comfortable living situation." Asking them to disclose a lot of personal information to virtual strangers makes it harder, Woodward said.

Senior Clare Johnson, a lesbian student, says she wishes she could have checked off a gender-neutral housing option when she was a freshman because her roommate was openly hostile to her lifestyle.

"I felt incredibly unsafe and my friends were afraid to come to my room," Johnson said. "If we'd had this option then, I would have gone for it."

Now she says she's frustrated that incoming students won't be explicitly told about gender-neutral housing possibilities as she thought they would.

"If I saw [the new questionnaire], I wouldn't know what they were talking about," Johnson said. "Brown is riding on its reputation as a diversity and queer-friendly school, when they haven't really done anything about it."

BROWN VALUES its image as a progressive institution and has touted its attention to diverse groups, publicizing the opening of a new Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning Resource Center last month, for example.

Such resources are increasingly important on today's college campuses, where some freshmen arrive already secure in their non-traditional sexual and gender identities, said Andrew Winters, who heads gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender services and programs at the University of Rhode Island. Many young people today are comfortable viewing gender as "fluid" rather than adhering to strict dichotomies such as male/female and gay/straight, Winters said.

"The young people accessing these programs today have a much broader sense of variance as it pertains to gender and are very articulate and more visible," Winters said.

That hasn't always been the case.

"It used to be that transsexuality was both relatively rare and quite scandalous," said Anne Fausto-Sterling, a professor of biology and gender studies at Brown.

But just as some aspects of homosexuality have gained traction and a certain degree of acceptance in popular culture -- the success of shows such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Will & Grace, for example -- some transgender issues are now moving to the forefront, Fausto-Sterling said.

"When gay marriage is on the front page of every major newspaper, it makes homosexuality look like something as neutral as apple pie," Fausto-Sterling said. "It creates a social space for transgender issues that wasn't there before."

But despite these social shifts and Brown's liberal bent, several students who are active in "queer" groups on campus -- a term younger people use to encompass gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and people questioning their sexual identity -- have mixed feelings about Brown's approach to several issues concerning sexual orientation.

Woodward, who is one of Brown's most visible transgender students, was pleased when Brown hosted a transgender symposium last year and says progress has been made on raising consciousness about different gender and sexual identities.

"I think we've made headway here because these conversations weren't happening before," Woodward said. "This past year, students have mobilized around trans issues."

But Woodward and other student activists say they feel stymied by Brown administrators who listen to their concerns but do little to address them.

Three homophobic incidents that have occurred on campus since last fall underscore their frustration, students say, including a physical altercation between two gay Latino students and a group of straight students in February. While no one was seriously injured, Isaac Rodriguez, 23, and Joel Madrid, 22, said they were shaken by the response of the campus police, which they called inadequate and unsympathetic. Rodriguez, along with the two straight students directly involved in the physical altercation, is facing a disciplinary hearing this week that could result in his expulsion. Rodriguez says it is unfair to penalize him for defending himself and has called on Brown to change the way it deals with incidents of bias and discrimination.

Brown is not the only college grappling with such issues. A recent national survey of 14 universities by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found that 30 percent of respondents were harassed due to their gender identity within the last 12 months, and 60 percent felt that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people were likely targets on college campuses.

Brown is also not alone in offering added protections for transgender and gay students. Wesleyan and Sarah Lawrence now offer gender-blind housing. The University of Iowa and the University of California at Berkeley have dormitory floors dedicated to gay and transgender students. Students at the University of Chicago and Beloit College in Wisconsin are pushing for gender-neutral bathrooms; Stanford has sent out CD-ROMs to entering students highlighting its gay-friendly programs.

While such steps are helpful and raise awareness about transgender issues, they are not a panacea, Winters cautioned.

"In higher education, we are quick to say we are leaders," Winters said. "But by the same token, just because we've made an accommodation in a bathroom, that doesn't mean our work is done. Transgender people reside precariously at the margins of our society and are vulnerable."

Nationally, transgender issues are slowly receiving more attention, as seen by the establishment last year of the National Center for Transgender Equality, a social justice organization in Washington, D.C., and by movements such as People in Search of Safe Restrooms, a San Francisco-based group that wants that city to require most public places to offer gender-neutral bathrooms.

Rhode Island was one of the first states to include "gender identity and expression" in a 2001 anti-discrimination bill for equal housing, and several other states have followed suit.

LUKE WOODWARD, an international relations major from New Hampshire, knows he is part of the increasing visibility of the transgender movement. Not surprisingly, he vacillates between a willingness to educate people and a weariness that he has to do so.

Woodward came to Brown as a lesbian and began questioning that identity shortly before he spent a semester abroad in Cuba two years ago. There, people responded to Woodward as a male, in part because of the cropped hair and boyish attire Woodward wore. He was also harassed and mocked for his appearance, experiences he calls traumatic. After receiving support from family and friends and learning more about transgender people, Woodward began identifying as a transgender male, took the name Luke and asked people to use male pronouns when talking about him.

"Eventually, men's rooms became safer for me to use than women's rooms, because people would stare at me in the women's rooms," Woodward said.

He wanted his outside persona to match the way he felt inside, and had surgery to remove his breasts last summer.

"I'm very happy with the surgery," Woodward said. "It's been a long process, of thinking about how I feel."

Gender-identity therapy was required before the surgery, but support from other transgender people helped more, he said. "I wanted to be seen as male, because I felt more like a guy in my gender presentation than a woman."

Woodward plans to start taking testosterone later this year, to further change his body type, deepen his voice and encourage hair growth. "I would like to pass more as male," he said.

When asked about the apparent irony between wanting society to be more accepting of gender variation and gray areas, yet moving himself closer to the traditional male paradigm, Woodward says he has thought about it.

"But I also deserve to be able to live my life in the way I feel most comfortable," he said.

Despite his physical changes, Woodward says using public bathrooms can still be a fraught experience for him and other transgender people.

"Bathrooms and here on campus, dorm rooms, are two places that are divided by male and female, but not everyone fits into one of those two groups," Woodward said. "It's important that everyone here feel safe, and a lot of us think it's important to have a gender-neutral space."

While Brown's new housing questionnaire is silent about the gender-neutral housing option, students are still pushing for such details on a Web site for new students that will be launched in June. Administrators haven't promised to include the information, but said they are thinking about it.

"We will continue to let this evolve," Greene said. "There are going to be lots of opportunities to communicate with incoming students between now and September."

Staff Writer Jennifer Jordan can be reached at 277-7254 or jjordan [at] projo.com.