BGLTSA Petitions For Housing Policy Change

With its co-sponsoring of today’s National Transgender Day of Remembrance, the Harvard BGLTSA hopes to jump-start a campaign to re-draft what the BGLTSA calls Harvard’s “heterocentric” housing policy, which allows students of opposite genders to room together only with special permission.

“That policy is very heteropresumptive,” said Stephanie M. Skier ’05, the group’s co-chair and a Crimson editor. “The University classifies people by their gender and makes people check only one box, ‘M’ or ‘F,’ and there is a significant part of the student body that is ignored in that.”

Although Skier could not estimate the number of transgendered students at Harvard, she said the issue was important regardless of how many were affected.

“Even if there’s only one student who does not feel welcome by this University because of their gender, that is unconscionable,” she said. “I wouldn’t want the fact that it’s not happening to a majority of students to be an excuse to ignore it.”

BGLTSA political chair Oussama Zahr ’03 wrote a set of e-mails to assistant house masters in recent weeks as the beginning step in feeling out administrative opinion on changes of policy. Zahr could not be reached for comment, but Skier said that responses were varied. She would not comment on their exact nature.

Harvard College administrators were not immediately available for comment on the proposal last night.

Marcel A.Q. LaFlamme ’04, the public relations chair of BGLTSA, said that the current housing policies were objectionable because they were based on an overly simplistic notion of gender.

“The very heterocentric presumption that the reason men and women don’t room with each other is sexual attraction” motivates current policy, said LaFlamme. “There is a larger ideological critique of the way that single-gender rooming is established as a given.”

The proposed change to housing policy is only one aspect of the group’s larger campaign to make Harvard policies more tolerant of the interests of transgendered students.

“We’ve had the ‘T’ in the BGLTSA before, but we wanted to make that more obvious,” Skier said.

In that spirit, the group is aiming to add a clause protecting “gender identity and expression” to Harvard’s non-discrimination policy. Such a move to revise non-discrimination policy was attempted in 1997 by transgendered student Alex S. Myers ’00, but was unsuccessful.

Myers was able to include the phrase in the Undergraduate Council’s policy statements. The BGLTSA sees these successes as motivation. “We want to take up where Alex left off,” Skier said.

Today, the group plans to attend a vigil in Boston in honor of the day of remembrance. The day commemorates the death of Rita Hester, a transsexual woman who was killed four years ago today in Boston, as well as the deaths of other “victims of transphobia,” according to Skier.