The Undergraduate Residential Life Committee (URLC) decided yesterday to give all incoming frosh the option of living in gender-neutral housing in any first-year residence, enabling two members of the different genders to live in one room.

“We’re expanding gender-blind housing from just a specific hall to all first-year housing,” said Becca Solow ’04, Chair of the URLC and WSA Student Activities Committee. The other students on the URLC worked with Dean of Student Services Mike Whaley and Residential Life’s Maureen Isleib, both of whom are on the URLC, to come to this decision.

The new policy will replace the gender-blind hall, which will be abolished next fall after receiving little interest from upperclass students this year.

Incoming freshmen students will be able to select gender-neutral housing in the same way that they will be able to choose to live in a single or double or choose substance-free living, according to Solow.

“I think it could be really good,” said trans-gendered student Zach Strassburger ’06. “It has its pros and cons. If people are allowed to choose where they want to live they can make their decisions based on things other than gender.”

He said that one of the problems of the gender-blind hall was that any student who wanted to live in gender-neutral housing needed to make it the only basis for their housing decision.

Strassburger said that he did not want the option to be worded so as to seem like a special request or in any way distinguished from other housing preference choices.

“It needs to be the norm,” he said.

Solow said that the URLC is working to make sure that the option is in no way different from any other housing preference.

“We wouldn’t want this to be a special option and attach any stigma to it,” she said. According to Solow, the language of the option yet to be developed.

Solow said that the creation of gender-blind housing option in all freshmen residences for all incoming students is a step forward.

“I think this is a pretty productive policy,” she said. “This is the direction that [the advocates of the gender-blind hall] intended to take it.”

“I think that this is a change that needs to happen at some point not only because of trans issues, but because it challenges the heterosexist nature of housing options,” said trans-gendered student Paige Kruza ’07. “I also want to make sure that it happens in such a way that the people who choose this option are not correctly or incorrectly [labeled] as being trans in a way that makes it unsafe for them with their families and elsewhere.”

Strassburger also said that it was important that residential programming on gender issues continue even without the hall. Solow said that she believed that Open House has been doing better than gender-blind hall had done in providing the programming.

According to Solow, the URLC consulted the WSA Queer Task Force and the current residents of gender-blind hall in the decision.