In Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America,” he begs the question, “are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?” President Bennet, I now ask the same of you: are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke? I met with you during your office hours on Tuesday and am still having trouble comprehending what I heard, and how I am supposed to feel. You told me that this whole gender neutral thing was a big misunderstanding. You told me that the housing plan that had been implemented for an entire school year and was about to go into effect for another school year had been misinterpreted by everyone in school except for you and Dean Patton? This was the plan that had been years in the making; it had been proposed and revised, proposed and revised and gone through the Student Life and Residential Life committees. Is this sinister or is this some sort of practical joke? On Tuesday, you claimed to be unaware that last year on the gender blind hall, the hall that I was the Residential Advisor for, there were roommate pairs who had different biological sexes. Is this what is so sinister? Did you think we were playing a practical joke?
On Tuesday you claimed that this was not the plan that you had agreed to. Okay, so if that is the case, why did it take you a year and a half to realize it? I don’t know if an argument of gross negligence is a sound one, but I do know that my grandmother will search out and find, in hard copy, any publication that mentions Wesleyan University. But you mean to tell me that you didn’t read the article in your son’s newspaper, the newspaper that is delivered to this campus every school day, the New York Times article that had been months in the works, the article that detailed exactly what this hall has been and exactly how other schools were looking to it as an example? There were other articles too; the Hartford Courant did one and even the AP picked it up. Were you unaware of these? After all, it was this type of media attention that was why I underwent media training in order to be the RA for the hall.
Who made this suggestion to train me for the media scrutiny that would befall this project? You will have a hard time convincing me that it came from within ResLife. Was it you? I really have no idea. I’m severely confused. Is this a ruse? You said on Tuesday that the plan that was implemented was not what you had agreed to and you suggested that the plan you did agree to only applied to trans-identified students. This plan suggested that trans-identified students could be placed in singles or with roommates of the same biological sex. In what way is this different from the “traditional” mode of housing assignment that you seem to cling to as a bedrock of the freshman experience? Do you really believe that the RA would need media training and that a New York Times reporter would come onto the hall looking to interview residents that simply adhered to the traditional mode of housing assignment? I do not.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke? Dean Patton said that this was not a boundary “we’re” prepared to cross. Well, we did cross that boundary last year. We were prepared and we still are, so do not send us back into the nebulous region of a male-female gender binary.
By the way, I’m a white male, just like you, and this is an issue for everybody on this campus. You claimed on Tuesday that you want to create a campus climate conducive to everybody. So do I. This is why progressive action can’t be handled in a way that caters to us hegemonic figureheads. This is why freshman need to be allowed to live where they feel safe, be it X House, a gender blind room, a Butterfield single or a WestCo double. In order to create a campus climate conducive to everybody, everybody needs to feel comfortable and safe in their home. With your directive to effectively end gender blind housing, you are actively failing at your intended purpose.
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