Critiquing Worldviews Through Gender

I decided to write this article when I noticed how many of the restrooms outside of dorms adhere to the gender binary while bathrooms inside dorms do not. Was this the result of policy not being put into practice? Was it the result of Conn wanting to create and sustain a public image for prospective students and other campus visitors that adhered to social norms? I wanted to find out.

When Conn went co-ed in 1969, there was no room for “sex-segregated bathrooms,” said Prof. Jen Manion, Associate Professor of History and Director of the LGBTQ Resource Center. The dorm bathrooms went co-ed when the admissions process did. The establishment of some gender-neutral bathrooms outside of the dorms is the result of years of activists’ work. A list of gender-neutral bathroom locations is available on the College’s website.

Courtenay Barton ’16 said, “The bathroom conversation has been had so many times in the last five or six years.” That I knew what she meant by “the bathroom conversation” only highlights this. Despite the conversation’s duration, several buildings on campus — Blaustein, for example — still do not have gender-neutral bathrooms, however.

The conversation has now expanded to include housing, healthcare and counseling. Barton pointed out that gender-inclusive housing is only available to upperclassmen. According to the Office of Residential Education and Living’s website, “First-year students and transfer students are assigned roommates of the same biological sex. … [These] students can live with someone of a different biological sex [or gender identity] only by going through the College’s room change process, which takes place … [three] weeks into the fall semester.” The site justifies this limitation by noting that “the gender-inclusive housing option should be part of a process in which two people who know one another enter willingly into a roommate situation.” I’m not convinced by this reason, which adheres to heteronormativity. Regardless, outside of gender-inclusive housing we are not required to know our roommates before we room with them. “[The gender inclusive housing option is] not for people in romantic relationships to room together. … It’s so trans* people can feel safe on this campus. And to be honest [Conn] has a high transfer rate for trans* kids,” said Barton. Conn’s overall first-year retention rate has hovered around 90% for the last few years.

The conversation about potentially reforming policy does not aim to demonize any of these spaces but rather is about meeting students’ basic needs. The goal is “to have conversations with different people on campus who could affect the [lives] of trans* kids. … They deserve to walk into the health center or the counseling center and feel just as safe as you or I do,” said Barton.

This conversation matters because, as Barton said, “We’re literally talking about people’s safety and comfort.” Additionally, gender is an axis of power through which disempowerment occurs. In order to understand disempowerment, we need to understand power, hence the present discussion.

Gender is a system that grants and removes power. Not acknowledging that gender exists along a spectrum, and forcing a person to conform to one side of a binary or the other – as happens in a variety of socially-defined spaces such as bathrooms and shared dorm rooms – means that we are not fully acknowledging someone’s personhood. Who we choose to recognize – because it is a choice – is incredibly powerful. By enforcing the gender binary without creating space for trans* individuals, Conn marginalizes individuals who do not fall on one side of the binary or the other.

Indeed, it is trans* and gender non-conforming individuals who expose the gender binary for what it is, a regulatory system, precisely by not adhering to it. As Joan Scott said on Dec. 10, “Diversity doesn’t cure the problem. In fact, it draws attention to the structures that perpetuate the problem.” Gender is one arena in which we can question who has power. This power is understood not as something that is “unified, coherent, and centralized,” but rather as “dispersed constellations of unequal relationships,” Scott wrote elsewhere. Because it is one of many organizational systems for social relationships, “gender [is] implicated in the conception and construction of power itself. … Gender inequality [helps to structure] all other inequalities. … [It] affects [even] those areas of life that do not seem to be connected to it,” for “the imposition … of the rules of social interaction are inherently and specifically gendered.”

Related to this question of how power is dispersed is the question of who we recognize as legitimate, as “fully” human. Gender serves to legitimize some people and not others, as Scott and many other scholars have noted. Because historically we’ve been told that gender is polarized, we enforce that system and discount the people who do not fall at either pole. We erase trans* and gender-non-conforming people as a result. Because gender norms are culturally bound, they rely upon “the refusal or repression of alternative possibilities,” as Scott reminds us. In this conflict, “the position that emerges as dominant is stated as the only possible one,” when in fact it is not. Regardless, we begin to consider “these normative positions [as] the product of social consensus rather than of conflict.” In the context of our campus, “People don’t see [trans* people] all the time so they forget they exist. … [But] they’re part of our family,” Barton said.

Justin Mendillo ’17 said, “Let’s get some visibility,” through “targeted queer hiring” or bringing certain speakers to campus. “Let’s talk about trans* people,” because that “validates [them].”

As the specific example of the gender binary suggests, Scott concludes in her article, “we must … continually subject our categories to criticism, our analyses to self-criticism.” Critique allows us to recognize that our worldviews have sources, reasons why they are the way they are. Through that analysis, we can potentially change and improve those worldviews. Regardless of whether we change them, “consciousness,” as Marx has written, “is something that the world must acquire, like it or not.” •