One of the common debates involving the LGBTQ community is where they belong when it comes to gender-specific areas such as bathrooms and dormitories. Colorado Mesa University has been working towards finding a middle-ground that would benefit members of the LGBTQ community as well as please those who hold conservative viewpoints on the topic.
In 2017, CMU’s Gay Straight Alliance and Cultural Diversity Board headed a project to provide these students with unisex bathrooms. In addition to this, CMU has incorporated more discussions about safe spaces on campus, bringing an overall dialogue of awareness for LGBTQ students.
While, again, there is no easy solution, Kacie Sinton and Avery Ashby, CMU students, set out to find a solution that works to support LGBTQ identifying students. Last year, Ashby was a freshman at CMU. She was just beginning her transition, and she was placed in a dorm room with boys.
After a month, she had to come out to be moved to a different room. Already moving once, shortly thereafter she was forcibly removed from the room.
According to Ashby, even though her dorm mates had communicated that they were comfortable with an LGBTQ roommate, they really weren’t. After their parent’s contacted CMU, Ashby was told that she would not be allowed to stay in the dorm and that they would work to find a dorm for her. In the meantime, she could return to the dorm with unaccepting roommates, or she could find her own place.
“That first month of college, I felt like I had to hide,” Ashby said.
While finding her a new dorm only took a day, she was left to pack up all of her things and move yet again. Kacie Sinton noticed Ashby’s situation and began advocating for gender-inclusive housing on campus.
“I was in a position with the school where participating in the conversation about trans students on campus was easy,” Sinton said. “In an ideal world, additional housing measures for trans students wouldn’t even need to be taken. The current policy for housing trans students is kind of a compromise between what I wanted for the school and what Reslife was able to execute given limited time and resources. It’s not ideal, but it’s certainly better than forcing students to out themselves to be housed on campus.”
“However, given the ‘gender neutral’ status of the policy, it still misses trans students who want to be housed only with their chosen gender, and still forces those students to out themselves. Essentially, this is a step in the right direction for CMU, but is by no means perfect or a real solution. It’s just better than what we had previously because now the option exists for non-binary students, and the option to avoid outing themselves is at least there.”
The new gender-inclusive dorm room is located in Lucero Hall on the south side of campus. It is a coed room, housing people of both genders as well as transgender students.
“CMU and Grand Junction also have a reputation of being hostile at worst and uncaring at best towards queer community members in general, and part of the goal was to work away from that,” Sinton said.
While it isn’t a perfect solution, CMU offering these dorm rooms is a step towards a safer and better college experience for LGBTQ students. Gender inclusive dorms also are not limited to just one room, but could eventually be all of campus.
“It’s more like housing takes everyone who checked the gender inclusive box and houses them together in a place they’re all willing to live,” Sinton said.
Perhaps CMU will see an expansion of these dorms in the future, but for now it’s just an immediate compromise.
