Sarah Gow moved into a quaint house in the 700 block of Main Street in Collegeville this week for the start of her junior year at Ursinus College. The English major will live with 12 other people of all genders in Queer House.
The college’s Gender Sexuality Alliance helped get the special-interest living option its own building last year. It used to be part of a housing option for people interested in peace and social justice.
“It’s important to have a space where people feel it’s specifically designated to talk about queerness,” said Gow, who is thinking of becoming a mental-health counselor with a focus on gender. “It creates a visibility on campus. Being part of a social-justice house is good, but it doesn’t allow the level of discourse to delve into the issues as much.”
Gow is part of the GSA at Ursinus and sees Queer House as a home base for the student group, which didn’t previously have a permanent meeting place. Now a student-project coordinator helps the residents arrange twice-monthly activities in the common room. Last year, they had pizza nights and watched movies like “Tangerine.” Students also hosted series on asexuality and polyamory. Everyone was welcome to attend, even those who didn’t live in Queer House.
“What’s really cool about Ursinus is the community isn’t just about having a safe space, but discussing issues of love and gender,” Gow said. “People are able to vocalize opinions that they’re feeling but they don’t normally want to say. Everybody in GSA and the queer community at Ursinus is really not judgmental.”
Growing trend
People might expect this kind of utopia from a small, liberal arts college. But Ursinus isn’t the only Pennsylvania institution promoting gender inclusivity. For this semester, Penn State University in State College debuted a mechanism to allow students to request campus housing with others regardless of gender. The option is available in apartments, suites, traditional residence halls with shared bathrooms or renovated residence halls with single-occupancy bathrooms.
“We wanted to make sure we had all different levels of housing,” said Kelly Griffith, senior assistant director for residence life at Penn State. “We didn’t want to price any students out of gender-neutral housing. For students, they can preference the area on campus where they’d like to live and their roommate regardless of gender.”
Griffith said the idea grew out of the university’s LGBT housing, called Ally House, which started in fall 2013 on a traditional floor in West Halls. That first semester, 15 students chose the living option, which required completion of a course in the gender-studies minor. In 2014, 23 students opted for Ally House and in 2015, 22 students lived there.
Much like at Ursinus, students at Penn State saw a growing interest in queer awareness and wanted campus housing to reflect that. Some attended the annual conferences for the National Association of College and University Residence Halls and heard about a growing trend for gender-inclusive housing. The Association of Residence Hall Students at Penn State conducted a survey in 2014 about gender-inclusive housing and received largely positive responses.
“It’s exciting for us as professionals,” Griffith said. “Sometimes, students underestimate the power of their own voices to advocate for what they need. When students ask for something, we have a responsibility to investigate if we can provide it.”
Choosing a roommate of a different gender does not require an academic component like Ally House. Griffith added gender-inclusive housing is meant to offer students more freedom and control over their living choices. She said friends or siblings of different genders could take advantage of the option. It wasn’t created specifically for transgender or non-binary students. But, Griffith said, if the option helps them feel safe and included in campus culture, so much the better.
“It is certainly very much a growing trend,” said Dr. Genny Beeyman, a research consultant for the Campus Pride Index, which rates colleges on their LGBT-friendliness. “We have now over 150 colleges that advertised having gender-inclusive housing set up in different ways.”
‘Particularly important for first-year students’
Erin Cross, senior associate director of the LGBT Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said more sexual minorities than gender minorities take advantage of rooming with people of different genders at the Philadelphia school.
An openly gay man, who was a student in spring 2003, first approached university officials about gender-inclusive housing. He wanted to live with his closest friends, who were women. Cross said the Penn LGBT Center helped the man lobby the university. By fall 2005, upperclassmen could request roommates anywhere on campus regardless of gender. A few years later, all students could choose any roommate.
“It’s pretty much been a natural progression that works out,” Cross said. “It really sends a signal to folks who are applying that they’ll be supported here.
“It’s important because where you live is hopefully your respite. You want to be comfortable.”
She added gender-inclusive housing has made a huge impact for first-year students who can choose a specific person to live with or select a random roommate without limiting the assignment by gender. Most older students move off campus and live with any combination of genders that suits them, Cross said.
“Gender-inclusive housing is particularly important for first-year students because if you’re a returning student you probably have made some good friends,” Beemyn said. “You have a support network of people who you may want to live with. An incoming student is not necessarily going to have that.”
Penn State allows first-year students to request a roommate regardless of gender or live in Ally House. Only returning students at Ursinus have the option to live in Queer House.
Beemyn, who also directs the Stonewall Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, shared a story from nearly a decade ago about an openly transgender student who started at the school. She talked to residence life about not wanting a male roommate. Amherst assigned her a single room in a building normally reserved for international graduate students. She felt isolated and ultimately dropped out, Beemyn said.
“Ideally, a campus should just say gender-inclusive housing is all of campus,” they said, noting Amherst students can now request roommates regardless of gender. “When you move off campus, you can live with anyone you want to live with. Why should universities and colleges be policing people’s genders? These are adults.”