Deserving a debate

The Brown Daily Herald
Section: Editorial
9/24/2007

'Excited rhetoric on both sides may obscure the issue, but the debate over gender-neutral facilities at Brown has a fairly straightforward problem at its core: Transgender students, who are among those in our community most vulnerable to abuse and discrimination, are not well-served by gender-segregated housing and other facilities'.

Why should it be a problem? Women's space for trans women and men's space for trans men.

I think because so many trans activists have been attacking the gender binary for years, the message has been gotten across, so now we all get reclassified as a sort of "third gender"--regardless of those of us who need to be accepted on one side of the binary. Instead of smashing the binary (which will not happen)they just deny it to us because some of our advocates have been against it. This plays into the hands of transphobes who don't want to accept us in our actual gender identities.