Senate works for transgender housingCharlotte Rea, The Tufts Daily, October 8, 2013
The Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate on Sept. 29 unanimously voted in favor of a resolution to create a safer and more welcoming housing policy for transgender students.
The resolution calls for more housing options in mixed-gender dorms to be available for transgender students, as well as increased access to single-gender triples, quads and suites on campus. Backers of the proposal hope to extend such options to first-year students as well as older students.
TCU Senate LGBT Community Representative John Kelly, a junior, and sophomore Erin Dimson-Doyle, who co-authored the resolution, explained that the resolution aims to make the current policy, which was last updated nine years ago, more sensitive to transgender students' needs.
Finding a comfortable living situation is a cumbersome process for transgender students, according to Dimson-Doyle.
"A large part of the resolution was saying that people could live with someone of their preferred gender identity in the regular housing lottery," she said. "To do that in the past, [the administration] would have to manually assign you to a place, and you would have to go to them and meet with them several times. It was just a longer process."
