Finals week is always a brutal reminder just how hard college really is. You’ve made it this far into the semester, and hopefully, your grades are still intact, but you’ve got that last stretch of papers and exams before the stress is over. Throw in a job, internship applications and all the rest, and you’ve got the makings of a difficult time.
For most of us, that stress is eased by our friends and roommates, who we can lean on and who make our apartments and dorms a comfortable respite.
But for transgender students, finding that escape isn’t always so easy.
USC’s housing policies in many cases require them to live with someone of a gender they don’t identify with or someone who might not understand them.
We’re glad that USC works with students who ask for special accommodations, but in our opinion, the process they go through to find a roommate they’re comfortable living with shouldn’t be harder than the process anyone else follows.
That brings us to a survey being conducted by Student Government and USC’s BGLSA group, which asks students what they think of creating gender-neutral housing here. Doing so could make USC a trend-setter — in South Carolina, the Southeastern Conference and the South overall.
We hope USC’s students and administrators are ready to make that change. We think it’s time.
This isn’t a movement to let couples live together or to change the system for the majority of students. Instead, it’s an attempt to give transgender students a basic comfort most of us take for granted.
Despite the movement, there’s still a long road ahead of gay and transsexual students. Other schools have tried installing similar specialized housing, including UNC, whose trustees voted in favor their gender-neutral dorms earlier this year. That vote was overturned by the UNC system’s board of governors, who banned gender-neutral housing.
USC has an opportunity to step up and show it’s a welcoming, inclusive university, so we encourage the administration to give serious consideration to the idea of gender-neutral housing.
It wouldn’t affect the day-to-day lives of most students, but for those the change would help, it would make a world of difference. No matter what gender-neutral housing’s opponents say, that’s what matters most.
College is hard enough as it is, but thanks to our friends and peers, most of us are happy to say it’s worth it.
Let’s make sure the same is true for all of our students. Period.