Pitt lacks gender-neutral housing options

Since high school, Alice Haas, then living as a boy, said she has never identified as a… Since high school, Alice Haas, then living as a boy, said she has never identified as a male.

In 2009, Haas started at Pitt, still biologically a male and going by his birth name, Allan Finkelstein. In her sophomore year, she made the life-changing decision to begin hormone therapy.

For the transgender student, the college situation has not been an easy one to maneuver. Now a junior, Haas has lived in single rooms at Pitt her first three years. This year, she tried to share a room with two female friends, because it felt unnatural for her to live with males, but Pitt’s Housing Services would not allow it. Housing Services did allow for her to live in a single room in Ruskin Hall adjacent to the roommates she had requested.

While the floors in some of Pitt’s dorms are co-ed, the housing policy does not allow for co-ed and gender-neutral room assignments. Pitt spokesman John Fedele would not comment on the issue, referring questions to information — given to The Pitt News for a column earlier this year — that said no changes have been made to the policy to better serve transgender students. Fedele would not say whether Pitt is considering changing the housing policy. All questions about Pitt’s housing policy were directed to Fedele.

Universities across the U.S. have begun offering students the option of picking roommates regardless of their sex. So far, all of the country’s Ivy League schools have enacted this change, as well as Pitt’s neighbor, Carnegie Mellon.

While the administration remains silent on the issue, Tricia Dougherty, the president of Pitt’s Rainbow Alliance, has not. Dougherty has raised the issue of the lack of housing for transgender students at weekly Student Government Board meetings and has been trying to drum up student support for a change in the housing policy.

She said she believes Pitt’s current policy causes transgender students to move off-campus rather than coming to a compromise with the University the way Haas did. She does not see moving off-campus as a good thing.

“A lot of them have had to move into more unstable living situations,” Dougherty, a senior, said. “If you’re living on-campus and you have a fight with your roommate and they kick you out, you’re not going to wind up homeless.”

Just this fall semester, Rutgers University began allowing students of opposite sexes to share one room. In a press release, Jenny Kurtz, director of the Center for Social Justice Education and LGBT Communities, an office at Rutgers that works to foster an inclusive community at the school, laid out the university’s reasons for the change of policy.

“The program has been launched in recognition of the fact that traditional, same-sex room assignments are not ideal for all students,” Kurtz said. She did not say how many students currently live in gender-neutral rooms.

Kurtz stressed that while the university does not require students who apply for the program to disclose the reason, it does require students to name the roommate with whom they will live rather than receiving randomly assigned rooms. Any Rutgers student past his or her first year is eligible for the program.

Rutgers students who use the program will live in university housing. If a student housed in a gender-neutral room moves out, the remaining student or students must name a new roommate who is comfortable with the gender-neutral arrangement and willing to move in. Otherwise, the university will assign a roommate of the same legal sex as the remaining occupants.

Just a few short blocks from Pitt, Carnegie Mellon University began allowing students to request housing with members of the opposite legal sex in the fall of 2008. CMU spokeswoman Teresa Thomas said in an email that fewer than four or five groups of students have chosen to live in gender-neutral housing each year since the program started.

Thomas said CMU began a pilot program in the fall of 2007 after the student body asked the administration to consider giving transgender students more housing options than just single rooms. Thomas said that the following year, the university concluded students other than the transgender student population could benefit from a mixed-gender housing arrangement.

Like Rutgers, CMU does not require students to disclose their reasons for living in the gender-neutral housing. Thomas said feedback from the program during the three years has been positive.

Thomas said that CMU’s policy also requires that, should a student in a gender-neutral room move out, another student who is comfortable with the gender-neutral living situation must move in or the university will transition the room back to a traditional single-sex room.

At Pitt, Haas said traditional housing arrangements can make transgender students feel uncomfortable. During the regular school year, Haas has her own quarters, but says she wants more options.

“The thing that makes it uncomfortable with the housing policy here at Pitt is that there is something specifically for males. Males have to room together. And specifically for females,” Haas said. “You don’t get a middle ground.”

Haas said she knows several other transgender students who have attended Pitt. However, she believed that she was the first to remain in on-campus housing. The other students moved off campus as quickly as University policy allowed them.

“I think I’m really the first [Pitt] student ever to really say, ‘I’m trans and I want housing,’” she said.

Haas stressed that for her, the issue of housing was part of a larger need that others see her the way she sees herself.

“I’d urge [University officials] to write us as softly into the rules as possible so that we can be what we feel we are,” Haas said. “I mean, any trans person that I’ve ever talked to, the big thing that they want is to be thought of as they think of themselves.”