Do We Have An Agenda?

I guess we do, to be treated equally and to be recognized as the gender that we identify. Well the is an article in Inside Higher ED about out “agenda,”

Broadening the Transgender Agenda
September 18, 2013
By
Allie Grasgreen

Last week, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill students marched the mile from campus to the Board of Governors meeting site to protest the UNC System’s blanket ban, imposed by the board, on gender-neutral housing. The new policy -- which overturned the Chapel Hill Board of Trustees’ endorsement of the housing option --  was approved while students were away for the summer under the reasoning that “there are more practical ways” to make students “safe, comfortable and included,” the board chairman said.

But it sparked outrage among advocates and campus officials concerned for the well-being of transgender students and others who would prefer to live outside traditionally designated pairs for college roommates.

Among elite institutions, UNC’s move was unusual – many institutions are in fact moving in the opposite direction. There are now about 150 colleges that offer gender-neutral housing, according to a running count by Campus Pride. Granted, that’s out of more than 4,000 institutions – and it’s taken more than 20 years to get to this point.

The conservatives are outraged over gender-neutral housing but the students have no problem with being able to choose a transgender roommate. Notice when they voted to overturn the Board of Trustees, they voted on it when no one was around during the August break. According to the student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, a number of student organizations including the UNC Student Power, Sexuality and Gender Alliance and Students Working for Adequation of Genders along with the speaker pro tempore of UNC Student Congress want the gender-neutral housing.

No one is forcing them to live in gender-neutral housings, they choose to live there, but that doesn’t matter because this is about transgender people and anything about us they are against. Hell, back when I went to college in the early 1970s we had co-ed housing and on weekend in our dorm there were more women our bathroom than men and no-one minded we just did our business and left. The showers were all individual stalls with a little seat in the front to change and the shower in the back of the stall.
Besides housing there is the covering the cost of heathcare…

Several colleges have added transgender surgeries and hormone therapies to their student insurance policies over the last couple of years, with at least 70 in all covering one or both of the expenses. (The additional services add virtually nothing to the cost of premiums.)

Okay, you got that? “…additional services add virtually nothing to the cost of premiums” The conservatives are going ape over having to pay for our surgery even through it cost them around a quarter a month in premiums. The article goes on to say,

Another practice gaining traction -- one from which non-trans students will benefit just as much -- is a preferred name policy. The new one at the University of Wisconsin at Madison allows students to note their preferred name through their online learning platform, which is then transmitted to class rosters and the online student directory. While plenty of students of all gender identities may prefer a nickname to a given name, the issue is important for many transgender students for whom the name with which they were born represents a gender with which they don't identify.

My nephew goes by his middle name, I know a number of people who go by the their initials or by JR. But heaven helps us if we let the student use the nickname in class especially if it has anything to do with trans-people.