By Somi Jun, Correspondent
Full mixed-gender rooming is coming to Princeton University., Though men and women have been permitted to live together in campus housing for nearly a decade, starting next semester undergraduates can choose to live with “gender-nonconforming” students as well., The new policy follows a unanimous vote last November by the University Student Life Committee to expand “gender-neutral” housing following years of petitions from student groups., “Many committees comprised of faculty, administration and students tried to get this done before and frankly, it happened now in large part because … [vice president Rochelle] Calhoun decided to make it a priority,” said senior Lily Gellman, who helped research the proposal. “She’s an administrator with enough power to get that push going when populism alone wasn’t enough.”, In 2008, Princeton became the last Ivy League school to offer gender-neutral housing., According to senior Lafayette Matthews, who participated in a teach-in and demonstration supporting the proposal, gender-neutral accommodations are complicated by “leftover” policies from Title IX, the federal government anti-sex discrimination law. When Title IX was first passed, its regulations used terminology that specifically addressed male and female genders. Increasingly, however, national discourse on gender includes a wider spectrum encompassing genderqueer and transgender identities., “There are a lot of restrooms around campus that are single stall, but have a gender marker on them. A lot of those are there because of Title IX regulations, that stipulate that you need to have a women’s restroom in every building, because it used to be that there were only men’s restrooms,” Matthews said., Matthews and seven other Princeton students wrote testimonials for betterprinceton.org about their personal experiences with gender-neutral accommodations. Matthews, for example, remembered memorizing a map of gender-neutral and private bathrooms on campus and choosing his dormitory based on proximity to them., “I didn’t seek out gender-neutral housing because I figured it was only for when you had a roommate. I didn’t even know there were rooms with private bathrooms until junior year,” Matthews said in his testimonial. “I just tried to keep my head down, constantly reminded that I’m lucky to even be at Princeton.”, Junior Nicolas Freeman faced a similar experience when he tried to draw housing in a mixed gender group last year. The process was confounded by the “n+1” rule, which requires that gender-neutral dorms have one more room than the number of occupants. This restricted gender-neutral dorms to quads with at least five rooms or doubles with at least three rooms, arrangements that are snatched up early in the drawing system., “We were denied gender-neutral housing,” Freeman said. “It was a discouragingly long and mysterious process. The new housing changes should hopefully make this process a lot easier.”, The new housing policy does away with the “n+1” rule by allowing groups of students seeking housing to mix genders. Other aspects of the policy include ways to extend gender-neutral housing to incoming first-years and give transgender or gender-nonconforming students priority in accessing private bathrooms., The expansion of gender-neutral housing is the culmination of years of advocacy from student groups. According to Matthews, other efforts to promote gender inclusivity could involve the Office of the Registrar’s policy that allows students to identify as “male” or “female” only. Again, Princeton finds itself entangled with federal institutions: The Office of the Registrar sticks with a gender binary to align with federal student aid rules, which offer students only “male” or “female” identity options.
