Online Exclusives

Letter from the Editor

Our cover is a photograph of an actual bathroom door in the Barnard quad.   We happened upon it while journeying through the first-year floors, remembering our floor meetings where our RAs asked us whether or not we felt comfortable with a co-ed bathroom.  Last year, the New York Times Magazine ran an article about the former Barnard student Rey, who identified as male.  In the article, the author noted, “Barnard does not have the kind of groups for trans students or awareness campaigns and gender-neutral bathrooms that some of the other women’s colleges do.”
These bathroom signs beg a larger question we face not as students who attend an all-women’s college, but, more specifically, as Barnard students:  where does gender identity fit into everyday life at Barnard?  In the Times article, Rey commented that he felt more welcome at Columbia, where he eventually transferred, than he did at Barnard, saying “Around the Barnard women, I felt extremely other.” This comes in contrast to Barnard’s long-held reputation as a liberal center for exploration of gender issues. According to another article in the New York Times on transgender policies in colleges around the country, the Medical director at Wesleyan’s student health services was encouraged by the school to “use a lot of my administrative time” to look at transgender health issues.  At Smith, students voted to eliminate female pronouns from the student constitution, replacing “she and “her” with the phrase “the student.”  These are the kind of forward-thinking role defying measures that one would expect to see at Barnard, particularly since Barnard’s Center for Research on Women has a strong focus on gender studies.  Our centerpiece on page 16 explores the school’s policies on transgender students in light of Rey’s story, one year later, and a campus visit by transgender activist Dean Spade.
Notably, Columbia’s university-wide non-discrimination policy includes “gender” and “sexual orientation,” but not the contemporary language of “gender identity” or “gender expression” included by many other colleges and universities.  It is true that transgender students are in the minority at Barnard.  However, if we want to shed the “girls in pearls” reputation that the New York Post so crudely used while describing Rey’s housing woes while at Barnard, or the “half finishing school” description used by the Times Magazine author, we still have some way to go.