Gender-blind housing a good step

Kudos to The North Wind for covering the gender-blind housing initiative on campus. I’m thrilled at the prospect of NMU creating such a house in the dorms; I hope it is accomplished soon and proves a success.

I can only imagine how wonderful it would have been to have had this housing option as a freshman. I recall the day I came to campus: my parents and I spent all day building lofts, only to discover (to my horror) that I was not in the house where I wanted to be. Some glitch in the paperwork had landed me, unawares, into an all-male house. Luckily, I was able to relocate to the co-ed floor above. I would have disassembled and reassembled lofts for a whole week if it meant a ticket out of a place where I would have been the least comfortable.

I’m glad to hear that Housing and Residence Life was able to accommodate a transgender person in the past. I can assure Carl Holm (director of Housing and Residence Life) that, while he may have had to work with just this one case in over 20 years, the student was certainly not the only one to prefer to not be categorized by gender.

It’s heartening to see NMU striving to provide the most welcoming environment for its students. I applaud Liz Nutt, OUTlook, and everyone else pushing to implement gender-blind housing. I hope more than one house gets created and that we see other progressive gender policies, like more unisex restrooms, employed on campus.

Kyle Bladow
graduate student, English