Despite being the only man in his Harnwell College House suite, Jason McAlees has impressed his roommates.
"He never leaves the toilet seat up, so I don't think there has ever been a problem," Wharton senior Kelsey Schwenk said.
"That's the one thing I spent all last summer practicing," McAlees, also a Wharton senior, said.
McAlees and Schwenk share their suite under Penn's gender-neutral housing policy, which is now at the end of its inaugural semester.
Students are living in coed dorm rooms this semester for the first time in Penn's history, but many feel that despite initial success the system still has a ways to go.
College senior Arllyn Hernandez chose to live in a coed room with McAlees and Schwenk this year, even though her father opposed it.
Her father "had some really interesting ideas as to why a guy would want to live with three girls, and none of them were repeatable in polite company," she said.
Opponents of the coed arrangements "probably just think it's an orgy fest," said College senior Lina Ragep, who lives in the same room.
But this view fails to capture the full picture, Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center Associate Director Erin Cross said.
"If you identify yourself as heterosexual, you're not attracted to everyone that's the other gender," she said. "If you're queer, you're not attracted to everyone that's the same gender."
Gender-neutral housing first received campuswide attention in January 2003, when Bradley Breuer, who graduated last year, was denied a request to live with a female friend.
The University changed its policies to prevent discrimination on the basis of gender identity that same semester.
Breuer presented the issue to the University Council, an advisory body, calling the existing housing policy "outdated, heterosexist and homophobic" and won the support of the Undergraduate Assembly.
In December 2004, Penn's new housing policy was made official.
"It seemed contradictory to not do something that accommodated transgender students," said Leslie Delauter, director of College Houses and Academic Services. "I think it was a coalescence of forces that made it seem like the time was right, and we took the plunge."
Gender-neutral?
The system in place now, however, is not purely gender-neutral but coed, Cross said.
"Complete gender-neutrality wouldn't ask for any gender whatsoever," she added.
A coed system still classifies residents as male or female, while a gender-neutral one does not distinguish between genders.
A better system would include a housing lottery for students who wish to live with randomly selected roommates regardless of gender, said Cliff Jones, advocacy director for the Queer Student Alliance. Currently, only students who have already picked their roommates may live in coed housing.
Additionally, Jones would like eligibility for freshman, as well as a simplified sign-up process.
Gender-neutral housing applicants must appear in person with their prospective roommates at the housing office to sign forms. Other students can request housing online.
"The fact that we all had to go down there as a group to sign the form was a pain in the butt," Schwenk said.
According to Delauter, the housing assignments office wanted to ensure that students in coed situations understood the potential difficulty in finding replacement roommates should anyone leave the arrangement.
Students living in a coed room are responsible for replacing roommates who move out or cancel housing. If a new tenant cannot be found, the remaining roommates can then be relocated, charged with the extra rent or assigned a new roommate.
Breuer said this extra step makes the process discriminatory.
"If they were going to be fair, they would require every student who was seeking housing in the Penn housing system to sign similar documents," he said.
Transgender experience
As an openly transgender student, College freshman E. J. Horlacher requested a high-rise single apartment under "special circumstances" on his housing application.
For transgender students, housing arrangements and bathroom choices become complicated issues tied to their gender identities.
Transgender can describe a range of people with different gender identities and includes transvestites and transsexuals.
When Horlacher first moved into a single in the Quadrangle, he felt nervous about using the nearby men's room.
"I think for the first week, my showers were between 7 and 8 [a.m.], and that was during [New Student Orientation] when nobody had a 9 o'clock anything," Horlacher said. "When I should have been enjoying NSO, I was more concerned with my gender and how people would react to that."
Since then, Horlacher has opened up to his hallmates about being transgender. Though he still mostly avoids using public restrooms, bathroom encounters in his hall have become less stressful.
"For the first couple times, it was awkward," Horlacher said. But the anxiety quickly died down as he realized "male patterns of bathroom use are different from female patterns. Men don't talk in bathrooms."
Overall, Horlacher said he has not had any truly negative experiences while at Penn due to his gender identity.
"I find that the average Penn student is pretty open-minded if you give them the chance to be," he said.
Refining the system
Horlacher's experience in campus housing exemplifies the need for a better housing policy, Cross said.
"I think what underlies this issue ... is making sure we have a coherent housing policy for all students no matter how they identify," she said.
The current housing policy lacks a standard protocol for assigning housing to transgender students.
The housing office is "aware of this and they are looking into it, but it has to be very thoughtful, sensitive and equitable," Cross said. "It shouldn't just shove folks who might not identify traditionally as male or female into singles or in rooms with each other."
Horlacher thinks that identifying himself as transgender to the housing office made the assignment process more difficult.
"It gets easier for you the more you hide," he said. "But I don't necessarily think that hiding my identity is really what I want to be doing here."
Penn's move toward gender-neutral housing is part of a national trend of addressing gender identity issues, Cross said. Harvard and Yale had similar policies in place before Penn's took effect.
"Many universities are facing this challenge right now as more and more of our students, staff and, to some extent, faculty, don't adhere to traditional gender identities," she said.
Next year, Horlacher plans to live off-campus because he feels it will be easier to create a mixed-gender living situation there.
"If I were to go back into the roommate lottery, I technically wouldn't be allowed to have a roommate because I don't have male sex but I don't have a female gender," he said.
In the future, Delauter hopes that Penn will have a gender-blind housing policy.
"What I'm guessing is that everyone will sort of creep along as public opinion catches up with what we're trying to do," she said.
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