Students React to Gender Fliers

They’re bold, and they’re everywhere. Across campus, an anonymous voice or voices are asking Exonians, “WHEN DID YOU CONSENT?” The second wave of a series of “Why so gendered?” posters continues to spark campus-wide discussion.Many of the signs last week reprinted the E Book dress code requirements, and others challenged gender-segregated bathrooms. The most recent batch has not only grown in number, covering entire bulletin boards in the Academy building, but has also grown in the number of topics.All the signs begin with “WHEN DID YOU CONSENT?” followed by statements, such as “to letting strangers decide what you look like naked,” “to being protected from diversity,” “to wearing clothes determined by what the administration thinks you look like under them,” and “to rules that deny the existence and validity of gay relationships,” and more.The anonymous group of students behind the posters declined to comment for this article, but disclosed to The Exonian that they will release a statement soon.Some members of the community have responded to the new posters with satirical signs mocking the provocative papers. One read “HAVE YOU EVER BEEN ASKED a cheesy rhetorical question?” Other people wrote feedback directly on the signs.On a “WHEN DID YOU CONSENT to socially segregated bathrooms?” sign, one Exonian wrote “to being bombarded with signs?”Others have piled response sign on top of response sign. One student pinned a long, handwritten note subtitled “PeopleAgainstMeaninglessRhetoricalQuestions” to a sign mocking the “why so gendered” series of posters. The note read “Trans + gender queer people have to struggle with gender segregation...every day of their lives. The only people who can call these issues unimportant/irrelevant are those who benefit from cis (non-trans) privilege…”While students continue to question the identity of the group, they also acknowledge the heightened awareness of gender issues that has resulted from discussion about the posters.“I think the posters are there to spark a conversation and I think they have done exactly that,” upper Helen Edwards said. “They get people to talk about something that they would probably not normally talk about. Whether that is good or bad, it gets us talking.”Some faculty members had an understanding of why the signs could have been posted. “I think that the posters are raising awareness about the challenges of being a transgender student at Exeter, or the challenges that any person with non-normative gender might face,” history instructor Betty Luther-Hillman said. “Choices that are easy for most of us, such as which bathroom to use or what clothing to wear, aren't easy at all for transgender individuals. At PEA, with single-sex dorms and a heteronormative visitation policy, these issues of gender can become heightened. I don't think there are easy answers, but I appreciate these attempts to raise awareness about these issues.”In light of the posters, health classes spent time addressing the issue of identifying oneself as transgender. New lower Lauren Karr and her class also talked about Exeter’s dress code in her health class.“I am in a class of twelve other lowers and we thought that the dress code should be more unisex because boys don’t have that much of a choice, but girls have many more options,” Karr said.Other students, however, did not feel that the posters sparked constructive discussion.“I think their purpose is to get people talking about equality,” upper Sarah Lamie said. “They fall short because they are more of a mild annoyance which people joke about.”The Academy has wrestled with some aspects of this issue in the past. In 2001, a committee of students and faculty worked to revise Exeter’s dress code, and submitted a potential gender-neutral dress code to students to gauge their response.“We met over the course of a term and eventually came up with a gender neutral dress code that would mean eliminating the requirement of blazers and neckties for boys and simply having a list of prohibited items,” history instructor and committee member Meg Foley said. “When we turned to the student body to find out their thoughts – it was one of the first times, I think, that the school used an online interface to collect survey data for students – and my memory is that in roughly similar proportions, boys and girls rejected it.”Although the rejection may have been due to students wanting to keep a necktie requirement in the dress code, Foley thinks that a consideration of this issue today might yield different results.“I think today people have a more complex understanding of gender, and perhaps that would weigh more heavily in their minds,” Foley said. “We’ve seen, as a faculty, many more students who identify as transgender come through [PEA], and they have had to make some sort of decision about how they are going to dress for school every day.”