A Slipping Facade
In recent times, leftist media has taken the US—and Exeter—by storm. After The Boston Globe incident, the Exeter administration has been scrambling to modify policies to fit the “woke” agenda—a move that any minimally important institution these days has to take in order to avoid scrutiny. The image Exeter’s deans and faculty want to uphold is undoubtedly one of care and equality for all. This only makes the visitations policy currently practiced by its gendered dorms even more insulting.
In the first week of winter term, a friend from a gender-neutral dorm and I decided to have a sleepover in my dorm. We were upstairs when there was a knock on my door; it was my dorm head telling us that she was unsure of what the policy was surrounding sleepovers with members of the genderless dorms. She proceeded to make them leave. The problem wasn’t that they lived in Kirtland—we’d had many sleepovers from people who lived in Williams and Kirtland Houses before. The problem was that the name of this non-binary person was Jake*, not Katie*, that they had short hair instead of long hair and that they didn’t have a visible lump on their chest. The dorm head was confused; she didn’t know what to do with people whose gender she could not easily determine.
A dean I spoke with, who would prefer to remain anonymous, said that all sleepovers should be banned because students don’t need sleepovers. A classic case of a non-solution. If we don’t know what to do with trans people that we claim to accept, then let’s take away everyone’s freedom!
Later that week, there was a mandatory dorm meeting in which our dorm head finally clarified the confusion. This is how I understand her message: if we wanted to have a sleepover with someone from a gender-neutral dorm, we would have to 1) ignore their gender identity, 2) ignore any attempt that person might have made or might be actively making to change their sex and 3) invade that person’s privacy and disregard any discomfort or dysphoria they might feel. We would have to ask that person what their biological sex was, and, if their genitals did not align with ours, they would not be allowed to sleep over.
The official Visitations Policy written out in the E Book states the following:
“Unauthorized visiting, commonly referred to as illegal visitations, by boys in girls’ rooms or by girls in boys’ rooms, or any abuse of visitations, may result in disciplinary action.”
The administration has created gender-neutral dorms, yet it somehow seems to forget that non-binary people exist on this campus.
The E Book says boys and girls, not those with vaginas and those with penises. However, according to this new policy, only people with the same genitalia can be in each other’s dorms outside of V’s hours. That means that either the current official policy is transphobic and says that to have a penis means to be a boy and to have a vagina means to be a girl or the school’s facade of “equity and inclusion” is slipping as the deans realize that their policies don’t match up with the promises they have made. To quote Exeter’s Genderbread Lion poster: “Gender is one of those things that everyone thinks they understand, but most people do not. Like Inception. Gender is not binary. It is not either/or. In many cases, it is both/and. A bit of this. A dash of that.” However, if I identify as a girl, would I not be a “real” girl in their eyes if I had a penis and were too young to have surgery?
A dean I spoke with, who would prefer to remain anonymous, said that all sleepovers should be banned because students don’t need sleepovers. A classic case of a non-solution. If we don’t know what to do with trans people that we claim to accept, then let’s take away everyone’s freedom!
First, it starts with sleepovers. But then, what if you’re a trans boy and you enter a boy’s dorm in the middle of the day? That can’t be allowed either because you have a vagina, so the school would ban all visitations to other dorms outside of legal V’s hours. But, then, what about the people in your own dorm—if trans men can’t visit them, then why should you be allowed to do so? Students should then no longer enter their neighbors’ rooms outside of legal V’s hours. All this may sound ridiculous and far-fetched, but it only serves to highlight the reason why banning all sleepovers is such a nonsensical avoidance of an apparent discrepancy between what the administration claims to care about and what it actually cares about. If the school decides to go down the path of “equality by equal restrictions,” at what point will it draw the line?
“How could I explain to parents that there’s a boy [trans girl] sleeping over in a girls dorm?” the aforementioned dean asked me.
At this point in the conversation, PEA’s priority became clear to me. The administration wants to be as “woke” as possible while still complying with the conservative values adopted by the parents of many Exonians. They would do anything to maintain Exeter’s reputation and continue to attract students even at the expense of the safety, comfort and very identity of the students themselves. What is even more concerning to me is the lack of discussion surrounding this reality. The school is enforcing a transphobic interpretation of the visitations policy and keeping it under wraps.
This policy that the administration is trying to conceal is wrong. For a school that claims to be all-inclusive, that claims to respect its students, that claims to be a safe space, that claims to want students to be their full selves, this policy is not only comedically hypocritical but something that exposes the reality of what it means to live at Exeter.
The very least the school could do would be to allow V’s at any point in time and sleepovers based off of people’s gender identity. If you identify as a girl, you should be able to go to girls’ dorms and vice versa. Those who are non-binary could visit both or neither throughout the day. This is the least— the least the deans could do to show that they care.