When MIT’s Graduate Student Union isn’t busy demonstrating in support of Hamas or fighting off attacks from brutal MIT police, it turns its attention to managing its grievance procedures. Few issues loom larger than protecting vulnerable trans and gender-expansive associates from systemic misgendering.
One might have thought that MIT’s long running Gender Identity Initiative would have already resolved these vexing issues. After all, they successfully worked with the All-Gender Restrooms Working Group along with the Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life (ORSEL) to get to the bottom of the poo and pee crisis.
But no! Conflicts remain between official databases that record students’ legal sex and health insurance sex, which can propagate the wrong gender in one’s directory name.
The situation has become so dire that a distressed transgender and/or gender-expansive graduate student afraid of privacy violations felt compelled to publish a 1500-word open letter in The Tech detailing their tragic plight.
“I have been unknowingly and forcibly outed to fellow students and co-workers. Students in my residence have been unknowingly and forcibly outed as transgender to me in my role as a graduate resident advisor. We, trans and gender-expansive MIT community members, urge MIT to treat this matter with the urgency, care, and resources that it deserves.”
The Beaver couldn’t agree more.
We must all listen to the words of celebrated gender-fluid MIT alumnus/a Sam Brinton, who found their true self at MIT. Right before he found a whole bunch of really swell luggage foolishly left for him to liberate at the airport baggage carousel.
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