All Posts Tagged With: "Transgender"
Brandon’s half-court shot, Queen’s hidden camera & more
What students are talking about today (February 19th)
Brandon U.
1. Brandon University student Mason Kaluzniak left this weekend’s basketball game with free tuition to his Manitoba school. In the season’s final Shoot-out for Tuition contest he was drawn at random and asked to either take a half-court shot himself or assign it to someone else. He choose to give Bobcats Head Coach Gil Cheung a try, who sunk it and won the big prize for Kaluzniak. The video has been shared around the globe and has more than 1.3 million views on YouTube.
2. University of British Columbia Athletics has mandated sensitivity training for 29 student athletes who participated in the @UBCDimeWatch Twitter account that surfaced in 2012, reports The Ubyssey. DimeWatch posted creepy photos of UBC women—a “dime” is slang for a female with looks that are ‘a perfect 10′—and disappeared after being linked to a hockey player in October. Eight of the 29 were deemed in breach of the Student Code of Conduct and some have been suspended from their teams. Athletics isn’t releasing names, however. Litsa Chatzivasileiou, a gender instructor, criticized that choice. “I don’t understand why there’s so much secrecy behind it,” she told The Ubyssey. “If you don’t publicize this, the broader community still feels unsafe.”
3. Here’s another creepy story. A hidden camera was discovered in a co-ed washroom at Queen’s University’s Victoria Hall on Feb. 13, reports the Queen’s Journal. The camera was disguised as a towel hook inside a shower. It was removed, all other residence washrooms were checked and Kingston Police are investigating. No Secure Digital card was found in the camera and an e-mail to staff said it would be “inappropriate” to disclose whether any images were found by police.
4. Students at St. Francis Xavier University are back in class today after a three-week strike that started on Jan. 28. The tentative deal for staff includes an eight per cent salary increase over four years and improvements to job security and health benefits for part-time contract workers and full-time employees, according to CTV News. The student union is already looking for some kind of compensation for missed time. The deal includes five teaching days added to the school year.
5. The University of Regina has opened 10 gender-neutral washrooms on campus by tacking signs on wheelchair accessible single-stall bathrooms that read: “This washroom may be used by any person regardless of gender identity or expression.” Mikayla Schultz, president of the TransSask Support Services, supported the partly symbolic change. Schultz is undergoing a gender transition and told CBC News that the women’s washroom was never comfortable. Other universities in Canada, including the University of Victoria, have a limited number of gender-neutral stalls.
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What students are talking about today (Sept. 12 edition)
Uncomfortable washrooms, tuition, & angry naked folks
followtheseinstructions/Flickr
1. Some students at the University of Victoria are uncomfortable with the new “multi-stall gender inclusive washrooms” in the Student Union Building. The student union got rid of the old man-woman divide by renovating urinals and changing the gendered signs to show just a toilet. The goal is to make life more comfortable for transgender students. I guess one person’s comfort is another person’s discomfort sometimes.
2. The new Mattamy Athletic Centre at the Gardens (formerly Maple Leaf Gardens) is sponsored by Molson Coors. There are multiple beer ads and beer is for sale in the concession. While hockey fans are saying “thank God,” other people apparently have a problem with it. Ryerson University President Sheldon Levy, true to form, has a pragmatic response: “you can sneeze and be within 40 paces of the Gardens and have alcohol, so how am I supposed to police things?,” he told The Eyeopener, adding, “I consider the students adults and I trust them to make judgments.”
3. Two University of Regina students are seeking sanctuary in a church after the Canada Border Services Agency decided to deport them to Nigeria because they illegally worked for two weeks at Walmart. U of R President Vianne Timmons is lobbying the government to allow them to stay.
Continue reading What students are talking about today (Sept. 12 edition)
Oxford loosens exam dress code
Gender no longer applies
Oxford University is changing its examination dress code. Male-to-female transgender students will be able to attend in skirts while female-to-male students can wear suits and ties. BBC explains:
Under the old laws on academic clothing – known as subfusc – male students were required to wear a dark suit and socks, black shoes, a white bow tie and a plain white shirt and collar under their black gowns. Female students had to wear a dark skirt or trousers, a white blouse, black stockings and shoes and a black ribbon tied in a bow at the neck. If a transgender student wanted to wear subfusc of the opposite sex they had to seek special dispensation from university proctors, who had the power to punish those who breached the rules.
Transgender professor charged with prostitution
Apparently $87,000 isn’t enough
Max Reinhart/Gwinnett County Police
It’s easy to understand tenure-less professors looking for extra work during the summer, but Max Reinhart—charged with prostitution in Atlanta—has tenure at the University of Georgia.
The 65-year-old German professor and Goethe Studies chair agreed to provide $60 of sexual “services” to an undercover police officer he met on a transgender escort website last week.
Reinhart’s salary is $87,224, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Apparently, it isn’t enough.
Continue reading Transgender professor charged with prostitution
Transgender students can use chosen names
Birth names remain on transcripts
After a two-year campaign, transgender students at Concordia University who make written requests will be able to use their chosen names on student IDs, class lists, exams, and class websites, starting in September. Their birth names will remain tied only to transcripts so that no professor risks embarrassing them by calling out a name that they no longer identify with. The change was made after Ben Boudreau, a second-year science student, complained about having to use his birth name, reports the Montreal Gazette. The University of Toronto has a similar policy.
What if your roommate is transgender?
American schools allow transitioning students to pick dorms
Photo courtesy of celesteh on Flickr
Ashley Gunn, the president of the University of South Florida’s (USF) gay student alliance, is applauding her school’s decision to allow transgender students to choose whether to live in a single room, with a friend of their choice, or be assigned randomly to a dorm room with a man or a woman.
But other students aren’t happy about the idea of sleeping next to someone who is physically the opposite sex, or whose gender is otherwise ambiguous. “I can’t imagine going into a room where I think that there is a woman, but it’s actually a man,” student Mohammad Noore told Miami TV station WTSP. “I’d be freaked out by it, creeped out by, maybe even a little disgusted.”
USF is not the first American school to make special provisions for GLBTTQ students who feel uncomfortable living with roommates of the same sex. Rutgers University in New Jersey began allowing students to live with the opposite sex if they so choose after Tyler Clementi, a gay student, committed suicide after repeated taunting from male roommates who exposed his homosexuality. Genderblind, an organization that advocates for gender-neutral campuses, lists 14 American universities with similar policies.
