By Marie Scarles, News Correspondent

Getting attention
Em Dunham walks into Starbucks, plops her black purse down on the table and scans the room before sitting down. The coffee shop is crowded this afternoon, filled with students studying, talking and laughing in groups. No one is staring at her. She wears her straight blond hair down to her shoulders. Everything appears to be fine. There’s just one action that makes her feel exposed:’ Occasionally, her hand will venture upward and adjust the pink scarf wrapped around her neck.
She tightens it to cover her Adam’s apple.’
It’s tough to be a transgendered student,’ Dunham said, especially out in public. It’s tough every single day, from the moment she steps out the door of her apartment to the time she walks back in again. In public, the hardest parts of the day are bathrooms and pronouns.
‘It’s always really hard. It depends on the day and the time of day,’ Dunham said. ‘It takes a lot of energy having to deal with people who don’t understand at all, or feeling unrecognized for the things you do.’
Despite the discrimination and uncomfortable situations that transgender students sometimes face, some say Boston and Northeastern are on the right track to becoming a more gender-neutral-friendly environment.
Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC) is working to pass legislation that would make discrimination based on gender identity and expression illegal in Massachusetts and Northeastern, student groups like NUBiLAGA are bringing in speakers to educate the student body about gender identity.
Author Shari Thurer came to Northeastern to discuss her book, ‘The End of Gender: A Psychological Autopsy,’ which is about the alleability of gender identity and its separation from sexuality.
‘Gender categories are socially constructed,’ she said during her visit to Northeastern.’ ‘There’s nothing inherent or basic about them.’ We do binaries all the time, sun-moon, hot-cold, male-female, because it’s a way of understanding our universe and making it less frightening.’
Thurer said she wants to overthrow the popular notion gender identity and sexuality are permanently linked.
‘Turns out everything binary can be deconstructed,’ she said.

Getting acquainted
Robyn Ochs, an activist and editor of’ ‘Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World,’ a of collection of writings by bisexuals, came to Northeastern to speak about gender expression and stereotypes.
During Och’s meeting students pigeonhole, mock and shout at one another. There is crotch’ grabbing, swagger, and talk of beer, boobs and the football game on TV.’ They back-thump one another, they push each other and they call each other ‘dude.” This is an experiment in acting like a heterosexual male.’ Thirty seconds later and everything changes when new directions are shouted from the front of the classroom.
The point of Och’s experiment, she said, is to show that even on Northeastern’s liberal-leaning campus in what is often considered the most tolerant part of the country, stereotyping’ happens.
‘How many of you feel that you don’t neatly fit into your stereotype group?” she asked the group.
Everyone in the room raised their hands and gave a collective nervous laugh.
‘Gender is a performance that we act, not a thing that we are,’ she said.’ ‘The equation ‘man equals male equals masculine’ is socially constructed.’
Just because an individual is biologically female doesn’t mean that she is a woman, or that she is sexually attracted to men, Och said.
According to gender theorist Judith Butler, this is an idea that has been accepted by society because it fits the standard mold.’
He said individuals who consider themselves transgender don’t need surgery to do so and the word ‘transgender’ is an umbrella term that includes anyone who doesn’t identify with their birth sex.’
For Morgan Collado, a freshman psychology and philosophy major, coming to grips with her sexual identity was a ‘take two’ on coming out as a gay man to her family in high school, she said.
Entering Northeastern last fall brought on self discovery that led to a whole new obstacle that many freshmen don’t have to face, she said.
‘I always knew that I was trans and I knew I was a male bodied person who was a female individual ‘- and I repressed that,’ she said. ‘It was like coming out all over again when I came to Northeastern.’
Once Collado became more comfortable identifying herself as transgender, the transition began and living in an all male dorm became difficult, she said.
‘I started to wear make-up and female clothes and I started to get strange looks around the dorm,” she said. ‘It was tough, but no one ever gave me a hard time and I am lucky.’
This upcoming fall, when the newly built residence hall Parcel 18 opens, Collado will be one of many Northeastern students who will be living in gender neutral housing. This new option will be one of Northeastern’s Living Learning Community (LLC) floors and will allow male and female students to live in the same dorm room.
‘The university has really embraced me and has been very supportive with my transition,’ she said.
Ruben Hopwood, social worker and coordinator of the transgender health program at The Fenway Health Center, said that full coverage for transgender health needs is hard to attain for many people who struggle with their sexual identity.
Hopwood works with every transgender patient that walks in the door of the clinic.’ He said he recognizes the unique healthcare dilemmas that arise within this population.
‘Insurance in the United States by and large doesn’t cover care related to transgender,’ Hopwood said. ‘It won’t cover actual transitional-related things, nor routine preventative care because preventative care is sex-specific.’
He said the loophole in the healthcare system creates an Achilles’ heel for transgender patients.’
Collado said even though Northeastern has helped her with their support, one negative aspect is their failure to provide transgender health needs such as providing hormones or transgender therapy opportunities.
‘The university should really take the lead,’ she said. ‘We go to such a progressive school and this is one thing I think that Northeastern has to change.’
The Fenway Health Center provides reassignment surgeries, the biggest step for many transgender patients. Hopwood said that the costs of a complete transition range from $50,000 to $300,000, plus the cost of a lifetime supply of hormone medications.
In 2007, the Fenway Guide to Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) Health was published as the first textbook for healthcare providers that has information on healthcare for sexual minorities.’ Dr. Jennifer Potter of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center was one of the manual’s editors.
‘We pretty much sat down and mapped out a manual for clinicians,’ Potter said. ‘We included GLBT issues because we wanted to be inclusive and distributed this book to all U.S. medical schools to increase coverage.’
This is a marked improvement from previous textbooks that only mentioned the GLBT population in the context of HIV and AIDS, she said.

Getting Active
In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the nation’s definitive list of mental illnesses. Under the category of ‘Sexual Disorders and Dysfunctions’ there remains a description for Gender Identity Disorder. Symptoms include ‘a strong and persistent identification with the opposite gender.”
Nancy Nangeroni, co-chair of MTPC, presented an argument to board members of the American Psychological Association to include transgender individuals in its Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual issues. She said she takes offense at the idea that transgender people have a disorder.
‘There were people there who believed that being trans is a pathology, a sickness,’ she said.
Everyone in the United States deserves equal protection under the law, Nangeroni said. Currently, 13 states and the District of Columbia have laws that protect citizens from discrimination because of gender identity or expression. Pamela Bridgewater, a professor of law at American University in Washington, D.C., helped draft some of the first transgender anti-discrimination policies in 1998 when she was a professor of law at Northeastern.
‘So far, only D.C. covers all five categories of discrimination identified by the transgender law organization,’ she said. ‘These are public accommodations, housing, employment, education and the right to sue.’
On April 7, MPTC organized a lobby day at the State House for a bill known as ‘An Act Relative to Gender-Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes.” ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘
Nearly 300 people attended the lobby demonstration, and the bill is supported by Governor Deval Patrick, Representative Barney Frank and Mayor Thomas Menino.’ The bill would make it illegal for employers to discriminate in the workplace against employees because of the way that they express their gender identity. This includes clothing, speech, actions or ‘simply for defying expectations of what a ‘normal’ man or woman looks like,’ Nangeroni said.
William Leap, a professor of anthropology at American University, who specializes in the politics of gender studies, said he feels that it is necessary to pass legislation to ensure legal protection for transgender people at the state level so that it will serve as an example for the federal government. According to Leap, the outlook is optimistic.
‘Washington gossip says that Obama’s people are going to include workplace rights to include transgender, and that should clear congress in two years,’ he said. ‘That will be amazing, opening doors in ways we haven’t seen since the ’70s.’
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