文档介绍：Transgender Issues at the Institute
Final Draft
MIT prides itself on having some of the best minds in the world. It is often thought of as a
meritocracy, where anyone is accepted as long as they work hard enough and are smart enough.
Many programs exist to help minority students excel and the current undergraduate population is
about half female. MIT added sexual orientation to it's non-discrimination policy in 1981 and
fulfills almost all of the mendations made for schools to create a "safe campus
environment for LBGT (Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender) people" (Sanlo xvii). Is MIT
a utopic academia filled with a diverse, accepted, student body? There are many issues still
surrounding race, women, sexuality, and religion. Many individuals have biases, some living
groups are not accepting of a certain group of people, tradition is used as justification for biased
practices, and when a group claims to have been discriminated against, many people do not take
them seriously. While MIT tries to eradicate some of these problems, it also must consider the
idea of gender, beyond having a student body posed of men and women. What about
the students who have a gender identity different from their biological sex? What about students
who don't want to identify within the constricting categories of male and female?
The latest group of people to gain media attention for their issues in higher education are
transgender people. According to Riki Wilchins, in Read My Lips:
Transgender began its life as a name for those folks who identified neither as crossdresser nor
as transexuals - primarily people who changed their gender but not their genitals. An example of
this is a man who goes on estrogen, possibly lives full-time as a woman, but does not have or
want sex-change surgery.
The term gradually mutated to include any genderqueers who didn't actually change their
genitals: crossdressers, transgenders, stone