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The following story appeared in The Globe Online:

Headline: Finding a gender-blind dorm

Date: Sunday, 7/27/2003

Page C1

By Jenna Russell, Globe Staff

At Wesleyan University in Connecticut this fall, a new ''gender-blind'' floor of dorm rooms will welcome students who don't identify with their biological gender. At Smith College, students voted this spring to eliminate the word ''she'' from their constitution, to be respectful of women students who identify themselves as male. And at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst a handful of ''unisex'' bathrooms are being created, at the urging of a few transgender activists. Now, the increasingly public debate over the accommodation of transgender people has erupted at Northeastern University. There, an undergraduate who was born female, but who is starting hormone treatment this week to become male, went public with assertions that school administrators had improperly handled a request for campus housing.

The debate highlights a trend on college campuses, where transgender students - individuals who were born one gender, but identify themselves as the other - are becoming more vocal. Their most controversial demands have concerned college housing, one of the few places on campus still governed by gender.

''It's an emerging issue in the undergraduate population,'' said a spokesman for Wesleyan University, Justin Harmon. ''Housing assignments have always been based on gender, and this is a more complex set of circumstances.''

At Northeastern, as at most universities, transgender students' requests for housing have been handled on a case-by-case basis. Four such cases have arisen in the last decade, and students either lived with a roommate of the same biological sex, in accordance with school policy, or chose to live in a single, studio-style apartment, said Christine Phelan, a Northeastern spokeswoman.

But a transgender undergraduate at Northeastern reported having been treated badly by housing officials this summer when he asked for an assurance that a woman would not be his roommate. The student lived in a single room last year, and was on a waiting list for housing this fall, but worried that if placed with female roommates, they would feel increasingly uncomfortable as the hormones changed the student's appearance this fall.

''I told them, if my number comes up, I just want to know what you'll do with me,'' said the 20-year-old student, who requested anonymity. ''They said I was asking for special treatment, and that I could go off campus to find housing.''

The student reported having been notified last week that the university was unlikely to supply housing. The student is planning to live at home, and is considering transferring to another school.

''They should be bending over backwards to make students happy,'' the student said.

Northeastern officials said the undergraduate had been treated the same way as other upper-class students, who are not guaranteed housing. ''They would never take someone off the wait list because they're perceived as being a problem,'' Phelan said.

The student's encounter with administrators raised a red flag for transgender students at Northeastern's law school. There, some said they have tried unsuccessfully for months to persuade university officials to revise the school's nondiscrimination policy to include transgenders. The school has declined to make the change, and students are organizing a meeting to plan ways to increase pressure.

''We've been told we don't need a policy, because discrimination doesn't happen here,'' said Ethan Eddy, a third-year student at the law school, who is also transgender. ''Now we have a clear-cut case. We're hoping the latest piece, with housing, will prompt them to take us a little more seriously.''

Lawyers inside and outside the university reviewed the nondiscrimination policy and concluded that an expansion wasn't needed, Phelan said. ''We believe that everyone is already covered,'' she said.

Wesleyan, in Middletown, Conn., is believed to be the first college in the country to have devised a gender-blind housing alternative for transgender students. The university is not alone; at least a dozen colleges have done the same, said Paisley Currah, a political science professor at the City University of New York and a member of the board of directors of the New York-based Transgender Law and Policy Institute.

This spring, Brown University updated the preamble to its student conduct standards to promise students protection regardless of ''gender identity,'' a spokesman said. At MIT, officials are considering expanding the nondiscrimination policy to include transgenders, in response to a request, a spokesman said.

At Wesleyan, the gender-blind housing option offers 12 beds on one floor of one dorm, and is open to transgender students or anyone else who seeks mixed-gender housing. The eight beds reserved for freshmen are already taken, Harmon said. Other colleges have contacted Wesleyan to express interest in learning how the experiment works out, he said.

Still, not everyone is interested. After Northeastern's student newspaper ran a report about the student who had felt wronged by the housing office, another student wrote a letter to the paper questioning its relevance. ''Do you really think Northeastern students care whether a `transgendered student' can find adequate housing on campus?'' the student wrote. ''Not exactly front-page material if you ask me.''

Gary Schwarzmueller, executive director of the Association of College and University Housing Officers International, said housing for transgender students has been discussed in a committee that examines gay, lesbian and bisexual issues.

''It's on the radar screen a little bit, but it's not a critical mass,'' he said. ''You always have to be careful that you don't solve one problem and create another one ... You have to assess what will meet the expressed need, and also fit the facilities and the philosophy.''