picking open old wounds... part 1

[apositivevoice]

WARNING: This post will probably be long and exceedingly personal. If either makes you feel uncomfortable, read no further. Also, it will be divided probably into 3 parts.

A subject I often avoid or dodge around is my college education. The reason being that it is a very touchy subject with me. Not touchy in the sense that I will kill

Comments

[arien]

From my experience with colleges, what they fear most is the possibility of lawsuits and bad press. In a sense I can understand why they would give you a single at first, since people in general are ignorant about HIV is transmitted and a new roommate may have been scared to share a bathroom or kitchen with someone who is HIV+, but that's nothing that couldn't have been worked out between you and your future roommates. (Did you always remain in a single your whole time in college? Were you allowed to room with people if they wanted to room with you?) But as for the other reason -- mass panic -- that's complete nonsense. Some parents MAY be dumb enough to remove their kids from school (anyway, aren't most college kids over 18?), but I doubt it would be very many, if any at all. College isn't the same thing as public high school: kids are going to get exposed to things that may make them uncomfortable. That's just the nature of the real world.

We have some issues at my college regarding transgender students. We're a tiny but very liberal school with a small but open population of transgender students. Right now the housing office will room trans students with members of their biological gender rather than their identified gender, which can make things a bit hairy. But one of the good things about my school is that the housing office is really helpful in making sure students are in a place where they are comfortable expressing themselves and their sexuality. Most of the trans students live in dormitories with coed rooms rather than same-sex rooms, but the freshman dorm rooms are same-sex and the trans students have to move away from the dorm if they are uncomfortable. There's been talk of establishing a transgender group of rooms, but I'm not sure if that's such a good idea because it may result in segregation from the rest of the student body.