“Don’t you think things are better now?”
This is not an uncommon question I’ve heard, from people both inside and outside the LGBT community, but it’s always a difficult one for me to answer. Yes, the crowd in 24 College on Thursday evenings is exponentially larger than it had been a decade ago, and yes, I feel safer being out in the majority of situations at Bowdoin than I’m sure my predecessors felt.
At the very end of the summer, just a few days before the rest of the student body returned to campus, the other College House officers and I spent several hours with the Peer Health and Residential Life student team discussing a book we had all read over the summer, Matthew Desmond’s Evicted.
Two weeks ago—on Transgender Day of Visibility, as it so happened—our community was made aware, through an Orient article and editorial, of the incidents that have occurred in some men’s bathrooms on campus in response to the Free Flow initiative’s placement of menstrual products in bathrooms for all genders.