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I'm reminded of all of the projects that I've seen mentioned in passing that for some reason or another has not gained traction with the administration, and I want to start giving a push. The issues I've noticed are with (and these are by no means an exhaustive list of problems with the University, but only the ones that I myself have noticed):

1) The Non Discrimination Policy still does not list gender expression as something that it protects in its students.

2) There are many professors who create a toxic or hostile environment towards queer and trans students with their comments or curriculum, and there are few avenues which can help to correct these environments.

3) Many queer students experience housing discrimination due to their sexuality and/or gender identity; currently, very little is done to curb this discrimination by protecting queer students from queer phobia. Additionally, the University often does not know what to do about trans students at all. It currently does not have a friendly way of handling trans students (binary or nonbinary) in terms of where they place them, especially once they are out as trans and express discomfort over being placed in the wrong dorm.

4) Currently, ELC lists out people's birth names on class rosters and when people comment or create threads. This means that trans students who do not want their birth names known are forcibly outed by this system.

I'm tired of hearing about changes happening in the most nebulous of senses; I'm tired of members of the higher-up administration coming to listen to us talk during Town Hall meetings and only paying us lip service about how changes are "in the works," and I'm tired of no one ever getting back to us about the status concrete policy changes, and instead just waiting until we get tired and stop asking questions. While some of these may seem non-threatening and even benevolent on the surface, I think that when administrators choose to listen and pay lip service to students' ideas rather than discussing and transparently working towards concrete policy change, it is a tactic that they can use to encourage complacency and to make us feel better about never actually getting results.

For these reasons, I'm choosing to publicly announce problems that I currently have with the University and changes that I would like to see. I partly hope that announcing them in a more public setting will get me to motivate myself to start acting towards these changes instead of remaining silent as I have, but I also hope to encourage other queer people to help me to fix these goals and to create new ones.

Under a read-more, I'm explaining some of the problems further and listing out some possible solutions that I would like to see.

1) NON DISCRIMINATION POLICY

-Due to the actions of a couple of wonderful queer activists putting pressure on the administration, last year gender identity was added to UGA's nondiscrimination policy, which was a wonderful victory. However, gender expression is still left off of the nondiscrimination policy. This is a major problem which needs to be corrected.

(As a side note, I have witnessed a member of the Equal Opportunity Office confusing gender identity with gender expression, and this is a problem which needs to be solved)

2) ANTI-HARRASSMENT TRAINING

-While there are many professors who are very good and well-educated about queer and trans students and issues, there are many more who are not, whether through genuine lack of information or willful disregard, and there are many professors who create incredibly toxic environments for queer students.

This point goes along with the nondiscrimination policy. In our University's nondiscrimination policy Article III section E subsection 2 (which is the section that deals with remedies during the formal process to discrimination and harassment reports, it states, "Potential remedies for the complainant or victim include, but are not limited to: Training/re-training on this Policy and other relevant topics for individuals or groups implicated in the discrimination or harassment." My question is: why is this only enacted as a /remedy/ and not a /preventative measure?/ As someone who was employed by the University, I had to undergo a form of anti-harassment training that was targeted largely towards preventing sexual harassment. I understand that other employees of the university--including professors, who are the group who has the most interactions with students--also have to undergo a similar training session every few years in order to maintain their status as an employee of the university. I would like to see a similar form of mandatory and regularly updated training sessions which all faculty and staff would have to undertake, which would give a basic overview on how to treat and respect queer and trans students.

This way, there can be no confusion over what the nondiscrimination policy actually entails, and when the EOO is having to deal with complaints about the nondiscrimination policy, no one can hide behind statements saying that they did not understand what it meant.

3) HOUSING DISCRIMINATION

-Since I came here, I have seen friends experience housing discrimination in the form of either being told directly that they were unwanted, or else being told to their faces that everything was fine, and then calling up housing behind their backs in order to complain and kick out my friends from the shared dorm room because they were queer. I knew a trans student who was made to live off campus because the University did not know what to do with him in the dorms.

I have experienced housing discrimination firsthand. During my freshman year when I was attempting to leave a harmful roommate environment and enter into a better one, after I met up with the different people who were listed with no roommate, and I was told directly that I was not wanted because of my sexual orientation. Numerous times, queer and trans kids have come up to me and ask if there was some sort of queer-friendly housing resource here. Unfortunately, the University currently has no system of helping queer students find friendly roommates in the dorms, and in fact, many times when there is a complaint over a student's sexuality, the queer student is the one asked to leave.

With the number of students who live in fear of being harassed or thrown out by their roommates if they come out, the fact that the University has not developed some measures to protect queer students is deplorable.

I would love to see some form of gender-neutral housing on campus. Given the fact that that is unlikely, I would like to see first (1) a policy change which outlines the procedures for how to deal with housing when one roommate has a problem with another roommate's sexual or romantic orientation. If a student complains that they do not feel comfortable with their roommate's sexual orientation, then they should be the one made to move out--since they are the one who has caused the problem, not the queer student. Second (2) I would like to see a more comprehensive way to handle trans-identified students on this campus. Third (3), I would like to see a way of matching up queer-identified and queer-friendly students up with one another. This could potentially be handled as simply as putting on a check-box questionnaire for housing match-ups asking something akin to the following: [(Check the box that most closely matches your situation) (1) I would prefer to live with a queer-identified student. (2) I would not have a problem living with a queer-identified student. (3) I would prefer not to live with a queer-identified student.] While this would not necessarily curb /all/ problems with housing discrimination, I feel it would go a much longer way than no system at all.

4) ELC/ATHENA

-When the Athena system was first about to be rolled out, we were promised that it would have a feature to display people's preferred names. It is true that eLC does have a section in people's profiles to state their "nickname" (if you can't tell, I have a bit of a problem with it being phrased as a nickname rather than a preferred name); however, for some reason, this feature is not currently functional. When I go to make a comment on eLC, it still shows my birth name under the comment, instead of my preferred name. When I have spoken to administrators about this, I was told to be calm and quiet, and that it would be fixed eventually. Well, this is the second semester that this has not been corrected, and I want to make sure that this problem is fixed--before next year. I would like to see this change implemented before fall semester, so that the next batch of freshmen do not have to worry about their birth names being shown to classmates against their wills.

Another goal that I have is for there to be an option for preferred pronouns to be listed in addition to a person's preferred name beside eLC posts and comments.

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