Trans Sri Lankan-American D'Lo speaks on Sunday night about "growing up immigrant and queer in a hick racist town." Over 40 students attended the event which was organized by Pride Alliance, Trancending Gender and Safe Zones as part of Trans Awareness Week.

For junior Wolf Smith, who is fluid between multiple gender identities, the choice between the male and female restroom is not so easy.

The co-founder and co-facilitator of Transcending Gender prefers to use gender-neutral restrooms, but those can be difficult to locate on the Washington University campus.

“The one in the psychology department, you have to basically go through a set of double-doors in the basement that leads into a tunnel, which is actually right next to the mailroom,” Smith said. “The signage is there, but it’s not really obvious.”

Trans* Awareness Week, from Nov. 12 to Nov.18, brought to light issues such as these that transgender Wash. U. students face. This year’s goals were activism, education and remembrance.

The week kicked off with a panel of activists from Missouri-based advocacy group TransHaven on Monday, followed by a screening of “Boys Don’t Cry” on Wednesday. The 1999 film starring Hilary Swank recounts the life of Brandon Teena, a transgender Nebraskan teenager who was raped and murdered in 1993.

On Thursday night, more than 30 students filled Umrath 140 to attend Transgender Safe Space Education with Chris Burns, the founder and former president of the Seattle University Trans and Allies club. Burns, once the only openly transgender student at Seattle University, is a non-op trans man, meaning he is biologically female but sees himself as male and has not had sex reassignment surgery.

Burns presented definitions applying to different members of the transgender community and introduced several books and movies on transgender education, including “My Gender Workbook” and “Omnigender: A Trans-Religious Approach.” Burns showed a trailer for the film “Two Spirits,” which chronicles the life and hate-crime murder of Fred Martinez, a teenager of Navajo descent who embraced the gender fluidity of ancient tribal custom.

Burns emphasized the importance of transgender “allies” earning their titles through knowledge and support rather than empty labeling.

“Allies need to know what transgender issues are if they’re going to advocate for transgender issues,” Burns said.

Among the most crucial issues is pronoun usage, which shifts according to one’s gender identity. Rather than fitting into the binary of “he/she” and “him/her,” some people prefer plural gender pronouns such as “they/them,” gender-neutral pronouns like “ze/hir” or entirely different pronouns. At the safe space training, students split into groups to practice different pronoun usages.

“I can’t say that I learned something new, but that’s not to say that other people didn’t,” senior Neel Desai said about the Safer Space Education. “I felt like the first half was definitely something that somebody who had taken any gender studies class would have known…Coming into it, I was hoping that it would be more of a discussion, but I think regardless of what the particular nature of it was, I was really glad that we were having these types of conversations at all.”

Saturday night’s WU-SLam performance featured transgender poet Storm Thomas. Trans* Awareness Week concluded Sunday with a vigil led by transgender performer and activist D’Lo.

“This is the second really big Trans* Awareness Week,” Smith said. “Last year it was really about breaking into the Wash. U. scene. There wasn’t much of a presence on campus and there really wasn’t much awareness on campus.”

Sophomore Brendan Ziebarth, the external co-president of Pride Alliance, hopes that Trans* Awareness Week will nudge dialogue into the mainstream.

“People are going to ask, ‘what did you do last night?’ And instead of saying ‘oh, I didn’t do anything,’ maybe bring up the fact that you went to an event for Trans* Awareness Week,” Ziebarth said. “You’re probably going to get a weird look from most of your friends, like ‘what’s that?’ or ‘why did you go that?’ and if you have the courage to explain a couple of things you learned, that’s slowly changing the campus atmosphere.”

Pride Alliance and Transcending Gender have been advocating to extend gender-inclusive housing, which currently exists in the Village, to the South 40. Ziebarth said that the administration has been supportive of the efforts but wants to ensure a smooth implementation.

“To do it wrong would be to just keep everything the same way it is now, except one room on the floor is ‘gender inclusive’, and all you do is stick a trans person in there with a roommate who doesn’t even know what they’re about to encounter,” he said.

Pride Alliance and Transcending Gender have had preliminary talks with Student Union on the matter and Desai said gender inclusive housing should be an option for sophomores at the very least.

The groups are also making a push to convert single-stall, locked-door restrooms into gender-neutral restrooms with better labeling. At the Safe Space Training event, organizers posted a makeshift sign for a gender-neutral restroom outside Umrath 140.

In general, on-campus activists hope to improve the perception of transgender people in the school community.

“I don’t think that Wash. U. actively discriminates against trans-identified individuals,” Smith said. “But there’s not this acceptance with open arms.”