Umrath House, which contains opt-in Gender Inclusive Housing (Mason Sutton | Designer).

Gender-Inclusive Housing (GIH) has had multiple names and many different forms. Students of any gender looking to live on campus property can opt into a process where they are matched based on gender, not sex assigned at birth. Through this process, students are asked to identify their gender identities and the gender identities they would be comfortable living with to provide Residential Life (ResLife) with ample information to match them with roommates.

People use GIH for many different reasons. For some, it is integral for safety and comfort, and for others, it is a way to live with friends of a different gender. 

How GIH was created:

GIH was initially created in the early 2000s at the request of a first-year transgender student with help from Rob Wild, the current Vice Dean of Student Affairs. At the beginning, GIH was called Gender Neutral Housing (GNH) and for roughly 10 years was only off, and on the North Side of campus. In 2014, a group of students, with the coordination of a former Vice Chancellor and the former Dean of Students, Sharon Stahl and Justin Caroll, respectively, met to offer suggestions to GNH and suggested it be expanded to include the South 40. 

Post-GIH’s addition to the South 40, the numbers of students opting in rose over time to 300, 400, and even 800 people, explained Rhonda Kiely — WashU ResLife Assistant Director of Room Assignments — and ResLife Executive Director Will Andrews. However, not all of the students who opted in truly wanted to live in GIH.

“In the past we’ve had a very large number of students who … recognized themselves as being gender inclusive, but when it got to the bottom line, they weren’t as comfortable living necessarily with students of different gender identities,” Kiely said. 

Andrews added that while “a lot of people are open to [GIH], that doesn’t mean they necessarily want that as their option with placement.”

To ResLife, it appeared that students were opting into GIH because they were comfortable living with people with gender identities different from theirs. Yet, in practice, a majority of these people had already chosen a roommate or truly did have apprehension about living with a genderqueer person. Additionally, queer students were hesitant about living with roommates who were uninformed about queer identities. 

“Students were saying, ‘Wait a minute, as an LGBTQ person, I don’t want to be the educator of my suitemates,’” explained Kiely. 

Over the past few years, however, ResLife has worked with the Center for Diversity and Inclusion (CDI) to make the list of gender identities on the housing application more explicit and comprehensive. 

As Kiely and Andrews from ResLife described, this specificity has led to a greater understanding of what “opting in” means, which has inevitably led to a significant decrease in the numbers of students choosing to opt into GIH. 

Two hundred and fifty students opted into Gender-Inclusive Housing for the 2024-25 school year — which ResLife described as a manageable number since these pairings are often done by hand. 

“We spend a lot of time making … every effort to give all of our students a great experience, but we really put the time in with our gender-inclusive students. They’re one of the first groups we look at so we know what we’re dealing with and how to best serve those students,” Kiely said. 

What it looks like currently:

Despite the efforts made by ResLife, queer students who opted into GIH report varied experiences. While many students who opted in for the 2024-25 school year largely declare GIH to be comfortable and positive, students who lived in GIH two or three years prior describe a drastically different experience, one that was overwhelmingly detrimental. 

“I’m one of the only trans people [in] my grade that I know that didn’t have a deeply horrible experience with roommates and that’s because I didn’t have roommates,” said junior Penelope Thaman, President of Pride Alliance, who lived in GIH her first year. 

Senior and former president of Pride Alliance Eden Gallup affirmed this, observing a pattern her peers experienced.

“I know three separate people, trans people, who selected their gender on the housing form and were roomed in suites with people of their assigned gender at birth,” Gallup said.

Kiely claims every year has been better than the last, and currently, the rate of room change requests for GIH is “significantly lower” than for standard housing assignments. Andrews recalled hearing Kiely on the phone many times with parents, personally reassuring them that their children will be given a rooming placement in which they feel safe. 

Many students have expressed this sentiment, noting the positives of GIH, describing it as being a safe, supportive, and necessary environment. 

“I really enjoyed it. I was scared of being put with people who would be bigoted towards me [but] I didn’t feel unsafe because of my identity at any point,” said sophomore Mia Johnson, who lived in GIH last year. 

Johnson, who is not currently in GIH, continued, “I have felt less connected to the queer community [this year] than I did last year. So I think Gender-Inclusive Housing did help.” 

Gender Inclusive-Housing for first-years is dispersed randomly across the South 40, and so, while within suites all students will have opted into GIH, it’s possible that their suite is the only GIH one on the floor. Despite this, some students, such as Johnson, report feeling more connected to the queer community through GIH. 

First-year Ko Sakano, who is currently living in GIH, explained that seeing GIH on the housing portal made WashU appear to be a supportive, open, and queer-friendly environment. 

“It’s comforting to [live with] other people who are experimenting with their gender,” Sakano said. “You could talk about certain things, or I could walk around in my binder without being worried that they’re gonna be like ‘Hey, what is that?’” 

While the first-year cohort of GIH appears to mostly be students who opted in looking for safety or community, students such as sophomore Justin Krelitz checked the GIH box to provide that safe space for others. 

Krelitz, who does not identify as queer, has lived in GIH for the past two years. He explained that his choice to opt into GIH in his first year was based on his brother’s experience with his first-year roommate at a different university. His brother, who identifies as gay, was discriminated against by his roommate for various aspects of his identity. 

“​​If I could … provide a safe space for someone where they didn’t have to worry or be afraid, that would be very meaningful to me,” Krelitz said. “There’s nothing that could possibly go poorly opting into GIH.”

Non-queer students who choose to opt into GIH, like Krelitz, quell fears that their queer roommates may have had otherwise. One of Sakano’s suitemates, for example, had very few interactions with the LGBTQ community prior to living in GIH. In the past, this may have been a cause for concern for Sakano. However, knowing that this roommate intentionally chose GIH eased Sakano’s worries. 

Dion Hines, a current sophomore who opted-in his first year, spoke to this point, explaining that during his first year he ended up making friends with cisgender people who opted into GIH. 

“I think it should be normalized for cis people to be a part of Gender-Inclusive Housing,” he said.

Thinking toward the future:

ResLife has continued to refine the process every year, working with the CDI and Spectrum office to update language and ensure students who are opting into GIH truly want to be there, according to Kiely. Despite this, some queer students have expressed interest in queer-specific housing options, like a queer residential college floor. 

The idea of a gender-inclusive floor or building for first-years is not an unprecedented concept. Other schools such as Dartmouth and San Diego State University have housing for queer people that students can opt into when entering the school. 

“I think a queer first-year floor would be the single biggest thing [ResLife] could do … I think it would fix the GIH issue, I think it would allow first-years to actually build community,” Thaman said.

Still, the creation of gender-inclusive affinity housing is not without its challenges. Thaman emphasized the complexities of creating community spaces for all, when the community itself may be fractured along other lines, such as politics. 

“Fundamentally, there is no space that’s just inclusive for all queer communities on campus. There’s too many different people and too many different strong opinions,” Thaman said. 

Dr. Tamsin Kimoto, Assistant Professor of Women Gender and Sexuality Studies, focuses partially on queer and trans people of color studies and echoed Thaman’s sentiments about these challenges within queer spaces.

“I think that there is a sense in which a lot of students do identify with queerness as an umbrella [term] or queerness in terms of its ambiguity,” Kimoto said. “But I think part of what’s also happened is that we become ambiguous in our politics, such that you can be queer and perfectly in alignment with a heteronormative state.”

ResLife has never made an explicitly queer housing community for first-year students, but they have experimented with other floor community spaces, specifically a substance-free floor, in the past. Kiely expressed that there were largely negative outcomes — she explained that students felt ostracized by their peers and requested to move out at high rates.

“The other issue is, as people move out, you have to fill those spaces with non-substance-free people so then you get this contamination factor. Then it gets to be awkward for both sides of the students,” says Kiely.

Kimoto also expressed apprehension about the role of the University in facilitating explicitly queer spaces.

“I hesitate to say it’s the responsibility of the University, because I think that puts the actual community … in a kind of passive position with respect to the University. I … would rather see queer spaces organized by the people who are actually occupying them.” They added, “A WashU branded queer space is not exciting to me.” 

Currently, WashU offers Kaleidoscope as one of the five Living Learning Communities (LLC) on campus. Living Learning Communities are opt-in housing environments that connect sophomore, junior, and senior students through a specific topic or an aspect of their identity. 

Junior Aspen Schisler created Kaleidoscope, an LLC specifically for students who identify as queer, three years ago with ResLife after finding queer housing on campus to be lacking. 

“Literally everyone I had talked to was like, ‘Oh yeah, we need queer housing on this campus,’” Schisler said. 

However, Schisler remains critical of the general housing system because of its lack of specifically University-created queer housing of any type. 

“Kaleidoscope is a Band-Aid until WashU is forced to become better by someone who is not me,” Schisler said. 

LLCs are not available to first-years, but Thaman, Schisler, and Johnson all expressed that having an easy way into the WashU queer community — a community they describe as sometimes feeling scattered — can be critical. They believe that University housing can be part of the solution.

Still, ResLife maintained that there was mixed feedback from students about whether or not a queer floor was desired, with some fearing it could become a target. They stated that LLCs are the way for students to form identity-based housing placements, not ResLife. 

“If students wanted to do it [make a queer housing space], then it’s up to the upperclassmen,” Andrews said.