College Guide has written before, though not very often, about coed dormitories and bedrooms at American colleges. Coed dorms, novel in the 70s, are now essentially standard. Coed rooms are still pretty rare.
Rarer still is the interesting situation at Iowa’s Grinnell College. According to an article by Mike Kilen in the Des Moines Register:
This fall, the progressive private liberal arts college on the Iowa prairie added a gender-neutral locker room to its mix of gender-neutral dormitory options.
The locker room in the athletic complex is for those using the recreational facilities, physical education students, varsity athletes or spectators of athletic events.
The benefits of this one are unclear. Coed dormitories seem to make sense because such edifices reflect the rest of student’s real lives. Men and women, in both domestic and public situations, interact all the time.
But this new plan seems especially odd considering that men and women don’t actually compete on the same sports teams, and probably never will.
The idea to create such locker rooms was apparently “driven by transgender students … and students transitioning from one gender to the other.”
