Yuji KATO
CGS staff member
[The article below is the same as the article that appears in the nineteenth issue of the CGS Newsletter.]
CGS published the first two volumes of the Gender, Sexuality, and Campus Life series this year - ICU Possibilities Guide in April and 108 Things You Can Do at University in September. We asked the author and editor, Yuji Kato, to discuss what led to the creation of this series.
CGS received 85 requests for assistance from off-campus sources in 2015, and 38 this year just in the Spring term alone. Many of the requests were questions relating to how to deal with students who have gender identity disorder or how to support LGBT students. Indeed, ICU is often regarded by the media and other universities as a pioneering LGBTfriendly university.
In responding to these requests, I did feel a sense of empowerment, learning that there were such conscientious faculty and staff members at other universities. More often than not, however, I was also exhausted. This was not just because the lack of staff at CGS meant I had to respond to many of these queries on my own, but also because it was so psychologically draining to repeatedly point out that ICU is not that progressive. ICU has been a pioneer among Japanese universities in some ways, as seen in changes to its system since 2003, allowing transgender students to change their name and gender on their school records, as well as in its establishment of an interdisciplinary program in gender and sexuality studies. Yet, in reality, ICU has a long way to go before we could call it truly LGBT-friendly. For starters, the university application form still requires prospective students to declare their gender identity (with the options being only male or female). Moreover, graduation gowns are differentiated so that female students must have collars and male students don't have collars (although in response to repeated demands, this rule was finally abolished from the March 2016 graduation ceremony). Thus from matriculation to graduation, the university system is built on gender discrimination and the premise of heterosexism. ICU is simply giving minorities "special treatment" within this rigid system, which in essence cannot be considered LGBT-friendly or progressive.
What added to my exhaustion was that enquiries and discussions were framed within the simplistic idea of "supporting LGBT students." We need to rigorously examine the concepts of "LGBT," "student," and "support." Otherwise, the "problem" ends up being limited to LGBTs rather than gender and sexuality issues on the campus as a whole, which should include women and men, minorities and the majority. LGBT faculty and staff (like me) also become completely invisible. While we do need to share our expertise and experience in order to address these urgent requests to help support LGBT students, I felt the limitations of only focusing on the immediate problems at hand, having the same discussions over and over, without sharing a fundamental understanding of the broader issues involved.
It was in response to these challenges that we created the Gender, Sexuality, and Campus Life series. The first volume, ICU Possibilities Guide, is an updated, comprehensive guide for LGBTs at ICU, based on one of our previous publications, LGBT in ICU Student Guidebook. The second volume, 108 Things You Can Do at University, lists 108 suggestions for improvement that could be achieved by individual institutions without the need for any legislative reforms at a national level, emphasizing the vital contribution of students. Indeed, the changes so far enacted at ICU would not have been possible had it not been for the coming out of minority students. True progress cannot be achieved with a top-down approach alone, by which LGBT-friendly policies are simply enforced by the university administration; rather, the university needs to be fundamentally reconsidered from the perspective of all its members, including the students. We hope that this series will help to achieve this aim.