After the success of last year’s gender neutral hall, LGBTQ+ students on campus were excited to return to an inclusive living space. However, due to the closing of LaSalle, miscommunication and a push to fill residence halls to capacity, the gender-neutral hall this year has been less than ideal. Last year there were two bathrooms in St. Michaels B200, both completely gender neutral. The hall was designated only for those who had signed up for the hall. The “door decs” had been carefully made to include the student’s preferred names rather than their legal ones. This year, however, things have changed. The hall was moved from St. Michael’s B200 to B100, one floor below and, while there are three bathrooms, the only gender-neutral one is a single-use facility. There are also many students who didn’t sign up to be in the gender-neutral dorm who were placed there after the closing of LaSalle, making the hall a “hybrid of what it used to be,” says Housing Director Connor Nelson. While most residents feel that DeAndre Montoya is doing a good job with the hall, it was not communicated to him that he would be the hall’s RA until what many feel was last minute. Because of this, “door decs” had residents’ legal names, rather than their preferred names, something that is very important to transgender students. While this wasn’t Montoya’s fault, many students felt anxiety over the decorations. “[When I chose to live in the gender-neutral dorm] I was expecting that the bathroom signs wouldn’t still be up,” George says. This is one of the major problems the hall is having this year. With only one gender-neutral bathroom for transgender and non-binary students to use, it’s hard for them to feel comfortable in their own...

As part of our 2015 initiative to foster dialogue about gender and sexuality on campus, Jackalope Magazine conducted a Facebook interview with freshman Creative Writing major Marisa Zapata about asexuality and the stigma behind it