You have a choice: You can suffer through an Ohio winter without a radiator in your dorm room, or you can briefly allow a maintenance man in to install one.
It seems difficult, doesn’t it?
Well, not if you are a student at Oberlin College. In the Oberlin Review, one such student announced that the cold winter would be preferable to briefly allowing a maintenance man into the dorm room. This student lives in a dorm community that is the “home of the Women and Trans Collective.” So, naturally, that means no (cisgender) men allowed.
After all, if a dorm promises to provide “women and transgendered persons with a safe space for discussion, communal living, and personal development,” there is no reason that any man should be on the premises, even if that is to ensure that the Women and Trans Collective doesn’t freeze over the winter. This student even went so far as to ask if one could decline to have a radiator installed in the dorm.
It turns out that in a “safe space,” you need to be adequately warned if a man is going to show up briefly to make sure your dorm room can be heated. Perhaps more women and transgender people can become maintenance workers to make Oberlin residents feel more comfortable, though something tells me those maintenance workers won’t be graduating from Oberlin.
