Yantézia Patrick, University of Missouri student leader

Trend stories are always sketchy. Taking a few strands of information and conjuring some large, grand, unifying theme removes the rough edges and ultimately are written to support some political theory. So I want to be careful here, but is there something going on in the Midwest when it comes to gay rights?. There is the Supreme Court in Iowa unanimously coming to the defense of marriage rights, but look at what is going on at the University of Missouri. Students voted this week to have gender identity included in the school’s non discrimination clause.

Between April 6 and 8, the  Missouri Students Association held a  referendum and with  2,780 students voting, the proposal passed rather easily with 82 percent supporting the addition. This overwhelming majority is due to the groundwork of a coalition of students who based their agenda on two principles: making sure there was strong support from straight allies and stressing that gender identity concerns are important for everyone.

“Gender identity and expression includes the whole community.  It’s a big umbrella term that encompasses everyone,” said Yantézia Patrick, a University of Missouri journalism major and president of the university’s Gamma Rho Lambda chapter.

“Everyone has a gender identity,” said Ashley Price, an biology and sociology major and  vice president of Gamma Rho. “That is one of the things we are trying to emphasize to the community. This is not just about trans students. It is about everyone as a whole and a safety issue.”

Word about the proposal was spread in the tried and true college ways: workshops in classes and dorms and petitioning academic departments (Patrick noted departments were an easy sell). The resistance to the inclusion of gender identity was based on a sense of priorities. In short, the student government had other pressing issues and there were other things MU students had to be concerned about.

“This entire discourse exemplifies everything that is wrong with MU,” wrote Marcus Bowen in a March 9 column. “We have spent countless hours and way too much mental energy trying to change our campus into a wonderful peaches-and-cream utopia. We spend way too much time and energy on transgender diversity clauses and way too little time learning how to make money.”

Bowen’s column brought out the knives but he also made clear “no one deserves to be discriminated against.” His stance simply mirrors what the polls all say. Among the young, there is less discomfort with issues surrounding sexuality.

Ahhh, but here is where it gets interesting. Yes Mizzou students have made their vote clear but for the change to be made the Board of Curators, the people who supervise the institution, must vote for it. It took 8 years, between 1995 to 2003, for the Board to include sexual orientation in its anti-discrimination clause. Price thinks if the university wants to present itself as an intellectual haven then following the students’ lead is the way to go.

“In order to adversitse ourselves as a forward thinking university in the Midwest we need to have policies that reflect that.”