Strange Stuff at Harvard

By Jeffrey Hart | Wednesday, January 14, 1998

At the beginning of The Great Gatsby, narrator Nick Carraway tells us that as a student at Yale following World War I something about him attracted the confessions of 'wild, unknown men' whose intimate revelations... 'are usually plagiaristic.' Nick should be at Harvard right now.

Alex Myers, Class of '00, has short, dark hair and wears wire-rimmed glasses and customary campus garb — black jeans, denim shirt, work boots and a silver ring through the curve of one ear. According to a fascinating article in The Washington Post, Myers lives on an all-male floor in a coed dormitory, stands about 5 feet 6 inches tall, majors in the sciences and seems indistinguishable from the run of Harvard undergraduates. Myers' voice is an unremarkable tenor.

Except that Myers isn't a man. For Alex's first 17 years, growing up in a small town in Maine, 'his' legal name was 'Alice.'

Alice wore short hair, hated dresses, liked to walk in the woods and hang out with boys. Alex says Alice felt like a man.

Myers attended Phillips Exeter Academy in Massachusetts, a prestigious prep school, where she compiled a good record and was active in sports. At the end of her junior year at Exeter, Alice legally changed her name to 'Alex.'

Myers has a female body, has not tried hormone therapy or surgery. To those adept in such matters, Myers is considered 'transgendered,' as distinguished from a surgically altered 'transsexual' such as the writer Jan Morris, who used to be James Morris.

There were a few rough spots of confusion during Myers' admissions interview by a Harvard alumnus, but the ultimate admissions committee took Myers' transgendering in stride and accepted him for the Class of 2000.

The undergraduates acquainted with Myers registered some surprise when they learned the facts, but thereafter adopted the attitude of 'live and let live.'

Harvard itself has been entirely accomodating. The housing authority assigned Myers to a single room on that all-male dormitory floor. The bathrooms on the
floor have only one shower and one toilet apiece, thus allowing for privacy.

That strikes me as civilized on Harvard's part — in contrast to, say, Williams College, where undergraduates are pressured to have coed shower and bathroom experiences.

But Myers is not willing to let it go at that. He wants to formalize his situation by having the Undergraduate Council add 'gender identity' to the list of categories protected from discrimination, even though he has experienced no discrimination.

He also wants the college to amend its own anti-discrimination code to include cases such as his, although his seems to be unique.

Alex's situation has given rise to debates within the undergraduate council on such matters as Alex's eligibility for male athletic teams, whether bona fide men could demand to share the women's showers, whether a man who declared himself a woman could on that account benefit from affirmative action. Suppose two biologically female athletes appeared and demanded to compete in a mixed-doubles tennis tournament? Or two men made the same demand?

You can see the virtually infinite possibilities.

The Washington Post article quoted a San Francisco cross-dresser who commented with a touch of vulgarity, 'Sex is what's between the legs; gender is what's between the ears.' Thus biological discrimination is outlawed, so why not gender discrimination?

In any case, genital organs are not the only criterion for differentiating between males and females. The nucleus of each cell contains distinctive male and female characteristics. The DNA is different. Much of the internal anatomy is different. We are dealing with different creatures within the same species — a fact that has scarcely been doubted until, well, yesterday.

With Alex Myers we might be dealing with a modern phenomenon, an intensified drive toward individual autonomy, a desire to make concrete actuality subject to the will of the individual.

In extreme forms, such moves can represent a rebellion against the fundamental givens of existence, an impatience with and even hatred of them. In small ways everyone shares such feelings, but pushed to extremes it is a losing proposition.

Normal expectations allow us to get on with the rest of our life. We don't stop to analyze how we tie our shoes. Is it really necessary for the Harvard Undergraduate Council to spend a lot of time debating whether Alex is eligible for the men's wrestling team or can apply for stipends reserved for women?

Nick Carraway might have had a point when he noted the 'plagiaristic' confessions he received from eccentric undergraduate at Yale.

Alex may be a modish cliché of our era, which is besotted with endless talk about sexual orientation and the implications of gender and so on.

Were I on a committee that spent a lot of time discussing Alex, I would resign and do something more interesting and important instead.

Finally, I'm not sure I understand what Alice, growing up in Maine, meant when she said she, 'felt like a man.' How can you feel like something you have never been? At 17 she never had the myriad experiences of most boys her age. She might have imagined she felt like a male, but she could not.

Strange Stuff at Harvard

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