Western sophomores Cory Hoffman and Laura Gorrin discuss gender mapping, as part of a Fairhaven independent study project, at an event where they displayed gender maps that contributors made on note cards Tuesday in the Fairhaven Auditorium. Photo by Graig Hill.

TRANSport is a new club that offers support for trans gendered, gender varied, inter sexed, and other non-gender-specific people, said Western sophomore and TRANSport President Cory Hoffman. The club was created to offer a place for students to socialize and meet other people they could relate to, he said.

What started out as a class project to map something that couldn’t be mapped, ended up as a Fairhaven independent study that sought out and collected 282 gender maps, said Western sophomore and TRANSport Vice President Laura Gorrin.

Each gender map is a 3-inch by 5-inch note card given to Western students on campus with the instruction to illustrate gender as they define it, Gorrin said.

“What we got out of the cards was the idea that gender has a lot of different spectrums,” Hoffman said. “Personal ideas or experience with gender range from binary, which has only male and female as an option, to people who think gender is completely fluid.”

Gorrin began this project in May and Hoffman joined in September. They decided to make it an independent study and expand the idea.

The credit they are receiving isn’t for the maps themselves, but for exploring the idea of gender and learning more about it as a whole, Gorrin said.

The pair started out in Red Square, asking people to fill out the map and answer survey questions, Hoffman said.

This turned into a problem because the answers weren’t as in depth as they had hoped because most people were in a hurry, he said.

“We realized that we had to pay attention to what we were asking people and how we were asking it,” Hoffman said.

They decided to change their approach and move to places where they could spend more time talking to people, Gorrin said.

The maps got better once they were able to explain what they were after, she said. For the sake of the project, they targeted people they thought would give in-depth and solid maps, she said.

The people they targeted included friends, students in their classes and members of groups or clubs that dealt with the idea of gender more often than others, she said.

The idea for the project expanded beyond getting students' definitions of gender. Their main goal was to get people talking, Hoffman said.

“To do these maps we had to have conversations about gender and what we found is that a lot of people have never been asked to define gender and had a hard time doing it,” Gorrin said.

The gender maps range from pictures of stereotypical gender symbols to cards with words where people admit not knowing how to define their own gender, Gorrin said. 

An example and one of their favorites was a card that had “Love sees no gender,” written on a heart, she said.

Since the sample was random and had such a large range, the maps didn’t show any trends or prove anything in regards to the kind of maps people would make based on their age or gender, Hoffman said.

“One of our goals was to get gender neutral projects going on campus,” Hoffman said. “At our first TRANSport meeting we spent a lot of the time talking about getting more gender-neutral bathrooms on campus.”

Another idea was pushing for gender-neutral residence halls on campus, Hoffman said. A lot of schools have the option readily available but Western doesn’t offer it in many places, he said.

After collecting and analyzing the cards, as part of their independent study, the pair, along with help from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Alliance (LGBTA), coordinated an event held Tuesday in the Fairhaven Auditorium.

At the event, the 282 gender maps collected were on display all over the auditorium along with activities designed to spark discussion about gender, Gorrin said.

This event was part of a weekly night series that is usually every Wednesday, said Western junior and LGBTA coordinator Amber Aldrich.

LGBTA had no part in the project but helped out with contributions that were mostly budgetary, she said.

“I’m glad they did [the independent study] because gender has always been difficult for me to discuss and to define,” Aldrich said. “I did a gender map and I never thought to define it. I couldn’t decide if what I thought was what I’ve been told or what I’ve decided.”

Western senior and LGBTA program coordinator Melissa Jensen helped with the publicity of the project and helped get the word out. The club has a large budget, and wanted to help because it was a unique idea, she said

“Gender is a difficult thing to think about, let alone talk about,” Jensen said. “The turnout for the event was great and people were really talking about the idea.”

A lot of time and hard work was put into the whole event, Western sophomore Andrew Stewart said.

He is Hoffman’s roommate and the project has opened his eyes to the idea of gender, he said.

“Before I met Cory, I didn’t know about all the alternative views of gender in society,” Stewart said. “Some see it one way and others don’t; it’s not black and white. Watching the project come together taught me to be more open to gender and the realm of it.”

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