Coppin for Glory
Jennifer Wiederick

In reading the article on Rhiannon Coppin's desire for gender-neutral washrooms, two thoughts immediately came to mind.

1. If I were a member of the transgendered community, I would feel insulted that Coppin is using a cause that's very personal to me to inflate the importance of her own little issues. 2. If Coppin really does have such strong issues with gender labels, I would argue that her problems are bigger than any unisex washroom can fix.

The Peak neglected to include what motivated Coppin's desire to alter the status of the facilities at SFU (other than her obviously unending desire to make things better for the transgendered population - sarcasm fully intended).

I'll draw from the August 23 Province (the URL for the article written about her there is http://www.canada.com/vancouver/theprovince/story.asp). If Rhiannon Coppin is really concerned with social issues at the school as opposed to her own perceived social dysfunction, then I'll be a monkey's uncle. If she has that much of a problem being a woman in a male dominated field and really wants to be one of the boys, the technology is available, she should have a sex change. Other than that, perhaps she should contact HCCC for some counselling instead of launching an embarrassing and misguided social crusade.

Coppin is quoted as saying: "I'm in engineering. I'm very good at it. Most of my friends are guys. I enjoy men's company, yet a lot of the time, as peers and co-workers, they don't accept me as one of them. They're sticking me into a gender-specific idea of what a woman should be."

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