Every fall semester, usually in early October, we begin to see students in the Pit asking for signatures to get their names on the ballot for Mr. and Miss UNC.
If we’re being honest, Mr. and Miss UNC is a popularity contest hidden behind the veil of “public service,” all the while slathered in gender binarism. Let’s reform it.
If Mr. and Miss UNC’s biggest goal is to give students a chance to represent UNC and to complete large service projects, let’s do away with the gender binary. Instead of having males compete with males and vice versa, we should simply have students compete with students, regardless of gender.
Mr. and Miss UNC innately exclude a portion of the student body who refute the traditional gender roles and titles society places on them.
To those who suggest that this would be irrevocably changing a UNC tradition, this has been an evolving alumni aspect of Alumni Weekend. They invented the tradition of homecoming king and queen in the late 1930s, “with the king being the most popular professor on campus and the queen being the most popular female student,” according to the General Alumni Association.
It took the GAA more than 60 years — in the early 2000s — to realize that misogynist messages were being conveyed with their differential student/professor categories based on gender. As the GAA continues to evolve its homecoming tradition to reflect the state of our culture, it only makes sense to Mr. and Miss UNC and replace it with a less cis-gendered alternative.
