And he says he believes the proposed change in the University's non-discrimination policy would affect every student, not just those who are transgendered.
"Every member of Harvard's student body has a gender expression," he says.
David Seil, a Boston psychiatrist who has seen more than 250 transgendered patients, also says that there is a wide range of gender expression.
"Society seems to need to dichotomize gender, [but] many people don't fit at one end of the scale or another. People wander back and forth in their lifetimes," he says. "The evolution will have to be [toward] more flexibility [in terms of envisioning gender]."
Unlike Socarides, Seil says he believes that transgendered people should be protected under the University's non-discrimination policy.
'Plumbing Fixtures Are Plumbing Fixtures'
Critics of the proposal, however, argue that changing the policy would wreak havoc on the University's housing system and athletic teams.
Nangeroni, executive director of the International Foundation for Gender Education, admits that she doesn't have all the answers.
But she says it is important that people work together to find the best possible solutions.
"Plumbing fixtures are plumbing fixtures and they don't have any genders," she says. "If people feel unsafe in the bathroom then we need to have single bathrooms."
Nangeroni advocates allowing students to decide for themselves which housing is appropriate for them.
The University took that path last year, when Myers was a first-year. Though no policies were made or changed for his arrival, he was placed in a Greenough single and used an all-male bathroom at the end of his hall. The College did not inform the other students on Myers' hall of his biological sex, though he announced it to his proctor group in the fall of that year.
"It's been on a case-by-case basis," Epps says.
And although Nangeroni says the issue of athletic teams is more difficult, she adds that there are places where transgendered people are participating on teams based on their self-determined gender.
"That seems to me a positive trend," she says.
Riki A. Wilchins, executive director of the New York and D.C.-based Gender Pubic Advocacy Coalition, also says that people should "compete and live in the sex in which they live their normal daily lives."
"I don't know if we'll ever get to the point where there are no categories," she says. "But I do hope that we make significant progress toward a point where categories are not regulated so fiercely and people are not punished or discriminated against for moving from one to the other.