Mean-mugged, Misgendered, and Marginalized

Using someone’s chosen name or preferred pronouns may seem like a small gesture, but it has a powerful and lasting impact. “Calling people their right names and pronouns, I don’t see it as political correctness,” says Maurer. “I see it as suicide prevention.”

Beyond the Classroom

Similar to classroom settings, TGNB students often struggle to feel safe in their own homes. Thanks to first-year random housing assignments, trans students frequently end up living with a transphobic roommate. Eli Blodgett, now a junior stage management major at Syracuse University, always struggled with university housing. During his first year of college, Blodgett spoke to his roommate only a handful of times — in part due to the roommate’s reaction to his identity. Once, he remembers his roommate put in their dorm-floor group chat that she needed a lightbulb. Blodgett saw the message, handed her his spare, but not one word exchanged between the two. For his second year, Blodgett sought out an introverted roommate (like himself) for an on-campus apartment. Blodgett wanted to live with someone outside of his own department since he spent the majority of his day with them. He eventually asked a peer from his writing-intensive class with whom he had worked on projects over the semester. She agreed.

That summer became a formative time for Blodgett. With the support of his chosen family, he publicly came out with a new name and pronouns on social media, including the Facebook group with his entire department (students, faculty, and staff). Blodgett, who identifies as a fat, transmasculine, queer person with a disability, began to experiment with his clothing, wearing navy button-up shirts and sage-green sweaters instead of floral skirts.

Coming to back school, Blodgett continued to explore his transness, becoming more comfortable with his identity. But his roommate wasn’t. One night, Blodgett was lying down in his room with the lights off. He heard footsteps walking up the stairs that eventually passed his room. “And she has this flag in the window and everyone thinks I’m gay,” his roommate complained on the phone, referring to Blodgett’s trans flag he hung up in his window. Blodgett stayed quiet.

After that night, Blodgett stopped inviting friends over — especially those who were “queer-looking,” a similar experience to his high school days, when he would avoid bringing any friends home to protect them from his unaccepting parents. Blodgett struggled to feel comfortable in shared spaces, quickly making dinner to eat in his room, avoiding the living room, and never confronting his roommate even with the smallest inconveniences. Blodgett didn’t even want his roommate to look at him; the look of disgust on her face made him feel ostracized, watched, and policed. His presumed safe space was no longer safe. “It’s one of those things where you have to think how all of your actions are perceived,” Blodgett explains. “I’m considerate of how my actions are going to impact other people, but I don’t like to think about how my existence is going to affect someone else.”

Blodgett went to housing service before winter break with the hope of moving out the next semester. When requesting a housing change, he struggled to explain the situation since he didn’t want to bluntly state that his roommate was transphobic in fear of retaliation. The staffer asked if they had had a conversation surrounding the issues. When Blodgett said they didn’t, the staffer told him that there was nothing he could do.

Universities around the country have vastly different housing policies. At SU, there are no online resources or guidelines for trans students navigating housing services. Other schools such as Ithaca College, an hour away from SU and listed as one of the top ten trans-supportive colleges and universities nationally by The Advocate, place their Trans Housing Policy online, allow trans students to request accommodations for their specific needs with priority, and handle each case individually as each student has different interests and/or intersectional identities. A trans student may want to live in a single or a four-bedroom style apartment. They might want to be a part of a living-learning community not specifically for those of trans and queer experiences. Trans students may request to live off-campus due to transphobic experiences they had with roommates. "Some schools just pair people up but not everyone wants a trans roommate," Maurer says. “Our process allows them to tell us what they need and then they get priority because every single person is different.”

An Absence of Counselors With a Trans Perspective, Understanding

Counseling services are not always safe spaces for trans students either. A 2019 study from the Journal of American College Health, states that universal health services are failing to meet the needs of transgender students. Many students reported that providers misgendered them, addressed them by the wrong name, and asked inappropriate questions about their gender identity causing transgender students to dissuade from returning to health care services.

Ionah Scully, a Ph.D. candidate studying cultural foundations of education at SU, remembers the difficulties they experienced trying to seek treatment. The health center denied their therapy because they were deemed “high risk.” They had just started their first month as a doctoral student and came out of treatment for an eating disorder, which caused them to be severely underweight and suffer from a low heart rate. They had suffered two heart attacks the previous summer. “I feel like eating disorders are this contradiction to my identity,” says Scully, who identifies as non-binary and two-spirit (a Native, all-encompassing term created in the late ‘90s with intentions to reclaim their pre-colonial gender norms similar to queer). “I shouldn’t be succumbing to these white standards of beauty and body. I don’t. It comes from wanting to disappear and not to take up space when I’m told I’m not supposed to.”

They eventually began to recover and got referred to their current therapist in Ithaca, who they drive an hour bi-monthly to meet. While this therapist, who happens to be queer, has helped them begin to recover, Scully still feels like their intersectional identities and issues aren’t fully recognized.

Other trans students also need counseling services to diagnose them with gender dysmorphia to access hormones and gender reassignment surgery, which not all counselors possess the training to do. “A lot of us in mental health don’t get training around these issues, and it happens often where people come in and they’re like ‘I need a letter for top surgery’ and you don’t really know what top surgery is,” Thigpen explains.

Role of LGBTQIA+ Resource Centers

With the challenges they experience, many trans students turn to LGBTQIA+ resource centers as the safe haven on campus. Maysam Seraji, a part-time senior studying political science at SU, became involved as a student staffer during a period of their life where they were still exploring their transness. They later became a community coordinator, organizing programs such as Fusion, a monthly discussion group for queer students of color. “The resource center just changed my whole life,” Seraji says. “This pocket of people cared about each other. We cared about learning about it, and teaching each other. It shaped me so much in all these fundamental ways.”

While these centers provide students with more comprehensive resources (like events, guides, and community), they also serve as an underground gateway to information from who’s the best counselor for trans students at the health center, which professors might be transphobic, and tips on gaining access to hormone therapy.

Some universities also implement innovative programming to support trans and queer students. At Washington State University, the Q Center offers both drop-in and scheduled counseling services to all students. Rutgers University’s Center for Social Justice Education and LGBT Communities provides information for how students can access hormones with their student health care plan and grants aid to trans students in emergency situations. Kansas State University created a program that connects trans folks on campus to local and regional trans and human rights groups to allow for opportunities for community building, employment, and mentorship.

At many universities, however, trans students continue to be underserved and undersupported. Many LGBTQIA+ resource centers, like UC Irvine’s (as stated in an external assessment report), continue to be underfunded, leaving the staff unable to find the monetary support needed to aid queer and trans students. Resources for students may be also inaccessible for students with differing levels of ability. At predominately white institutions, trans spaces are often centered upon whiteness — causing trans students of color to feel ostracized within their own community.

Though trans students may face heightening violence and increased mental-health issues compared to their cis colleagues, they continue to persevere. “It sounds very doom and gloom but most TGNB students don’t just survive, they thrive,” Maurer says. “So despite all the odds, this is a population of folks who are resilient, resourceful, tenacious, determined. These are all skills we’ve had to cultivate to get all the way through college.”

My college experience came to an abrupt end in late March as the global COVID-19 pandemic began to engulf everyone’s daily lives, creating a “new normal” filled with social distancing, Zoom calls, and uncertainty. As home for me — like many LGBTQ students — remains a place of constant misgendering and unacceptance, I took refuge at a friend’s apartment where five people shared a three-bedroom space. My mornings changed. I woke up, and it was already the afternoon. I missed my first class, but luckily I watched a recording of the lecture. My body ached, my mind felt numb, and I felt lost in another depressive episode. I mentally prepared myself to get out of the bed I shared with my friend, and after an hour of mental reassurance, I did. I didn’t change and continued lounging in an oversized hoodie and sweatpants.

I logged onto my computer and began organizing the agenda for a digital meeting I had for MARGINS, the mentorship program I co-established for students of color and LGBTQ+ students in my department. That day, more than others, I was reflective. “I think I’m going to change my name,” I said, turning to one of my roommates sitting across the living room. She smiled at me, knowing I’d been contemplating this for months now.

A couple of days later, I got ready like I used to do. I applied makeup with the same blush, soft highlighter, and lipgloss. I rummaged through my luggage and decided to wear a dark, neutral checkered jacket over a ribbed tank top with a mid-length denim skirt. I walked outside. I quickly deflected the sunlight from my eyes with my arm. It was the first time I left my apartment in two weeks. My friends took my picture on the side of our apartment building, and we walked back inside to quarantine.

Looking at the pictures, I grinned and quickly posted them on Instagram and Twitter: “my name is river now,” I wrote in the caption. “as i began to live my life more authentically, i decided to look towards nature for inspiration. river — a free-flowing source of water that serves as a passage between lakes, seas, and oceans — is an in-between state, with no clear start or end, without restrictions to a binary.”