To help create a more welcoming environment for transgender and gender noncomforming students, colleges and universities nationwide are offering gender-neutral accommodations and restrooms — and allowing students to pick new names for themselves.
According to the advocacy organization Campus Pride, at least 141 schools, including large public schools in California, New York and Pennsylvania, now allow students to choose a first name for internal records, such as course rosters and directories. The University of Vermont (UVM) and Hampshire College have taken that a step farther, letting students who don't identify with the name or sex officially assigned to them at birth choose both a first name and pronoun to represent themselves on campus. UVM offers gender neutral options, including "ze," "they" or first name only.
Having a say over how you would like others to address you is a big step toward public recognition and acceptance for gender nonconforming and genderqueer people, says Sand Chang, PhD, chair of the APA Committee on Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity.
"Self-identification is more than a person's legal and birth identification. This is recognizing that people are who they say they are," Chang says.
Terms like genderqueer emerged in the mid-1990s, and were quickly adopted by generations X and Y. But institutions are just catching up in assisting gender nonconforming people, sometimes due to needing to update information technology systems but largely due to society's rigid belief in and adherence to a binary gender system, which often leads to discrimination, Chang says.
It took years for UVM to institute the pronoun options in its records systems, says Dot Brauer, who directs UVM's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning and Advocate Center, and who pushed for the change. "If you start at the premise that language is an important driver of social change, it helps you identify this as something meaningful you can do to support a cohort of students who are saying, ‘I don't like labels,'" Brauer says.
An APA task force is writing practice guidelines that are expected to be released by early next year to help psychologists who work with transgender and gender nonconforming people, including recommendations on how to address them.
"Though there's been positive movement in the past few years, psychologists and the mental health field overall still have a long way to go in trying to understand the experiences of gender nonconforming people," Chang says. "We want to promote awareness that people of all gender identities and expressions, including those outside the binary, deserve recognition, respect, and affirmative care."
— Stacy Lu
