The nexus of trans collegians’ pronouns and name practices navigating campus space(s): Beyond the binary.

Abstract

The purpose of our study is to explore the nexus between trans students' experiences with pronoun usage and naming practices through campus interactions and navigations of campus. Grounded in a Deleuzian conception of becoming, our analysis explores the multiple and simultaneous ways that pronoun use effects trans student's experiences on campus. As a theoretical orientation, becoming centers the multiplicitous and entangled narratives, experiences, and negotiations of pronoun usage and naming practices with the trans students in our studies, disrupting the dominant culture. Our study's findings contribute to the literature on trans collegians' experiences navigating genderist campus environments, as well as theoretical and methodological considerations for centering trans, nonbinary, and agender student narratives. Specifically, our analysis of student narratives emphasized the ways in which students simultaneously experience isolation and affirmation, the ways in which policies designed to affirm and support trans students could also work to silence them, as well as how students practiced resilience and built relationships within these contexts.

Safety strategies and the impact of misgendering among nonbinary college students: A minority stress perspective.

“…Our results extend and elaborate on minority stress theory by demonstrating the nuanced experiences of anticipated rejection and misgendering among nonbinary college students. Similar to previous findings on TNB populations broadly (Rood et al, 2016), nonbinary college students commonly experience the proximal stressor of anticipated rejection in university settings (Flint et al, 2023). However, instead of anticipated rejection, we labeled this phenomenon hypervigilance to more explicitly denote the experience of constantly being vigilant and assessing one’s safety.…”

“…Anticipating threats to one’s safety was accompanied by feelings of anxiety, stress, hyperawareness, as well as irritability, anger, and a depressed mood. Nonbinary individuals have reported being hypervigilant about how their gender is being perceived by others and self-monitoring their gendered behaviors and expressions in an attempt to stay safe (Flint et al, 2023; Matsuno et al, 2022).…”