Transgender students are left behind
College is hard, and probably always will be. There’s no problem with that – classes and new classmates and new dorms and food that maybe isn’t quite up to par with homecooked meals are the common complaints.
Those issues are normal, expected, and they’re the issues you can find online when you search “Help, I’m going to college.”
Those are problems that can be solved or worked through easily.
But who is there to warn transgender kids that when they go to any bathroom, they’re going to be standing between the two, looking back and forth between the doors and trying to figure out whether they have the courage to go into the correct one, or will go into the other and feel a deep, burning pit of shame in their chest while they pee?
Who is there to correct pronouns for those students who are too shy to do it on their own?
Who is there to walk up to our professors at the beginning of each and every semester and give them a crash course on what the word “pronoun” even means – or tell them just to listen to the name they’re given and not ask where it came from?
The answer is simple: no one.
It’s easy to sweep transgender students under the rug in colleges and universities, especially when – according to every statistic that exists – there are so few of them. The fact still stands however, that transgender students exist, and they deserve the same comforts as the cis-gender students they are studying alongside of every day of their lives.
No one is there to help these students feel comfortable in their own skins, which seems like something that should come as part of a package deal along with the thousands of dollars in tuition transgender students pay to attend universities.
Transgender students have to deal with enough in their home lives. That haven so many cis-gender students claim they get when they come to school seems like an impossible dream. The issues are easy to fix, yet so many schools seem incapable of it.
All administration has to do is acknowledge that transgender people exist.
That seems easy. It almost seems too easy, and many people will say it is already being done.
Salisbury University has a single gender-neutral restroom that exists in Holloway Hall. To those not familiar with the area, Holloway Hall is on the very edge of campus. Few classes are taught in that building, and the restroom itself is on the second floor (where no classes are taught) in the back wing.
There are no transgender-specific resources on campus, often lumped into the general “LGBT resources” tab on the counseling website, which contains links to the same websites that can be found with a cursory Google search.
Salisbury University is a specific school, but it isn’t the only one.
If one school is doing it, chances are others are in the same or even impossibly worse situations.
Transgender students have to be acknowledged. What is at a risk is the current statistic of 41 percent of transgender people attempting or committing suicide will remain at that staggering number or get worse.
Alex Heil is a freshman at Salisbury University.
Note: Salisbury University lists on its website 16 gender-neutral restroom facilities located throughout the campus. In addition, the new Sea Gull Stadium concourse offers a gender-neutral facility that's available on game days. The new Guerreri Academic Commons, which will be open for fall semester 2016, also includes two gender-neutral restrooms.