Running Head: HELPING TRANSGENDER STUDENTS LIVING IN RESIDENCE HALLS 1

Helping Transgender Students to be Comfortable in Living in the Residence Halls

Samantha Latham

Northern Illinois University

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For my Graduate Assistantship I am the Graduate Residence Hall Director of Stevenson

B Tower. In the tower there is a wide range of students who live all together on each of the

floors. They range from freshman, to graduating seniors, to transfer student, and graduate

students. On one of these floors lives a student who identifies as transgender. Before the school

year even started I was contacted by the Gender & Sexuality Resource Center (GSRC) because

one of the students that was living in B Tower wanted to contact their Community Advisor (CA)

to let them know their preferred gender. I was more than happy to help so I passed on the CAs

information to the Director of the GSRC so that the student would be able to communicate with

their CA.

It was not until a couple weeks into the semester that I was able to interact with the

transgender student mentioned above. He came to me to talk about a mailing issue. He had

ordered something and had it shopped to Stevenson using his preferred name. He informed me

that the mailing package tracker said that it had arrived but he has yet to receive a mailing

package slip in his mailbox. I informed him that I would look into it for him and see if I would

be able to locate his mailing package for him.

From there I contacted my supervisor and asked her what we could do for him since in

the system where the mailing packages are logged it has his legal name listed and not his

preferred name. Since the mailing package arrived under his preferred name it was not logged

properly because only his legal name was present in the system. My supervisor wondered if

there was a way for us to change it in our systems. It is not something that we can just go in and

edit the names ourselves, it has to go through a channel of programs in order for something to be

changed. We also made sure that on his mailbox his preferred and legal name were now both

written on the mailbox to avoid him not getting his mail.

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My supervisor talked to the right people and they were able to change our program,

(called Front Desk Buddy), and now when someone looks up someone who has a preferred name

on the screen it will show the desk worker the preferred name and also the legal name. This will

ensure that this problem will not occur in the future. Attached to the end of the paper is an

example of how this change looks in our program. After this change was made I informed the

student of the change that was made and ensured him that if he ordered something again using

his preferred name, that he would not run into the same problem.

In the reading that we had for this week there was not much said about transgender

students, at least in my opinion. The material that was presented though, was very

straightforward and directly to the point. That made it easy to understand and easy to apply it to

any real life situation that we have. The situation described above can best be related to Brent

Bilodeaus model. His model did not have much to it and was very clean cut, but he was able to

make what he wanted to say apparent. The part of the model that this student is in is,

Developing transgender social identity by creating a support network of people who know and

accept that one is gender variant (Evans, Forney, Guido, Patton & Renn, 2010, p.343). The

student went through the motions to actively make sure that he knew what people to talk to in

order to make sure that his time on campus will go as smoothly as possible.

Taking an active measure to make sure that everything that you will need for the year is

settled is not something most college students would take part in. They would not have

contacted the CA before the semester even started or would have contacted me when there was a

situation at hand. Most students wait until the problem has exploded, and that is the time when

they seek help from others. The student mentioned above did not wait for the explosion, he

made sure that he talked to the right people and that they would be able to help him in case
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another problem would arise in the future. So in the students network of support he has the

GSRC, myself, his CA, and the advisors of the various organizations that I know he is a part of

there to support him fully in whatever it is he may need help with.

Before the student even was on campus, and the GSRC contacted me, I did not know

much about what the GSRC had to offer. In order to better inform myself, and to make sure that

I knew all that I could to help the student that was living in my tower, I went and gave myself a

tour of the GSRC website. It amazed me what the GSRC all had to offer for the students on

campus. On their website they have a section just to help transgender students. Once I clicked

there it lead me to an abundance of resources, most of them on how to make sure their preferred

name is the name that is recognized by the University. This opened my eyes up real wide

because it made me realize just how much these students have to go through just to make sure

that their true identity is the one that is recognized by the University. The legality of why this

must happen is understandable, but it seems to me that there must be a better and easier way

people can go about this process.

There is so much more that I would like to know about the Trans* community. For

example just from what I wrote in the last sentence what does the * in Trans* stand for? I am

sure that there is a meaning behind why it is written that way. Sadly most of what I know is from

the media, and that should not be the only source I know something from. I will admit to

watching I am Cait, and there are some things that the show has taught me, but there are others

that seem exaggerated in order to get the ratings that they want. I would be open to reading more

in order to better educate myself on this topic, hopefully then I will feel like I have enough

knowledge to better help the students that I work with now and in the future.
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Transitioning back to the section where the theory/model was talked about, for this

student I can only say that I saw evidence of him being in the stage of the model that I

mentioned. I do not know him well enough at this point in time to determine whether or not he

can identify with other stages in that model or not. As mentioned, I said that it was a fairly

straightforward model. It seems that there could be more information for each of the stages,

besides just a one sentence statement about what the stage is about. At this point it gets the point

across, but if the author truly wants the best understanding then they will probably want to add

some more detail to what was said in order to inform the readers even better.

What this situation made me come to the conclusion about is that coming into the college

setting there are going to be many transgender students who are at various stages of their

transition. With the student that I worked with, he already knew about the resources available to

him. He took it upon himself to contact the people that he needed to in order to get what he

wanted done. Other students may not be at the same point in their life as he was, so working

with those students I will need to make sure that they have all the right resources that they may

need. This made me realize that at each new campus I work on I will need to become familiar

with all the resources that the campus has to offer. This is always going to be helpful because I

never know who is going to walk through my office door or what kind of help they may need.

One last concept that working with this student has brought to my attention is that I want to be

Ally trained again. I had gone through Ally training in my undergrad and that was an eye

opening experience to go through. I want to make sure that the students that I work with know

that I am there to help them to the best of my ability and being an Ally is the best way to show

those identifying students, that I am there for them and want to help. If going through an

additional training will get me to that place, then I am more than willing to do so.
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This is the example of the program that I mentioned above. This is purely an example

and is not in any way a real person. I just wanted you to be able to see the change made visually.
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References

Evans, N. J., Forney, D. S., Guido, F. M., Patton, L. D., & Renn, K. A. (2010). Student

development in college: Theory, research, and practice. (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA:

Jossey-Bass.