Article / Archive
Within hours of being sworn into office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that seeks to wholly challenge the legitimacy and jeopardize the safety of transgender and nonbinary Americans by enforcing a strict, binary, and immutable definition of gender. The order directs the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Prisons to mandate that incarcerated trans women reside in men’s prisons and detention centers and bars trans people from changing the gender designation on their identity documents.
The erasure of transgender identities is a top priority for the Trump administration. As the administration unfolds its agenda, it will only get worse. In the face of the rising tide of transphobia, as trans folks face greater barriers in accessing gender-affirming care, changing their identification documents, and receiving protection from discrimination, it is imperative that we feel protected in the environments that we choose for ourselves—those like the Columbia community. For this to happen, cisgender members of our community must make a simple choice: to either be complicit in the dehumanization of trans people, or to work to make Columbia a bastion of trans inclusion and acceptance.
As the co-president of GendeRev, Columbia’s affinity group for trans students, I write this piece to advocate for the well-being of trans students at our university. However, before Columbia can enable its trans students to thrive, it must first end its archaic policies that target and shame us. Trans activists and advocates at Columbia are forced to perform a double function: we must unflinchingly critique the deep flaws of the university, even as we work toward making it a place where trans people can thrive. In what follows, I describe the University policies that most frequently cause issues for trans students and what steps Columbia might take in order to let its trans population feel safe, included, and capable of success.
First, it is important to address Columbia’s approach toward students seeking gender-affirming care. Instead of being sent to an endocrinologist—a doctor who specializes in how hormones work in the body—students seeking hormone therapy at Columbia Health are sent to a physician who does not have the expertise to suggest alternative prescriptions when a medication isn’t working as it should. General physicians at Columbia Health do not have the expertise needed to fully inform students that there are multiple types of medication one can take for both feminizing and masculinizing hormone therapies.
Additionally, students are required to read and sign a form that highlights the risks of hormone therapies before they can be prescribed by Columbia Health, a requirement that shames and pathologizes trans students for seeking out necessary care. This guideline is not consistent with New York state policy, which does not require doctors to highlight the potential risks of gender-affirming care.
Though Columbia Health has an off-campus referral process, students seeking gender-affirming care should be directly sent to endocrinologists, preferably one who specializes in gender-affirming care, rather than the general physicians on their staff. Columbia should also remove barriers to care that are not legally necessary.
While many, but not all, trans students seek some variation of gender-affirming care, something that has emerged as a nearly universal struggle for Columbia’s trans community is the process of changing legal and preferred names. To update one’s legal name and see that change reflected in the Columbia University Student Information System, the University requires that a student presents two pieces of ID with their name on it. Already, this policy makes it harder to change your name on Student Services Online than it was to change the name on your passport under the Biden administration. At the same time, Trump’s executive order is making it more difficult for trans people to get accurate documents by freezing their passport applications. It will only become more and more difficult for students to get multiple forms of ID with their correct information.
Further, the preferred name system is deeply flawed. While one’s preferred name is what is visible on CourseWorks, LionMail, and the student directory, the housing system still uses students’ legal names. There is no reason that a resident adviser should know a student’s deadname, or for the housing portal to stubbornly display that deadname to students. Therefore, Columbia must reform its policies for name changing. It should revise the requirement for changing one’s legal name to only require the presentation of a single government-issued document and accept a court-certified copy of one’s name change as sufficient proof to change one’s legal name.
The third major challenge of being trans at Columbia is the amount of false information that exists about the number and locations of gender-neutral bathrooms. It’s a rite of passage for trans Columbia students: the desperate search for a gender-neutral bathroom in the middle of class, only to find that it’s not where it should be or is out of order. I’ve done it myself, planning my day around a trip to a particular bathroom listed on the map only to find that it doesn’t appear to exist at all. The Morningside campus already has a dearth of gender-neutral bathrooms, with many dorms, class buildings, and libraries containing none at all. It is both demeaning and completely unnecessary for Columbia’s map of accessible and gender-neutral bathrooms to provide students with incorrect information.
Worse, several dorm buildings only have multi-use, sex-segregated bathrooms, which means that housing options for trans students are artificially limited. For trans students who don’t feel comfortable using either the men’s or women’s bathrooms, it is a daily struggle and major inconvenience to locate and use the few gender-neutral bathrooms available. Most trans students feel the need to use gender-neutral bathrooms at some point in their undergraduate career, whether it’s because they are nonbinary or because of the all-too-justified fear that using the appropriate bathroom will put them at risk of encountering a transphobe. Columbia needs to dramatically expand the number of gender-neutral bathrooms on the Morningside campus and in its student dorms.
This has already happened at Barnard through the targeted repurposing and relabeling of existing bathrooms. Over the past decade, Barnard has worked to ensure the presence of gender-neutral bathrooms in nearly every building on its campus. The University ought to do the same for the Morningside campus to allow trans students to focus on their education, their friends, and their futures—not whether or not they will be able to find a bathroom that accommodates their needs.
At the crux of all of these issues is the lack of financial assistance provided by the University to support students through their transition—the resources are simply not here. Several of our peer institutions have already successfully established these resources. At Oxford University, for example, nearly all of its undergraduate colleges have a gender affirmation fund which provides students with financial assistance that they can use to purchase binders, breastforms, or other items necessary for students to feel at home in their gender presentation. Closer to home, Barnard’s Student Government Association has run a program for the last four years that sends students binders, free of charge. While this initiative represents progress for transmasculine students on Barnard’s campus, transfeminine students would benefit immensely from a similar program. Furthermore, it should not be the responsibility of the Student Governing Board to establish or fund such programs. Instead, it is the responsibility of the University to provide its students with the resources they need to be happy and healthy.
Along with the specific gender-affirming items referenced above, haircuts, clothes, and makeup don’t come cheap in New York; trans students attending one of the wealthiest universities in the world should not be made to feel that experimenting and achieving their desired gender presentation is impossibly expensive. Columbia should establish a gender-affirming fund or a similar program enabling students, especially those early on in their transition, to experiment with and affirm their identity.
These demands are not the end point of trans activism at Columbia, but only its beginning. Ideally, the implementation of these demands would address the major material challenges faced by trans students. However, trans students at Columbia face far more challenges than this op-ed can describe. I leave out all the cultural specificities, unspoken norms, and society-wide assumptions that alienate trans and genderqueer students from their peers, their professors, and their studies. I leave out the thorny questions that are raised when one turns their attention towards trans inclusion at Barnard—a self-described women’s college—or begins to pay attention to the specific needs of transfeminine and transmasculine students. I leave them out because the answers to these trickier questions will only be arrived at after more discussion and advocacy from within Columbia’s trans community and throughout the university. I hope this op-ed pushes you, the reader, to consider what actions you can take in defense of the trans people in your community as the country becomes an increasingly hostile environment for us. Let this piece serve as the beginning of a larger conversation and a university-wide push to protect our trans and genderqueer students.
Miriam Mason is a Columbia College senior double majoring in English and Gender Studies. She is a co-president of GendeRev.
Within hours of being sworn into office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that seeks to wholly challenge the legitimacy and jeopardize the safety of transgender and nonbinary Americans by enforcing a strict, binary, and immutable definition of gender. The order directs the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Prisons to mandate that incarcerated trans women reside in men’s prisons and detention centers and bars trans people from changing the gender designation on their identity documents.
The erasure of transgender identities is a top priority for the Trump administration. As the administration unfolds its agenda, it will only get worse. In the face of the rising tide of transphobia, as trans folks face greater barriers in accessing gender-affirming care, changing their identification documents, and receiving protection from discrimination, it is imperative that we feel protected in the environments that we choose for ourselves—those like the Columbia community. For this to happen, cisgender members of our community must make a simple choice: to either be complicit in the dehumanization of trans people, or to work to make Columbia a bastion of trans inclusion and acceptance.
As the co-president of GendeRev, Columbia’s affinity group for trans students, I write this piece to advocate for the well-being of trans students at our university. However, before Columbia can enable its trans students to thrive, it must first end its archaic policies that target and shame us. Trans activists and advocates at Columbia are forced to perform a double function: we must unflinchingly critique the deep flaws of the university, even as we work toward making it a place where trans people can thrive. In what follows, I describe the University policies that most frequently cause issues for trans students and what steps Columbia might take in order to let its trans population feel safe, included, and capable of success.
First, it is important to address Columbia’s approach toward students seeking gender-affirming care. Instead of being sent to an endocrinologist—a doctor who specializes in how hormones work in the body—students seeking hormone therapy at Columbia Health are sent to a physician who does not have the expertise to suggest alternative prescriptions when a medication isn’t working as it should. General physicians at Columbia Health do not have the expertise needed to fully inform students that there are multiple types of medication one can take for both feminizing and masculinizing hormone therapies.
Additionally, students are required to read and sign a form that highlights the risks of hormone therapies before they can be prescribed by Columbia Health, a requirement that shames and pathologizes trans students for seeking out necessary care. This guideline is not consistent with New York state policy, which does not require doctors to highlight the potential risks of gender-affirming care.
Though Columbia Health has an off-campus referral process, students seeking gender-affirming care should be directly sent to endocrinologists, preferably one who specializes in gender-affirming care, rather than the general physicians on their staff. Columbia should also remove barriers to care that are not legally necessary.
While many, but not all, trans students seek some variation of gender-affirming care, something that has emerged as a nearly universal struggle for Columbia’s trans community is the process of changing legal and preferred names. To update one’s legal name and see that change reflected in the Columbia University Student Information System, the University requires that a student presents two pieces of ID with their name on it. Already, this policy makes it harder to change your name on Student Services Online than it was to change the name on your passport under the Biden administration. At the same time, Trump’s executive order is making it more difficult for trans people to get accurate documents by freezing their passport applications. It will only become more and more difficult for students to get multiple forms of ID with their correct information.
Further, the preferred name system is deeply flawed. While one’s preferred name is what is visible on CourseWorks, LionMail, and the student directory, the housing system still uses students’ legal names. There is no reason that a resident adviser should know a student’s deadname, or for the housing portal to stubbornly display that deadname to students. Therefore, Columbia must reform its policies for name changing. It should revise the requirement for changing one’s legal name to only require the presentation of a single government-issued document and accept a court-certified copy of one’s name change as sufficient proof to change one’s legal name.
The third major challenge of being trans at Columbia is the amount of false information that exists about the number and locations of gender-neutral bathrooms. It’s a rite of passage for trans Columbia students: the desperate search for a gender-neutral bathroom in the middle of class, only to find that it’s not where it should be or is out of order. I’ve done it myself, planning my day around a trip to a particular bathroom listed on the map only to find that it doesn’t appear to exist at all. The Morningside campus already has a dearth of gender-neutral bathrooms, with many dorms, class buildings, and libraries containing none at all. It is both demeaning and completely unnecessary for Columbia’s map of accessible and gender-neutral bathrooms to provide students with incorrect information.
Worse, several dorm buildings only have multi-use, sex-segregated bathrooms, which means that housing options for trans students are artificially limited. For trans students who don’t feel comfortable using either the men’s or women’s bathrooms, it is a daily struggle and major inconvenience to locate and use the few gender-neutral bathrooms available. Most trans students feel the need to use gender-neutral bathrooms at some point in their undergraduate career, whether it’s because they are nonbinary or because of the all-too-justified fear that using the appropriate bathroom will put them at risk of encountering a transphobe. Columbia needs to dramatically expand the number of gender-neutral bathrooms on the Morningside campus and in its student dorms.
This has already happened at Barnard through the targeted repurposing and relabeling of existing bathrooms. Over the past decade, Barnard has worked to ensure the presence of gender-neutral bathrooms in nearly every building on its campus. The University ought to do the same for the Morningside campus to allow trans students to focus on their education, their friends, and their futures—not whether or not they will be able to find a bathroom that accommodates their needs.
At the crux of all of these issues is the lack of financial assistance provided by the University to support students through their transition—the resources are simply not here. Several of our peer institutions have already successfully established these resources. At Oxford University, for example, nearly all of its undergraduate colleges have a gender affirmation fund which provides students with financial assistance that they can use to purchase binders, breastforms, or other items necessary for students to feel at home in their gender presentation. Closer to home, Barnard’s Student Government Association has run a program for the last four years that sends students binders, free of charge. While this initiative represents progress for transmasculine students on Barnard’s campus, transfeminine students would benefit immensely from a similar program. Furthermore, it should not be the responsibility of the Student Governing Board to establish or fund such programs. Instead, it is the responsibility of the University to provide its students with the resources they need to be happy and healthy.
Along with the specific gender-affirming items referenced above, haircuts, clothes, and makeup don’t come cheap in New York; trans students attending one of the wealthiest universities in the world should not be made to feel that experimenting and achieving their desired gender presentation is impossibly expensive. Columbia should establish a gender-affirming fund or a similar program enabling students, especially those early on in their transition, to experiment with and affirm their identity.
These demands are not the end point of trans activism at Columbia, but only its beginning. Ideally, the implementation of these demands would address the major material challenges faced by trans students. However, trans students at Columbia face far more challenges than this op-ed can describe. I leave out all the cultural specificities, unspoken norms, and society-wide assumptions that alienate trans and genderqueer students from their peers, their professors, and their studies. I leave out the thorny questions that are raised when one turns their attention towards trans inclusion at Barnard—a self-described women’s college—or begins to pay attention to the specific needs of transfeminine and transmasculine students. I leave them out because the answers to these trickier questions will only be arrived at after more discussion and advocacy from within Columbia’s trans community and throughout the university. I hope this op-ed pushes you, the reader, to consider what actions you can take in defense of the trans people in your community as the country becomes an increasingly hostile environment for us. Let this piece serve as the beginning of a larger conversation and a university-wide push to protect our trans and genderqueer students.
Miriam Mason is a Columbia College senior double majoring in English and Gender Studies. She is a co-president of GendeRev.
