Despite scholarship describing college campuses as becoming more affirming of queer and trans students, queer and trans people continue to be under attack legislatively, recently in growing intensity, such as Florida's “Don't Say Gay” law. These political and legal movements will have deleterious effects on these communities for years to come. However, queer and trans communities have always fought for their existence in the face of cisheterosexist violence. In this chapter, the scholars contend higher education professionals at every level have potential to be advocates of and support the holistic well-being and academic success of queer and trans students. Building off decades of traditions, theories, and strategies of activists and changemakers, namely those from multiply marginalized communities, the authors highlight three central ideas for those working in postsecondary education: 1) supporting students' positive meaning making of their identities, 2) creating and fostering counterspaces/counternarratives, and 3) collectively organizing for liberation.
TopWho We Are And How We Come To This Work
In writing about this topic, we were deeply reflective of the positions of privilege that we hold, as well as the challenges that we face in being agents of social institutions (i.e., colleges and universities) that have long upheld the marginalization of queer and trans communities (Duran & Miller, 2022). For this reason, we see it as crucial to describe who we are and how we have come to the work of advocating for queer and trans communities on college campuses, especially in light of recent sociopolitical shifts. Thus, in the sections that follow, we offer brief insights into our positioning, including our social location and motivations to engage in social justice advocacy.
Steve Lemerand
Steve (he/him) is a white, bisexual/pansexual, cisgender man. He aims to recognize the ways his identities privilege him and resist these systems of oppression within and beyond queer communities through a bottom-up organizing approach to scholarship by focusing first on the well-being of the most marginalized individuals (Jobin-Leeds, 2012). Steve is a PhD student whose research interests include queerness in postsecondary education environments and the performativity of gender and sexuality. As a nonmonosexual person, he is attuned to the complexity, multiplicity, and entanglement within identities and experiences, leading him to embrace the ‘messiness’ of studying gender or sexuality while acknowledging that may never be wholly possible within academia. He is also a practitioner within an institutional unit focused on multicultural affairs, and thus, an example of the intended audience of this chapter. Steve comes to this work with simultaneously strong beliefs that institutions of higher education a) can perpetuate and exacerbate violent cisheterosexism and b) possess the potential to be liberatory catalysts in the collective pursuit of a more queer- and trans-affirming society when grounded in abolitionist and mutual aid frameworks (Boggs et al., 2019; Spade, 2020).
Antonio Duran
Antonio (he/him/él) is a cisgender Latino (Mexican) man who is constantly reflective on his identities as someone who is a first-generation college student and comes from a working-class background. Relevant to this chapter, he is particularly cognizant of how he advocates for people who hold multiple minoritized identities on college campuses. He is both aware of his areas of privilege (e.g., being a non-Black Person of Color and identifying as cisgender) and knows that he can advocate for others by drawing upon his experiential knowledge as a Queer Person of Color. He comes to the work of social justice advocacy recognizing that he can engage substantial change at colleges and universities that continue to reify heterosexism, trans oppression, and other forms of marginalization.
Contextualizing The Experiences Of Queer And Trans Students In The Mid-2020S
As we prepared to write this chapter, we were reminded of the histories of queer and trans college students who have long challenged cisheteronormativity and advocated for their rights—both on campuses (e.g., Beemyn, 2003; Coley, 2018; Mobley et al., 2021) and beyond (Swank & Fahs, 2012). Thus, although the current moment when we were composing this contribution presented unique challenges for queer and trans students navigating higher education, these communities have always been a target of those who have regulated anyone who does not fit the norm. For the purposes of this present manuscript, we find it pertinent to describe what college students are facing as they encounter the effects of anti-queer and -trans policies.