Sitting in a campus conference room facing a dozen senior administrators, Max Strassfeld was more than a little nervous. The graduate student in religious studies was stepping into the gender-identity spotlight for the first time. “I’d never said, ‘I’m trans—let me be really vulnerable and tell you all about myself today,’” Strassfeld recalls. “It was extraordinarily emotional.”
It helped that across the table, the vice provost for student affairs was listening attentively. “Their stories were very moving and poignant,” Greg Boardman says of the presentation he heard last winter by a panel of six gay, bisexual and transgender students, and a straight ally. “They were speaking about their own experiences in the hopes of educating us, and I don’t think there was a person in the room who didn’t feel that we could do a better job of supporting these students and being more aware of the difficulties they face.”
At a time when Wall Street and Silicon Valley firms like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wachovia, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have added health benefits that cover sexual reassignment surgery, transgender students are emerging from years of hidden existence to exercise a new visibility and voice on campuses nationwide. In recognition of this societal sea change, Stanford in September added two words to the categories protected by its Statement of Nondiscriminatory Policy: gender identity. Some 150 universities already had that protection in place.
The change is more than symbolic, says Ben Davidson, director of the LGBT Community Resources Center. “It’s important because it signals to students, as well as faculty, staff, alumni and prospective students, that Stanford has a real desire to meet the needs of all members of our community. Although we still have a very small number of transgender students, my office receives more inquiries every year from transgender applicants about what life would be like on campus.”
Today, when dorms or student groups want to learn more about queer issues—“queer” being the term used widely by gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and genderqueer youth—the center sends out savvy student speakers who volunteer for its Safe and Open Spaces at Stanford (SOSAS) program.
“We ask panelists to lighten up—to show that [being queer] isn’t scary, that it’s about this person living a life,” says senior Katherine Roubos, who eschews conventional female or male labels to identify as genderqueer. She helped convene the students who met with senior administrators to talk about the thorny problems trans students encounter in housing and health care. “You have to be pretty secure in order to speak up,” Roubos says. “And last year we had enough trans-identified or genderqueer students who felt like they were in a place where they were safe, and who also felt compelled to be vocal.”
The first task was clarifying what transgender means and why trans people often are stigmatized and misunderstood. Through the lenses of their own experience, panelists explained that trans people either don’t identify with the gender assigned at birth or feel they somehow are between genders. Some trans people undergo expensive surgery or take hormones, but many do not. Some are lesbian, gay or bisexual, but many are not. Being transgender is not about sex; it is about gender expression, which is about human behavior.
Joni Meadows (not her real name), ’07, suggests that gender is “a very complex and evolving phenomenon.” When she enrolled at Stanford, Meadows was male—a self-described “fairly well-adjusted heterosexual man.” Like other undergraduates, she found college was “a time of intense personal growth.” She also found herself developing close friendships with LGBT students. By drawing into a co-op that had an unofficial gender-blind roommate policy, Meadows was able to live with supportive female friends as she began to cross-dress, wearing dresses and makeup one day and sporting a full beard the next. “For a solid two years, my gender identity was vague, even to myself,” Meadows told the administrators. Ultimately, she began taking hormones. “And in my sophomore summer, I transitioned from male to female,” she says, eyes held steady, fingering the delicate white flowers woven into her braids.
“I learned that transgender really transcends gender categories,” says Patricia Karlin-Neumann, senior associate dean for religious life, recalling the day she heard of Meadows’s life journey. “Understanding something about identity is everyone’s path in the University, and for these students, it just took a somewhat different turn.” The Reform rabbi pauses. “I think all of us who were there felt a little bit like we were in the presence of the sacred.”
Four years ago, Karlin-Neumann was making the rounds of prospective colleges with her daughter, and on a tour at Wesleyan University, their student guide mentioned that there was a transgender dorm. Wesleyan is among some 30 U.S. colleges that offer gender-neutral housing options, according to the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition. At Stanford, where Meadows says some transgender students live in “dreadful housing situations,” the Gender Identity Task Force began meeting in October to ensure that the housing draw complies with the revised University statement on nondiscrimination. A gender-neutral housing option will be piloted in 2008-09.
Nationwide, some 140 universities also have designated gender-neutral restrooms on their campuses; the LGBT-CRC is having a map of facilities at Stanford printed. “It just doesn’t occur to people that this is a need, until you tell them what it’s like to walk into a woman’s bathroom and get yelled at because of how you look,” says Roubos. “I know where all the gender-neutral bathrooms are, and I will go out of my way to use them because some days I look kind of like a dude.”
Before she graduated, Meadows met with Vaden Health Center clinicians and with director Ira Friedman to clarify that hormone treatment and monitoring, blood work and counseling were spelled out in the insurance benefits available to trans students. “If I’m a Stanford student and exploring transitioning, am I going to have care at Vaden and CAPS (Counseling and Psychological Services) commensurate with that of other students?” Friedman asks rhetorically. “The answer is yes.” He notes that Vaden offers students a Sexual and Gender Identity Exploration Group.
When Strassfeld arrived at Stanford last year, he was surprised to find that “there weren’t more ‘out’ students.” He checked out the LGBT-CRC, and “one of my first questions to [Meadows] was, ‘So, where are the trans students?’ And she said, ‘Well, they’re stealth.’”
Because Strassfeld lives off campus, he is making a stand for trans activism academically. This year, with graduate student Maura Finkelstein and linguistics professor Penny Eckert, he is a coordinator of the Humanities Center’s Workshop in Critical Studies in Sexuality, which brings together specialists in the humanities, social sciences and biological sciences. In his own research, Strassfeld studies legal categories of gender in classical Jewish texts that roughly correspond to intersex identities, or what used to be called hermaphrodites. “Critics will say, first there was feminist studies, now there’s transgender,” says Strassfeld’s adviser, religious studies associate professor Charlotte Fonrobert. “But I think it’s an issue that people have learned to articulate and have become more outspoken about.”
In the Introduction to the Humanities course she co-teaches, Sex: Its Pleasures and Cultures, Fonrobert introduces freshmen to the philosophical arguments of Simone de Beauvoir and the performance pyrotechnics of John Cameron Mitchell. “De Beauvoir said that one is not born a woman, one becomes one,” Fonrobert notes. “So what’s the connection between biology and gender identity?” As for Mitchell’s cult film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, about an East German transgender rock singer? “Some of the kids thought, ‘What the heck is she talking about?’ But some of them got into it.”
Several instructors also took their classes to visit the Clayman Institute for Gender Research this winter when it hosted Transfigurations, an award-winning photo documentary of trans people. “What I think we’re doing as a society is trying to soften the edges of where one gender ends and the other begins,” says Londa Schiebinger, director of the institute and professor of history. “Shouldn’t we all be able to choose the characteristics that we portray in life, whether we’re gentle or firm, intellectual or emotional?”
It’s an argument freshman Jenna Queenan appreciates, as she visits dorms and fields questions with a new cohort of SOSAS panelists. “There’s this idea that people who identify as trans are messed up, or it’s a disease, or there’s something wrong with them,” Queenan says, referring to queries she used to hear about trans issues when she co-chaired her high school’s transgender-straight alliance—and still hears at Stanford. “Kids will be like, ‘I don’t understand,’ and then I’ll explain more, and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, okay, that makes sense.’”
