The Wiley Handbook of Gender Equity in Higher Education

10Trans Students

Genny Beemyn

Twenty years ago, a chapter on research into the experiences of trans college students could not have been written. Only a handful of articles about trans students were published prior to the mid‐2000s (Lees 1998; Nakamura 1998; Carter 2000; Beemyn 2003), and these relied largely on anecdotal evidence in suggesting ways that colleges and universities could become more trans‐inclusive. Since then, a rapidly growing number of studies have focused on trans students, which has been made possible by more and more students openly identifying as trans and being willing to share their experiences. However, many of these studies have based their findings on small, non‐representative samples (e.g. Bilodeau 2009; Pryor 2015; Nicolazzo 2017), and thus are limited in their ability to consider possible distinctions among trans students based on differences in identities (e.g. gender, sexual orientation, race, class, religion) and the types of institutions they attend (e.g. public vs. private, 2‐year vs. 4‐year, religiously affiliated vs. secular). Only in the last decade, as researchers have undertaken large‐scale studies of trans students (e.g. Beemyn 2019; Goldberg et al. 2019) and national surveys of college students have added questions on gender identity (e.g. Cantor et al. 2015; Oswalt and Lederer 2017; Stolzenberg and Hughes 2017), has there begun to be a body of research that considers the diversity of trans students and makes comparisons between trans ...