Centering Transfeminine College Students: An Exploration of Transmisogyny Using Large Scale National Data

• In Event: Responding to the Void: QuantCrit Analyses of Queer and Trans Outcomes across Four Large-Scale Surveys

Abstract

Purpose
Transfeminine college students remain profoundly underrepresented and misrepresented in higher education research, policy, and practice (Marine & Nicolazzo, 2014; Nicolazzo, 2017, 2021; Seelman, 2014). Despite the growing number of national datasets aimed at assessing student experience, few disaggregate gender identity in ways which capture the specific experiences of transfeminine students (Jourian, 2021; Keenan, 2022). Rather than treating transfeminine students as statistical anomalies, this project intentionally centers their perspectives to illuminate systemic inequities in their collegiate engagement using the following research questions:
● What are the outcomes of transfeminine undergraduate collegians compared to their peers? How does transmisogyny as a conceptual lens help make meaning of these potential differences?

Theoretical Framework
This study is grounded in Gill-Peterson’s (2024) concept of transmisogyny as a historically rooted and institutionally reproduced form of violence which targets transfeminine people’s access to legibility, autonomy, and life. In this framing, social institutions such as colleges and universities are sites of ontological theft—where transfeminine people are misrecognized, made killable, or rendered impossible (Hayward, 2017; Nicolazzo, 2021). This project also utilizes transfeminist theory (Christiaens, 2024; Koyama, 2000; Raha, 2017), which critiques cisheteropatriarchy utilizing the experiential knowledge of transfeminine people. Together, these frameworks inform both the critique and construction embedded in the study: a refusal of transfeminine erasure through the documentation of institutional transmisogyny.

Methods
We drew separate comparative samples from three national surveys: the 2023 the National College Health Assessment (NCHA), 2021 Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (MSL), and 2024 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Across all measures (see Appendices A-C), we compared transfeminine students with their peers, and determined group classification through respondents’ selection of the variable trans woman and/or a written response indicating their transfeminine identification (e.g. “transfemme” or “nonbinary trans woman”). We used t-tests (or Welsh’s t-tests when equal variance not assumed) to indicate significant differences between respondents’ academic engagement, mental health indicators, leadership development and perceptions of campus climate and the general student population.

Results
Across the three national datasets (NCHA, MLS and NSSE), trans women reported significantly lower outcomes than their peers on numerous indicators related to well-being, campus climate, academic engagement, and leadership (see Tables 1-3). Compared to their peers, trans women experienced poorer mental health, lower resilience, reduced sense of belonging, and increased dropout intentions. They also reported lower GPAs, weaker perceptions of institutional support and inclusion, and diminished engagement in learning strategies, student-faculty interaction, and leadership capacity. These findings point to the harmful effects of systemic exclusion and institutional neglect in higher education, where structural and cultural forces of transmisogyny continue to marginalize and oppress transfeminine college students.

Scholarly Significance
As one of the first quantitative projects in higher education to center transfeminine students and transmisogyny using large-scale national data, this project deftly challenges dominant data practices which obscure transfeminine realities. Through our results, we commit to advocating for institutional leaders to directly address structural transmisogyny during a critical time when support for transfeminine college students is being actively stripped away.

Authors

• Roman Christiaens, Indiana University

• Cat Metcalfe, Florida State University

• Animesh Paul, University of Georgia

• Kristopher Oliveira, University of South Florida

• C. V. Dolan, University of Vermont

• Jason C. Garvey, University of Vermont