Transgender Adults’ Access to College Bathrooms and Housing and the Relationship to Suicidality

ABSTRACT

Transgender and gender non-conforming people frequently experience discrimination, harassment, and marginalization across college and university campuses (Bilodeau, 2007; Finger, 2010; Rankin et al., 2010; Seelman et al., 2012). The minority stress model (Meyer, 2007) posits that experiences of discrimination often negatively impact the psychological wellbeing of minority groups. However, few scholars have examined whether college institutional climate factors—such as being denied access to bathrooms or gender-appropriate campus housing—are significantly associated with detrimental psychological outcomes for transgender people. Using the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, this study analyzes whether being denied access to these spaces is associated with lifetime suicide attempts, after controlling for interpersonal victimization by students or teachers. Findings from sequential logistic regression (N = 2,316) indicate that denial of access to either space had a significant relationship to suicidality, even after controlling for interpersonal victimization. This article discusses implications for higher education professionals and researchers.

KEYWORDS:

• Bathrooms
• campus housing
• harassment
• higher education
• minority stress model
• suicidality
• transgender

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Dr. K. Jurée Capers for reviewing a draft of this article and offering constructive feedback.

The author acknowledges the National LGBTQ Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality conducted the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, which generated the data analyzed within this study. Their report on the survey data is available at http://www.thetaskforce.org.

Notes

^1. Within the present study, transgender encompasses those whose gender identity differs from predominant cultural expectations for their sex assigned at birth. This includes people who undergo medical treatment to transition from one gender to another, as well as those who have not or will not undergo such treatment, and is meant to match the definition used by the organizations that conducted the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (Grant et al., 2011). I will often use the term trans* to denote inclusion of a broader range of gender non-conforming identities, including those who may not use the term transgender for themselves.

^2. This statistic was calculated using the inverse odds ratio: 1 / 0.69 = 1.45.