High Impact of [Whiteness] on Trans* Students in Postsecondary Education

Abstract

This article asserts whiteness as an ideology that reaches beyond race/racism to shape and reproduce other interlocking oppressive systems. In higher education, this notion of whiteness permeates commonly celebrated “high impact practices” (HIPs) to undermine the success of trans* students in US postsecondary education. Through an intersectional approach, we illustrate how HIPs lead to jeopardizing trans* students’ success in higher education and advance a different approach that we have coined “trickle up high impact practices” (TUHIPs). TUHIPs prioritize the needs of those students who are most vulnerable and incorporate an acknowledgement of the oppressive contexts within which students with multiple minoritized identities must navigate higher education. We discuss the implications of this approach and offer five recommendations to move higher education institutions toward policies, practices, and systems that support the college success of trans* students.

Notes

Notes

1 An earlier version of this article was presented at the 5th annual pre-conference of the Council on Ethnic Participation in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education on November 10, 2016, in Columbus, Ohio.

2 Mimicking Boolean search functions, the asterisk is a symbol that some—but not all—trans* people use to provide an expansive understanding of the transgender community. As Tompkins (2014) stated, “trans* blends the symbol’s wildcard function with its use as a figurative bullet point in a list of identities that are not predicated on the trans- prefix” (p. 27). Although there is contestation over how some people have misused the asterisk for exclusionary purposes, we use it throughout our article as a way to reflect the various ways in which trans* people may identify their genders, including in ways that do not rely on the prefix trans- or the word transgender.

3 A term originally coined by Serano (2007), who wrote, “When a trans person is ridiculed or dismissed not merely for failing to live up to gender norms, but for their expressions of femaleness or femininity, they become the victims of a specific form of discrimination: trans-misogyny” (pp. 14–15). It is also sometimes written as one word without the hyphen, as in transmisogyny.

4 An extension of the term misogynoir (coined by Moya Bailey), transmisogynoir (sometimes written as trans-misogynoir or (trans)misogynoir) refers to the ways racism, anti-blackness, and trans-misogyny manifest in the lives of black trans* women (Trudy, 2014). In particular, the term denotes the various ways in which life chances for black trans* women are foreclosed as a result of these interlocking systems of oppression.

5 Enabled is the term used by Clare (2015) to signal the multiple ways that societal norms and assumptions enable certain bodies and ways of functioning in the world instead of focusing on “disability.”

6 These two were Fayetteville State University and Winston-Salem State University.

7 Following Cornel West’s use of the term; see West (1994).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dafina-Lazarus Stewart

Dafina-Lazarus Stewart is a professor in the School of Education, co-coordinator of Student Affairs in Higher Education, and faculty affiliate in the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at Colorado State University.

Z Nicolazzo

Z Nicolazzo is an assistant professor of Trans* Studies in Education and the Center for the Study of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and Practice at the University of Arizona.