It's extremely difficult for trans and queer kids to get into and make it in college, especially these days. We're likelier to have lower-paying jobs to begin with, as most jobs beyond retail don't want to hire visibly queer people. There are far fewer scholarships available for trans people, as evidenced by the fact that the Transgender First scholarship (https://tcne.org/the-transgenderfirst-scholarship-the-first-national-scholarship-for-transgender-students/) is the first (and only, as far as I saw) national scholarship for trans people. Additionally, with the way that many are treating our trans identities as politics to be debated, we as a people have a much harder time getting by unfazed, untraumatized, and with any degree of financial security.
Once we get in, people are cruel, callous, or careless to us. Few people outside our own community are interested in our welfare or feelings, and I often feel like any cishet people trying to respect me as a trans person, are doing so performatively because they want to be seen as a good person, not necessarily because they care about me. I can't tell you how many people - admins, professors, bosses - gave me this awful performative spiel about how "this they/them thing is just so new," and that they'll try, but that I couldn't get mad if they got it wrong, because they were TRYING.
Do you know how many of those people successfully learned how to use my pronouns?
Do you know how many of them used my pronouns to my face once or twice, and then stopped completely after a few weeks?
Of those groups of people, which one do you think was bigger? I bet you can guess, but I'll give you a hint: there was 1 person who, after giving that performative spiel, went on to actually make an effort to respect me.
And the worst thing is the fact that these people lied to my face, all of them. People who were meant to help me, teach me, be leaders. They cared more about the appearances of the thing, they cared more about being seen as caring and respectful, than they cared to actually try. They claimed to care about me and my people, then turned around to show me just how much they truly did. What kind of leader shows everyone that an already-marginalized group doesn't need to be respected?
College is not easy for trans folks. College is harder to get into, and harder to stay in, for us than it is for cisgender people. We earn less on average than cis people do, and have to deal with the stress of daily disrespect, often framed as performative false allyship, from people who "just don't understand", and don't care to try. Few people other than ourselves care about us. This is true of most minorities. Maybe we'd all benefit from giving each other more of a damn.
