Trans Scholarship Link+App!
(It’s the 11th hour, I know, but there’s a link to the scholarship at the bottom of my little spiel if anyone wants to apply before the year ends.)
Okay, so we know that transphobia is a thing. We all know that trans youth and young adults are at risk of having mental health problem, lacking a support network, being poor, and having insecure housing. Not saying these issues aren’t important, but I’d like to highlight some of the challenges I experienced, which have been a bit more nuanced than this.
I feel like when I first went to college, at lot of people my age complained about how on-campus housing at various schools was not trans-friendly. Like, trans students were getting paired with cis students who did not have the same gender. Bigger, more progressive schools were beginning to set aside certain dorms for queer students to opt into sharing with each other; smaller, more conservative schools (like mine) handled these issues on a case-by-case basis, usually by sticking the trans student in a single occupancy room.
I never encountered this problem, though, because I couldn’t afford to live on-campus. I commuted from my parents’ place. I couldn’t get a loan because no one in my family was willing to cosign for me. Often this happens when they reject their trans kid, but I wasn’t out to my family at the time. We were just a lower-middle class family and no one wanted to risk their credit on me.
My family has been plagued by drama and divorce since before I was born, but none of my relatives were out as LGBTQ; queerness had nothing to do with their dysfunction. Nevertheless, that wasn’t the kind of environment I felt safe coming out in. I entered college pretending to be cis. It was years until I came out to my closest friends, and years still after that until I started coming out to trustworthy relatives and at work. By then, summer 2021, I was finished with school and one year into HRT. Some people have to choose between their transition and their education, because they don’t have the resources to do both. I didn’t either, but it wasn’t much of a choice for me—I did education, and only after did transition present itself as an option. Now, in a way, I’m trying to kill two birds with one stone: go back to school to become a hair removal specialist (AKA an electrologist), so that I can continue my treatments while also training to provide them to other trans folks.
Now here’s the kicker, the thing I almost never hear other people bring up: having the correct name and gender on all the important paperwork. Yes, people talk about how they get deadnamed and misgendered at school—but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about what you put on your application; I’m talking about what gets put on your diploma, your professional license, or whatever certificate you get at the end of your program.
Changing your legal name (and gender) is such a taxing, time-consuming, and potentially expensive process. (were it not for the fee waiver I obtained, it would have cost me several hundred dollars.) It’s hard to imagine any college student being able to pull it off while also focusing on their studies and maybe even working on the side. If you make the change after you finish school, then you may need to go through an additional ordeal getting your school to issue you a new certificate. And if you try to do it before entering college—well, you may need to delay school for a semester or two, because you’ll probably run into the same dilemma I did.
Thinking nothing of it, I initiated the name/gender change process at the same time that I was applying for school. When I visited the school, they told me that my name and gender would need to be consistent across all of my application materials in order to process my application. Here, for the first time, in a very real way, I needed to choose between my transition and my education.
I chose transition.
The only alternative would have been to change my name after school—a highly unappealing option, as this would entail the additional paperwork of changing my name on my program certificate, as well as delay my licensure by about a year. The name change process I knew would take months, and it would need to be completed before I could even register for my state’s licensing exam. That semiannual exam is reportedly extremely difficult, and it would be a fool’s errand to try to pass it without my training still fresh in my memory. Either way, my career switch would be pushed back a year, so postponing school and getting the name/gender change out of the way first was the most sensible choice. Besides, it was more important for me to have my name and gender officially recognized—by the school, by the government, by my future classmates—and I didn’t want to later have to start the process from scratch.
Anyway, that was a year ago, and I’m finally starting school in a month. Just warning y’all, because I think the name/gender change is an underappreciated setback that trans folks may need to deal with.
P.S. I’m still short on funds. I’m applying with this post for the #TransgenderFirst scholarship: https://www.onlinedegree.com/transgender-first-scholarship/
