Gender Pronouns: Recommendations from an Institution with Solutions
Parks Parks, Margaret O’Connor, Jesse Parrish · College and university · 2016
As the population of transgender and gender-nonconforming students at colleges and universities increases, it is important to examine how institutions have adjusted policies and student systems to create a universally welcoming environment. Transitioning is often a challenging and sensitive process, making each interaction in a new setting vital to student development. Even the use of the wrong pronoun or a renounced legal name in a classroom setting can lead to embarrassment for the student and awkwardness for the faculty member. These social setbacks can be detrimental to both the transgender student's self-concept and the campus's efforts at creating an inclusive community. From an enrollment management perspective, a lack of attention to these matters can also adversely affect retention.In an effort to address the needs of this burgeoning subpopulation, universities are seeking ways to modify systems to help transgender and gender-nonconforming students navigate these challenges. Specifically, some institutions are building technologies that recognize the unique aspects of their personality. In fall 2015, Elon University became an early adopter of the methodical use of a pronoun in the university's student information system. The system allows for the use of the pronoun in every aspect of the student's life on campus, from an instructor's class roll to the name used on campus identification cards. Together, the offices of the university registrar, admissions, application technologies, and student life are working to ensure that transitioning students benefit from systematic changes that allow them to select a pronoun, preferred name, prefix, and preferred gender at the time of matriculation.ACTION/IMPLEMENTATIONIn fall 2014, Elon took a preliminary step by allowing students to voluntarily affiliate with the lgbtqia population at the point of admission. Students who self-identified were sent information about the lgbtqia community and the process for declaring a preferred name. A year later, the pronoun and prefix attributes were officially added as an educational resource. Any student seeking to use a preferred pronoun could meet with the university registrar to request that the pronoun be added to the system. Students could also petition to change their email address and email alias to reflect their preferred name.This early meeting with the registrar proved critical. Several students decided to initiate the process and in doing so pointed out several previously unconsidered campus systems that still used the legal name. The students asked careful and specific questions about how the pronoun change would affect them, which inspired the registrar to conduct a more comprehensive assessment of student systems on campus. As anticipated, several more were identified as problematic, including the library's circulation portal, mail services, housing networks, and a whole host of custom reports created at the departmental level. They all used legal name and gender. The user-generated reports posed a particularly unwieldy challenge because changing the source of one commonly used field would necessitate report reconfiguration en masse, which in turn would necessitate a candid justification. In response, application technologies proposed an elegant solution: A custom meta-report (i.e. a report on reports) was written to identify all reports currently using legal name and gender, and in one batch process, the source for those fields was overwritten to point to preferred name. In complementary fashion, access to legal name and gender fields was restricted to trained users with a legitimate legal need.ADMINISTRATOR PERSPECTIVETo facilitate the best possible experience for transitioning students, a systematic overhaul was necessary. Correspondingly, faculty and staff needed to learn where to look for and how best to use this new information. It may be surprising, then, to learn that from the time they matriculate Elon students are expected to embrace diversity by participating in seminars and culturally significant events on campus. …