By Theo Klinger, Contributing Writer
Growing up as Transgender in central Pennsylvania was never easy.
I was bullied throughout all of my high school years, and the thought of facing a new environment with my identity was absolutely terrifying after I graduated. I carried my trauma throughout my first year of college. It was better in some ways, but I still decided to transfer since Susquehanna always seemed so opening and LGBTQ+ accepting. I wasn’t able to get in for the first year because of my GPA, so I worked hard to be accepted as a transfer my sophomore year.
Yet, a full semester here has shown me that no campus seems to be perfect with respecting transgender rights. I have yet to change my name, so I am faced with many emails and documents with my birth name on it, which is completely understandable if it involves medical or financial reasons. Though, if it simply involves campus activities, where I will be living next semester, satisfaction surveys, the post office, and many other reasons that aren’t exactly professional, then it is not necessary to address us by the name we don’t go by or identify with. Not only does it make us uncomfortable, but it also makes us feel unsafe on this campus. One of the other many places on campus that regularly deadnames (calls us by the name we don’t identify with) the transgender community is Public Safety. Last semester, an officer had been investigating a recent disturbance within my residence hall. They came into my suite and asked my roommates about anything they could have seen that would help with the investigation, soon turning to my roommate and I, who both identify as transgender, and asked us what our names were.
We, of course, gave our names that should be in all systems months before this time period, even on our identification cards. It ended up that the only name that they had on record was in fact our deadnames, saying it for everyone who we lived with to hear and many other people that could be surrounding us, putting us in danger on a campus where we should feel safe.
It didn’t involve any legal actions, so there was no reason for the officer to address us with names that aren’t or shouldn’t be accessible in the system unless you are in charge of financial or medical records. Every single day, most if not all of us are terrified that someone will say these names, or even just simply learn them. With that information, they could be granted access into a life that could be used against us. A little hate crime could go a long way within our lives, and within a world where many of us are murdered for being who we are, I would like to do everything I can to make this campus a safer place for people like me in the future.
These may sound like little things that the campus could fix, but they go a long way for our safety and security.
