Some background information. My name Torin MacLaughlin, I’m a trans man from Indiana and a freshman at Lewis and Clark.
In Indiana, it was a fight just to keep our one gender-neutral bathroom, or to get people to respect our pronouns. Other students were a lost cause in that department so were many of the staff and teachers. It was so hard to get such a basic level of respect. Obviously, that wasn’t true across the board and I’m very thankful for the people in my hometown who loved and supported me.
In terms of those very basic things, pronouns, bathrooms, not getting called slurs in the hallway, LC has been soo much better. I should note that due to my physical transition I pass as a man much better now.
I know that restrooms were one of my main concerns when I was coming to college. I’ve had some bad experiences, so I much prefer to use the gender-neutral restrooms, but I use the male restrooms as well. I will say the situation at LC is generally good, but it is also extremely varied. I would tell you that the restrooms in dorms are built one way and the ones in the academic buildings another, but every gender-neutral restroom I’ve been to works a different way. There is also not a gender-neutral restroom for every gendered one so they are often hard to find. In my dorm in particular there is just one restroom with urinals stalls and showers that’s it for the whole floor. I have heard other dorms do it differently. In the academic buildings sometimes there is a one-stall restroom that is genderneutral and than two other gendered restrooms. Sometimes there is one multi-stall restroom that is gender-neutral. Unfortunately, there are some buildings that have no gender-neutral restrooms at all including the theater building where a lot of trans people work, so that has caused us some problems.
One thing I take issue with the way that some of the restrooms are arranged: there is often a set of restrooms one for women and one that is a men’s restroom converted to be gender-neutral. There are quite a few issues with this in my opinion that I plan to go more in detail within a future story about restrooms specifically. But I will say this much, you can’t expect trans women to chose between a men’s room that is “gender-neutral’ and the women’s room. Also, there are fewer stalls so that can be inconvenient.
Socially I have had no problems whatsoever. In classes and other organized social gatherings, introduced ourselves immediately with pronouns and after that, both students and staff made a point to use them (it may have helped that there was a giant trans flag in my zoom background). When I don’t introduce myself with pronouns, people automatically use they/them pronouns for me. I know it has been a little harder for my non-binary friends who use they/them pronouns. Now interestingly, portland as a whole has been a little different. I think it’s because there are more cis people who don’t dress conforming with their gender here, but I get misgendered more in portland than I do now in Indiana.
I’m not going to tell you that everything is perfect here. But so far my transness hasn’t been something that has impeded my life on a daily basis and that is a change. I am very happy with my experience here, and I feel like I can say that LC is a safe place for trans people.