It\u27s Not Just the White Girl: How Higher Education Professionals Support Transgender Survivors of Sexual Assault

The Obama Administration took important steps in extending civil rights and protections to the transgender community and even released the Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students in 2016 (Gupta and Lhamon). Despite the beginnings of this conversation, there are still very large gaps into which transgender students fall in Title IX compliance guidelines, let alone the educational system as a whole. It is approximated that 47% of transgender people have experienced or will experience acts of sexual violence (James et al, 2016) and Harris and Linder (2017) argue that most of these acts of violence are an exertion of power in direct response to the person’s identity as a transgender individual. Yet, transgender students are rarely included in conversations regarding campus sexual assault. This lack of connection between campus sexual assault and the transgender student community establishes a system in which implicit bias is not appropriately challenged. It is the intersection of the issues and their silencing that have left transgender students with few options for seeking support from the justice system or services such as crisis counseling and medical advocacy without high risks of revictimization and retraumatization (Marine, 2017). This paper will conduct in-depth interviews with higher education professionals as a tool to further identify the barriers transgender students face in reporting and seeking support to ultimately propose recommendations for supporting trans survivors of sexual assault