We Have to Do Better for Our Transgender Siena College Community Members

              

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This week, our class learned of an appalling reality taking place right on our own campus. In a 2016-2017 Siena Student Climate Survey, it was reported that 100% transgender students at Siena expressed that they had personally experienced bias/harassment/discrimination at our college. This is quite frankly appalling and absolutely unacceptable.

While there is no acceptable percentage of students on any campus experiencing bias/harassment/discrimination, there is something particularly egregious about hearing that 100% of transgender students has had these experiences. It demonstrates that not a single trans student at Siena was able to avoid mistreatment and injustice on our campus. Often, we hear Siena College referred to as a “community.” It's a point of pride that gets touted at admissions events, campus tours, and scrawled across newsletters. This idea of “community” is something that many students believe in as well, and is a popular answer among students when asked why they love the school. But, to praise the school as a beacon of “community” feels hollow and abstract once you learn of the realities that face an entire population of students on our campus. Siena loves to talk about how it is a place in which “students hold the door open for each other,” but holding a door open for someone does not make for a community when the person holding the door might be harassive or discriminatory toward the person walking through. 

Upon learning this, I felt a sense of shock and confusion as to why this information was not more widely known and discussed, and that it took me until my senior year to hear of this. I even asked some of my friends to see if they knew about this statistic, and so far none of those I asked stated that they were aware. Does it stem from a place of my privilege as a cis person that I was unaware of this fact? Was I able to shield myself from this reality because it does not affect me directly? Is it the fault of the college for not being particularly candid or forthright about this information? I was reminded of ideas I had heard being expressed by many black Americans over this past summer during the period of widespread anti-racism protests. Some argued that it was a sign of deeply rooted privilege that many white people were completely “shocked” to find out about the realities faced by black Americans each day. Is something similar taking place on the Siena campus that allows the majority-cis population of students to maintain the illusion that we live and study in an inclusive community? 

This survey was conducted in 2016, and so I am curious to know if any concrete actions have been taken by the school to ameliorate or rectify the conditions that led to the experiences of bias, harassment, discrimination expressed by trans Siena students. During freshmen orientation, we did receive diversity training, and I wonder if it has changed much since I was a freshman in 2017. I recall the presentation being brief. These findings demonstrate that we have a college-wide imperative to do more than simply giving a diversity presentation once in the first week of arrival. These sorts of diversity training and presentations can so easily get lost among countless other, unrelated Powerpoint presentations and in the haze of orientation icebreaker games and mandatory group Saga lunches. 

I firmly believe that college is a period of time in which people are capable of undergoing tremendous growth. I’ve seen it firsthand among so many of my classmates, friends, and even within myself. College serves as the first time that many of us are exposed en masse to ideas that differ from those of our hometowns. We are thrust out of our home environments and are forced to form our own independent thoughts and perceptions of the world. This provides the perfect opportunity to educate and expand our worldviews, which is a goal that Siena already strives for, and in some respects achieves. But, once again, one to two diversity presentations very obviously is not going to cut it. I think one concrete action that we could implement is to institute a larger focus on diversity and awareness within the freshman seminar curriculum. I know some freshmen seminar classes already focus on these ideas in depth, but I also know from accounts from other students that much of the course material was, to use their words, “a waste of time”. Without removing the emphasis on writing, maybe we could dedicate more of the required seminar curriculum to reading more works written about the trans experience and about discrimination and bias. I also think it could be useful to host more trans guest lecturers who speak about such topics, and make the attendance of such seminars a requirement for seminar students and students in general. If we expose students to various accounts of the experiences and lives of trans people early in their Siena careers, this might open the door for conversations among members of the Siena community and might ultimately eliminate some of the biases that lead to the discrimination and harassment of trans students. These steps would hopefully educate and open the eyes of more Siena students so that we can create an inclusive and fair space for the trans students of Siena, and finally create the “community” that we so often claim to already have.