Keira Rao, like many rising Boston College sophomores, hoped to live in a coveted eight-person dorm room in her sophomore year. She had a group of seven women with whom she planned to share it. All seven had agreed to live with her.
But the university blocked Rao (MCAS ‘26), a trans woman, from living with them.
Because she was assigned male at birth, the Office of Residential Life told Rao, she couldn’t live with those female students. She was also told no when she asked if she could live with men.
Now, Rao lives alone in a one-person room in Greycliff Hall, a small, 45-person dorm far from the rest of campus, instead of with her friends.
Boston College lags behind other universities, secular and Catholic, in accommodating transgender and gender-nonconforming students. The school’s technology systems and IDs use students’ deadnames and incorrect genders. Further, finding housing can degrade trans students and undermine their identities.
Now, many students, working in organizations including the Queer Leadership Council, (QLC), and Trans* Collective, are trying to change that by starting grassroots efforts to build a more welcoming campus.
Their disappointment with their experiences at BC drives the students’ actions. Nessa Schirtzinger (MCAS ‘24), came to the university thinking that, since BC is Jesuit, there would be a better chance of finding a strong LGBTQ+ student community than at other Catholic colleges. She grew up hearing in church that the Jesuits were “Marxists,” and hoped the university would think about God as accepting of LGBTQ+ people. Once she arrived on campus, however, she, like many other trans students, discovered it wasn’t as accepting as she hoped.
Rao knew about BC’s reputation of being less accepting of LGBTQ+ students when she applied to the university, but said she naively wanted to be part of the change. The way other students acted toward her showed her how hard that change would be to come by. “Some students ogle at me,” Rao said. “They look at me weird. They give me glares.”
The glares they get from their cisgender counterparts sometimes seem to be the only attention transgender and gender-nonconforming students say they recieve. Being on campus is isolating. They’re usually the only non-cisgender people in their classrooms. H Edwards (MCAS ‘26), said discussions in his classes don’t tend to touch on transgender issues. When gender is discussed, it’s talked about in terms of binaries with little acknowledgment of different gender identities. Even though Edwards said many professors and administrators he’s met with privately support trans students and want change on campus, few public attempts are made to help trans students feel seen.
“There’s a lot of self-policing,” Claire Mengel (MCAS ‘26) said of faculty members’ fears of expressing their support. “People err on the side of caution.”
Not all professors are accepting of trans students. Schirtzinger said that, during a class in freshman year, a professor called her “ideologically confused” and “infected with politically correct culture.” She hadn’t come out as trans then, but she wore a crop top to the class, and she thinks her queer identity prompted the professor’s comments.
BC doesn’t have an independent resource center for LGBTQ+ students. The university tried to solve this problem last year by including them in the Thea Bowman AHANA and Intercultural Center, or BAIC. That compromise has upset many students because it reduces the physical space on campus for students of color and LGBTQ+ students alike.
Because LGBTQ+ students, especially trans students, have to operate in an environment that doesn’t advocate for them, they have to advocate for themselves in a way cisgender students don’t. “There’s always a feeling like you have to be vulnerable in a way that cis students aren’t asked to be because you have to ask for kindness and ask professors to use the right name and pronouns,” said Edwards.
The likelihood of being deadnamed is high because of how hard it is for students to change their names and genders in the university’s technology database. While there’s an option to add a preferred name on Agora Portal, the university’s tech hub, it’s more difficult to change the university-issued Gmail usernames. Students who applied to BC under their deadnames have to use those names in their email addresses. Even when he introduces himself as H in emails, Edwards said, professors refer to him by the deadname in his address.
Even QLC, the university’s student-led organization for LGBTQ+ students, can feel unwelcoming to trans students. QLC often holds events and tabling sessions for Pride Week and other important dates, but there was no event planned in 2023 for International Transgender Day of Visibility. That motivated Mengel and Edwards, who is QLC’s policy coordinator, to start Trans* Collective, an organization for trans and gender-nonconforming students and allies, last fall; the asterisk is meant to capture other gender identities. Trans* Collective does programming and policy work around issues important to trans students and proposes those policies to the Undergraduate Government of Boston College and the administration. Edwards said it’s more effective to have a separate organization dedicated to policy and community-building work for trans students than to rely on QLC.
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Nearly nine out of 10 Catholic universities in the U.S. mandated same-gender roommates and didn’t have policies outlining housing accommodations for transgender students as of 2020. BC is one of those: Where trans students get to live is up to the discretion of ResLife.
BC assigns students to dorms based on their genders assigned at birth. That means many trans students are assigned to dorms with people of other genders, especially in freshman year, when roommates are mostly randomly assigned. The experience of sharing communal bathrooms and living spaces with people who are sometimes not accepting of their gender identities can be unsafe and hostile. Edwards felt as if he didn’t belong in his three-person dorm room in freshman year, which he shared with two cisgender women.
While cisgender students can live in any on-campus dorm, trans students have fewer options. ResLife officials gave Edwards two choices for his junior-year housing. He could live in a two-person apartment at 2000 Commonwealth Ave., known as 2K, with a female student. Or he could live in a single room in Greycliff Hall, which are usually reserved for students with disabilities. Edwards decided to live in 2K with a female friend. Rao was told she could live alone or with another woman in 2K, instead of with her seven friends, but ultimately picked Greycliff because of the price.
Some transgender students aren’t afforded that choice. ResLife told Schirtzinger that the only place she could live on campus was in a Greycliff single.
It takes 15 minutes to walk from the center of BC’s campus to Greycliff. The dorm tends to be forgotten by students because of its size and its location, tucked away on the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Greycliff Road next to the university’s Brighton campus. A bed, desk, and dresser take up most of the space in the singles, leaving only a few square feet of floor open. A box fan would cover the window.
Schirtzinger had to spend her senior year living in a cramped room in the university’s smallest dorm. She said a ResLife official told her she should be grateful to even get this opportunity. “There’s an utter lack of acknowledgement that this situation actually sucks,” Schirtzinger said.
Students in QLC and Trans* Collective have been pushing the administration to create a trans-friendly on-campus housing policy. In the fall, a group including Edwards, Mengel, Schirtzinger, and QLC director Aidan Seguin (MCAS ‘25), started researching what other Catholic universities do. Not all have become more accepting, but there are many examples of schools that have. Georgetown University opened a living-learning community for LGBTQ+ students called Crossroads in 2018, although at the time of writing, there is no mention of the community on the university’s website. Fairfield University, Sacred Heart University, and Saint Mary’s College of California have gender-inclusive dorms, meaning students of different genders can live together.
The first step of the students’ plan is for the university to create a policy that outlines accommodations for trans students to clarify where they can stay on campus. The second step, and the ultimate goal, is to institute gender-inclusive housing, which would allow trans women to live with other women and trans men to live with other men. Non-binary students would be allowed to decide who they feel most comfortable living with. Other potential changes include creating a living-learning community for LGBTQ+ students, as Georgetown has done, and adding a question to the housing application that asks all students if they’d be comfortable living with a trans or gender-nonconforming student. Those who answered yes would be grouped on the same floors in the hope of creating a more affirming environment for trans students.
Edwards, Mengel, Schirtzinger, and Seguin began meeting with officials in ResLife and the Office of Student Affairs in November, including vice president of student affairs Shawna Cooper-Whitehead, ResLife’s associate vice president George Arey, and director of housing operations Caitlin Codding, to discuss the proposal. They’ve had three meetings but say that no tangible progress has been made yet. Edwards said that while the administrators were sympathetic, the students’ requests and questions were met with indecisive responses like “I don’t know” and “I have to ask higher-ups.”
Codding referred a request for an interview to Arey, who did not respond to three emails requesting comment.
Even though the university doesn’t provide much help, student activists are creating spaces for themselves on campus. Outside of policy work, Trans* Collective holds programs promoting visibility for trans students. The organization has held a gender-neutral clothing donation and swap. It organized a vigil for Nex Benedict, a transgender 16-year-old who died in February after being attacked in a school bathroom. And it collaborated with the BAIC on “Tea for T,” a night of tea and conversation for trans and gender-nonconforming students.
BC does offer a handful of resources. The BAIC hosts weekly discussion groups that cover issues surrounding gender and sexuality, including Transcend, a once-weekly group in which trans and gender-nonconforming students can talk with each other about trans-related topics or anything else they’d like. It also hosts Spectrum Retreat, a weekend retreat for LGBTQ+ students. Student activists think there’s more to be done, however.
Trans students’ activism takes its toll, as it eats into their time for homework and other extracurricular activities. Mengel said they often compare themself to cisgender classmates who don’t have to advocate for themselves all the time and wonder how else they could be spending their time.
While these students know the importance of the change they’re trying to make, they hope that BC eventually reaches a point at which this advocacy isn’t needed.“I’m not in there to hash out why there isn’t space for queer people on this campus,” Schirtzinger said. “I’m there to discuss how we find creative solutions and to demand that we acknowledge that those creative solutions shouldn’t be necessary.”
Trans students at BC don’t want to feel pressured to explain who they are to others, inside or outside of the classroom, they say. They don’t want to have to defend their identities in discussions or have other students assume that just because they’re trans they’re experts on everything about gender. They want to live as their authentic selves, without judgment or restriction.
Reaching that point is still an uphill battle. Edwards still feels as if he can’t be his full self at BC, even in spaces like QLC and Trans* Collective.
But while they fight with the university to become a more welcoming community, trans and other LGBTQ+ students have formed their own communities to support each other.
“The depth of the connection within communities that are accepting of queer people is unreal,” Schirtzinger said. “Joy in the face of struggle is that much richer.”
Psych student who likes the Mets and the Voyager 2 spacecraft
