Students attending universities or colleges come from diverse groups, including racial, ethnic, ability status, sexual orientation, gender and intersex identities. Institutions of higher education may encounter challenges in acknowledging the needs of diverse groups of students. Particularly, these institutions could possibility have difficulties in understanding transgender students’ needs. In the education literature, transgender students often face intolerant/negative attitudes, prejudice and discrimination against them in society (Beemyn, 2016; Wernick et al., 2014). Transgender or, to use a more inclusive term, ‘trans’ students in this chapter are defined as those students who ‘do not identify with or normatively enact the gender assigned to them at birth’ (Wernick et al., 2014, p. 927). Scholars in the field of trans prejudice often adopt the concept of genderism to conceptualize prejudice, discriminatory and intolerant attitudes against trans people. For instance, Hill and Willoughby (2005) perceived genderism as ‘an ideology that reinforces the negative evaluation of gender non-conformity or an incongruence between sex and gender’ (p. 534). Copyright © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Neil Harrison and Graeme Atherton; individual chapters, the contributors.
