I’ve Been Misgendered So Many Times: Comparing the Experiences of Chronic Misgendering among Transgender Graduate Students in the Social and Natural Sciences

Abstract

Chronic misgendering is the process of being repeatedly misgendered (referred to as another gender) after informing an individual of gender pronouns (e.g., “she,” “he,” “they”). Chronic misgendering is symbolic of larger institutional and disciplinary adherence to a paradigm that privileges cisgender people, referred to as a gender essentialist paradigm. In order to understand which disciplines in higher education have more pervasive chronic misgendering, we analyze results from the National Survey of Transgender Graduate Students (n = 245). Graduate students in the natural sciences experience more chronic misgendering compared to graduate students in the social sciences. Those in health and biological science fields (in and closely related to medicine) reported the highest level of chronic misgendering, accounting for the majority of all chronic misgendering in the natural sciences. We argue that not only do these incidents negatively impact transgender graduate students, but they also reflect and reproduce field‐specific expectations for what is considered acceptable misgendering practice in post‐graduate professional environments, such as community health and medicine. As such, chronic misgendering in graduate school functions as unofficial curricula and thus, training for workplace cultures that, to different degrees, devalue transgender people and contribute to structural inequalities.