“I felt minimized, like my experience didn’t matter,” Morgan says.

“There is a really pervasive attitude amongst students, administrators, and professors that there aren’t enough trans students to warrant accommodating,” Morgan adds. “It really bothers me on a bunch of levels. It really shouldn’t matter how many of us there are. It’s a matter of principle.”

Because of instances like these, Morgan did not feel comfortable enough to come out at Harvard beyond designated safe spaces. While he explained his sexual identity to the members of the Harvard College Women’s Center, Queer Students and Allies, and the Trans Task Force, in other settings he adopted another identity, a kind of painful shapeshifting that led him to pursue the possibility of gender reassignment surgery.

At the Women’s Center, Morgan used male pronouns. In other extracurricular settings, peers referred to him with female pronouns. Friends who knew him in multiple settings would refer to him as “he” at one organization’s meetings and “she” in another’s.

This selective coming out led to feelings of isolation and exhaustion. In the months after leaving Harvard, Morgan transitioned from female to male, undergoing hormone therapy to begin the process of medically reassigning his sex.

“I partitioned my identity at Harvard,” Morgan says. “I did not feel safe enough to come out everywhere at Harvard.”

Morgan did come out in classroom settings, asking his peers and teachers to refer to him using male pronouns but found that in most cases coming out frequently led to awkward and occasionally passive aggressive responses from other students.

“It’s not like they threw rocks at me, but some students would continue to use the wrong pronouns over and over even though I had said I go by male pronouns,” Morgan says. “I wish I was in an emotional place to have stood up for myself more.”

Some trans men and women on campus have had more positive experiences while transitioning at Harvard.

While studying at the Divinity School, Cameron E. Partridge, now a lecturer at the Divinity School and in the WGS department, medically transitioned from female to male.

At the end of the 2001-2002 academic year, Partridge handed in forms in at the Registrar to file for a name and gender change.  After reading over the files, the Registrar clerk smiled and said, “Welcome to the male gender—it’s served me well!”

A CULTURAL PROBLEM

Starting in the fall of 2011, students will be able to update their preferred name using the online registration tool, according to Burke. It is small victories like this that trans activists have heralded as indicative of increased tolerance and awareness of trans issues at the administrative level.

But Jia Hui Lee '12, a trans rights activist and member of TTF, and others say that there is a disparity between the administration and the faculty and student body. While the administration has taken steps to improve the experience of trans students at the College, there is a lack of awareness among students and faculty regarding the issues facing the trans community.

Trans activists say that while Harvard students are on the whole fairly aware of sexism, racism, and homophobia, they’re significantly less attuned to transphobia and issues surrounding coming out as trans on campus.