Misgendering on Campus and Its Mental Health, Social Belonging, and Academic Consequences and Resilience Promoting Factors

Being misgendered, that is when someone intentionally or unintentionally uses a pronoun or another word (e.g., Ms.) that does not reflect a person’s gender identity (Nordmarken, 2021) is a trans microaggression and maintains transgender, nonbinary, and genderqueer (TNBGQ) students’ oppression (Nadal & Skolnik 2012; Nordmarken, 2022). Minority stress theory suggests that trans discrimination can increase TNBGQ students’ risk for negative mental health outcomes (Hendricks & Testa, 2012). Moreover, trans discrimination can contribute to feelings of isolation and interfere with students’ academic engagement and development (Nicolazzo, 2016; Wilson, 2016).

Growing attention is being given to misgendering, including on campuses (Barthelemy, 2020; Ehlinger et al., 2022; Dolan, 2023; Goldberg, 2018; Whitely, 2022). Though offering important insights, these studies tend to address misgendering as part of larger examinations of trans microaggressions, utilize qualitative methods thus rely on small samples, be limited to specific student groups (e.g., graduate students), and/or overlook outcomes.

To understand misgendering more fully, using survey data, we ask: how prevalent is misgendering? What is the association between misgendering and mental health, social belonging, and academic outcomes? Further, to foster students’ resilience to misgendering, we ask: what multi-level factors might buffer students from the negative effects of misgendering?

Methods: We recruited a convenience sample of 2SLGBTQ students (N=3879) throughout Ontario, Canada, through outreach on campuses and social media. Our analytic sample consists of 768 trans-identified students (Mage = 22.48, 84.1% undergraduate, 24.4% students of color). Students’ gender and sexual identities varied; largest groups 22.6% nonbinary and 26.4% queer, respectively.

Participants reported the frequency of being misgendered on campus in the preceding year (0=never, 5=very frequently) and completed standardized mental health (psychological distress, PHQ-4) social belonging (belonging on campus), academic (academic development, academic engagement) measures. They also completed measures for 2SLGBTQ+ pride, social support from friends, and perceptions of campus EDI polices for 2SLGBTQ+ people, which we use as moderators. After running descriptive statistics and Pearson’s correlations we ran multivariable linear regression models controlling for age, race, and 2SLGBTQ+ outness. We created interaction terms to test moderating effects using sperate models for each factor to identify their unique effects.

Results: Nearly 65% of participants reported being misgendered with 32.2% reporting very frequently (M=2.50, SD=2.16). Correlations between being misgendered and each outcome were statistically significant and in the expected direction. Across all regression models for mental health, the main effect of misgendering was positively associated with each outcome and the protective factors were negatively associated (as expected). For belonging and academic outcomes, the same patterns were observed for misgendering and the protective factors. Regarding moderating effects, pride significantly moderated the misgendering—stress and academic development relationships; perceptions of EDI policies moderated it for academic engagement.

Conclusions: Multivariable results indicate that misgendering can negatively affect TNBGQ students’ mental health, belongingness, and academics, including when including protective factors. We found that only pride and perceptions of EDI policies promoted resilience to misgendering. Our findings emphasize the need to address misgendering and offer support to affected students. We will outline implications for policy and practice.