This episode focuses on increasing recognition of—and needed supports for—queer college students from rural areas. Building upon a recently released chapter in a new monograph, this episode brought together two authors/scholars and two practitioners to discuss the many ways that core aspects of gender and sexual identity intersect with location.

Shea, H. (Host). (2021, December 8). Queer & Rural College Students (No. 74) [Audio podcast episode]. In Student Affairs NOW. https://studentaffairsnow.com/queer-rural-college-students/

Carl (Kip) Sorgen:
So in order for us to understand queer college students from rural areas, we need to kind of look at where they came from, like Heather was saying. So I do want to say that many queer students value and identify with their experience and acceptance and inclusion in these areas, in these rural areas, they appreciate a close knit community and they’re connected to their rural roots.

Heather Shea:
Hello and welcome to Student Affairs NOW, the online learning community for student affairs educators, I’m your host, Heather Shea. Today, we are exploring the experiences of queer students from rural areas with two scholars and two practitioners. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We hope you’ll find these conversations, make a contribution to the field and are restorative to the profession. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find us at studentaffairsnow.com on YouTube or anywhere you listen to podcasts. Today’s episode is sponsored by Anthology. Learn more about their innovative data-driven platforms to build and foster your campus student engagement experience. Learn more by visiting anthology.com/engage. This episode is also brought to you by Stylus, visit styluspub.com and use promo code

Heather Shea:
SANow for 30% off and free shipping. As I mentioned, I am your host, Heather Shea. My pronouns are she her and hers, and I am broadcasting from East Lansing, Michigan on the campus of Michigan State University, where I serve as the director of women’s student services and interim director of the gender and sexuality campus center. I am also an affiliate faculty member in the MSU student affairs administration master’s program, Michigan State University occupies the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the three fires Confederacy of Ojibue, Ottawa and Pottawatomie peoples. The university resides on land seated in the 1819 treaty of Saginaw. Let’s get to our conversation and I’ll have each of you introduce yourselves and welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to tell us a little bit about both your work and your scholarship. And I’m going to start with Baker. If you could start by telling us a little bit about you, your current role and maybe your pathway into the work that you do now. So welcome.

Baker A. Rogers:
Thank you. So my name is Baker Rogers. I’m an associate professor of sociology at Georgia Southern University. My research focuses on gender and sexuality and specifically how it intersects with location. Most of my research is centered in the Southeastern United States. And also I look at the differences between rural and urban experiences in specifically in regards to gender and sexuality. Yeah, so that’s how I got into this. That was my research. And Kip reached out to me and asked me to work on this article with him on this chapter we wrote together. And we’re very excited to be here to talk about it.

Heather Shea:
Thanks so much for being here. I appreciate it. Julia, welcome to Student Affairs NOW.

Julia Keleher:
My name is Julia Keleher. She, her pronouns. I’m the director of the LGBTQA office here in the University of Idaho here, located in the Northern part of Idaho in Moscow. I’ve been in this role for nine years. This is my ninth academic year and kind of a fun tidbit for the podcast. Heather was the person who hired me for this position way back in 2012, which was my first professional position out of grad school. So got some connection there. And yeah, so the University of Idaho is in a very rural area. And so I’ve been working with rural queer and transgender students through my roles here. And am I also a graduate student here at the university of Idaho, but doctoral students is my finishing up the first semester of my third year.

Heather Shea:
Congrats Dr. Keleher her to be very exciting. Yes, when I read this chapter in the new directions series, I was like, oh my gosh, I have to get Julia because of all of our shared past at the University of Idaho. So glad you’re here today. Kip, welcome to Student Affairs NOW.

Carl (Kip) Sorgen:
Thanks Heather. Hi, I’m Dr. Carl Sorgen, but my preferred name is Kip. My preferred pronouns are he and him. I’m an assistant professor of educational leadership at Georgia Southern University. And my focus is higher education of specifically LGBTQ students in higher education. I came to this work. I started as a grad student in the office of LGBTQ student services at New York University. And then I went to Penn State for my doctoral studies and my dissertation looks at the influence of academic outcomes are the influence of sexual identity on academic outcomes for college students. So I’m delighted to be here to talk about this. Georgia Southern is the perfect place to do this kind of work for rural students. So thanks to Baker for helping me write the chapter and Lexi and Julia and Heather. I’m delighted to talk with you today.

Heather Shea:
Thanks so much. Lexi, welcome to Student Affairs NOW I should kind of say welcome back because we have a past also in the previous iteration of the podcast. So I’m so happy to see you.

Lexi Sylvester:
Yes, it’s, I’m, I’m happy to be here. It’s been a while since I was running the Twitter back channel for you, but it’s, it’s fun to be back now and saying things I’m Lexi Sylvester. I like a she, her, ella pronoun. I’m the assistant director for equity and access where I support queer and trans students at Southern Oregon University, which is a very rural university in Oregon. And we are on the occupied land of the Tacoma, Shasta, and peoples. And I am I’m from rural Oregon. I grew up in a population 3000 town with one high school of 300 people as the only out queer person at the, at the time. I went on to work in K-12 education where I was a gay straight Alliance advisor in New Orleans. And then I really wanted to work with queer and trans students who could sign their own permission slips, which is why I came back to higher education. I’ve worked at Michigan State as a grad student at University of North Texas and then returned to Oregon to serve and trans students with a rural experience like mine. So I’m really excited to be here today because in many ways, the writing we’re discussing is really about my experience and the experience of other folks that grew up with happy to be here.

Heather Shea:
So excited for the conversation, just in our prep calls. We were getting rolling today. We had some really interesting dialogues. I love bringing together scholars and practitioners and educators and those who are studying, you know, in all of our multiple identities. So as we’ve alluded to Kevin Baker, recent really recently released a new directions as student services chapter titled recognizing and supporting students from rural areas, which we’re going to post the link to in our show notes today. And the larger monograph focused broadly on rural students. So maybe Kip, could you start us out by talking a little bit about that larger project? How did the editors of that monograph define rural?

Carl (Kip) Sorgen:
Well, actually Heather, we don’t, there are over two dozen definitions of rural use by federal agencies in the United States. There are also some considerable differences among those federal definitions, some use administrative concepts, some use land use concepts, some use economic concepts. So in the, in the issue that we wrote, we didn’t or edit it, we didn’t define rural the literature on college students from rural areas typically includes definitions provided by the USDA’s economic research service, the ERS or the national center for education, statistics, and CES. The ERs uses county, a county wide system, and then the NCE S uses school districts. And within those school districts, they’re categorized as rural town, suburban and city districts. And then within the rural districts, they’re categorized as fringe distant or remote, depending on how far they are away from an urban center. So you can see that there’s really no one definition of rural United States, federal government can’t even decide on that.

Heather Shea:
That is fascinating. I hadn’t really thought about all the different ways that it could be constructed, right. My guess is that there’s definitely a mindset or sociological component to this as well. Maybe you could talk a little bit about like why specifically this monograph came to be, why, why explore rural college students in general?

Carl (Kip) Sorgen:
So the driver of this monograph was Dr. Elise Cain. Who’s a colleague of mine here in in educational leadership at Georgia Southern, and she wanted to produce this new direction of student services, took the lead on. It asked me to co-edit and also Dan Calhoun who’s in my program, we co-edited, it contacted some great scholars. The volume starts out with place-based identity as a model. So thinking about identity, identity, characteristics, using location, where people grew up as a model for that, then we talk about urban normativity in the university and how urban normativity influences the university and then the impact of advising on sense of belonging. So that kind of frames it. Then we get into specific identities. So social class, and then African-American students, indigenous students, Latin X students, and then what Baker and I wrote recognizing and supporting students.

Heather Shea:
That’s great. So Baker, maybe you could go into talking a little bit about kind of this concept of urban normativity. And then also what drew you into this topic of exploring the intersection of queer identities and rural identities

Baker A. Rogers:
Like Lexi stated in their introduction to her introduction, excuse me. She grew up in this experience, right? So, so did I, I grew up in rural South Carolina. I went to school undergrad in rural South Carolina. I went to grad school in rural Mississippi, been all over now at Georgia Southern in rural Georgia. So I’ve been all over the Southeast in the rural areas. And so a lot of it was my interest in my own experiences and the experiences of others like me. And really also just getting the word out that queer people are here in the south, in the rural areas, because that’s goes back to your question of the urban normativity and Metro normativity. This idea that queer people always migrate to the cities and prefer to live in cities. And I, that wasn’t the, my experience or the experience of others like me. So I wanted to really use my research to shine a light on queer people in all locations. And specifically because of the need for more resources that are ignored when we take this urban normative perspective of queer issues.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. So talk a little bit about maybe, you know, some of the concerns that there is kind of this bully for, or a gap in the understanding of queer people living in rural areas. What are some of the concerns potentially that queer people in rural areas face?

Baker A. Rogers:
Yeah, I mean, queer people in rural areas face a lot of the same challenges, but then also additional challenges because of the lack of resources. The, this question of do queer people move to the city. I, it, what I was thinking about this question before the podcast, I the only way I could answer it was like, yeah, some people do some queer people do some don’t just like cisgender and people, some moved to the city, some don’t. When we were talking about earlier, how you define rural we, I usually define rural or Southern in my research based on where respondents stay as rural in Southern, because it’s all about an experience, right. And some people prefer that experience to the urban life. So I think research shows us that not all queer people moved to the city, it’s a very white, gay male perspective. That’s also very dated, I think. So queer people are everywhere and are thriving everywhere, and we need to make sure we’re doing things to provide the extra resources needed in rural areas, because sometimes you have to travel so far to get healthcare to get just information and things. The internet has changed a lot for rural queer people. But you still have to travel a lot to get the resources we need. So we, we have to bring light shed light on these populations.

Heather Shea:
I’ll open this up to other folks, other perceived concerns that, you know, potentially face queer people in rural areas or in your experiences.

Carl (Kip) Sorgen:
Well, in some of the research that I was studying, there’s increased visibility because there are fewer queer people in rural areas. So they’re more visible. There are fewer resources like Baker mentioned, then there’s also less social support for queer people in rural areas. So those are some considerations. And also I found that queer people come out in rural areas and about the same rate as they do in urban environment or suburban environments about 10%. So there’s really no difference in how, how many people are coming out from a rural area versus an urban area.

Heather Shea:
Julia, Lexi.

Lexi Sylvester:
It’s really funny as we discuss virality my partner and I are both from rural Oregon and we have like, debate about, cause I’ll be like, you’re not from rural Oregon. I’m from rural Oregon. Like you’re from the city. We, this is the thing we argue about regularly. And I, my qualifications are always like, how far are you from like the nearest Walmart or Target? Like, that is how I define rurality in a lot of ways. And I’m like, I was an hour away from the nearest Walmart or target. You had one like 10 minutes away where you grew up, it’s not rural, but to Kip’s point, like that’s, that’s not really what it’s about. And when I, when I think of this idea of moving to the city, it’s so funny because that was out, you know, I’m sure it was part of your experience to Baker, but like there, the conversation we’re talking about today is actually like, I work at an institution that represents a version of Lexi that could have been, but my, my parents were like, no, you need to go to University of Oregon for college, which they were, I was really blessed that they were both like emotionally and financially supportive of that because they were like, you need to get out of here and go to the city.

Lexi Sylvester:
Right. So there’s, I serve students today that are, are continuing most often a rural experience. And I think it’s really, it’s really interesting that that narrative, even amongst parents, amongst teachers really still exists encouraging people to go to where the queerness is, which is in town.

Julia Keleher:
Yeah. I was going to mention, I’m kinda, I’m a transplant to Idaho. I w we’re not from here, I’m originally from Iowa, which I would say is not as rural as places I live here now, like very much so. Cause my town where I’m from is my city had, you know, multiple Walmarts and Targets. If we’re gonna use it for like a capitalistic view of how we do that. But being a transplant here when I moved out, I’m originally from the Midwest. So I was living in Minnesota at the time in grad school when I moved out here and everyone was very concerned that I took a job in Bosco, Idaho, and it became like a, like a, like a safety concern. Like people pulling me aside and being like, do you really know where you’re moving to? Like, are you going to be safe?

Julia Keleher:
Are there going to be other queer people in, in your town? And it was a misconception of living in a smaller space because Bosco, for those who, you know, the random few people that are aware with it is it’s kind of, we call it like the blue Oasis in a red state. Idaho is extremely conservative, but Bosco is a true and true college towns. So we have, you know, population of about totally 32,000 people. And we recently just got a target like a month ago, our target open. So and we have a Chipotle over in Pullman. So my life has said, I don’t need to go to Spokane and Spokane Louis did as no, but like that’s the thing is that the Bosco is surrounded by these pockets of reality that is sometimes actively hostile. And so when students come from these areas like Idaho is a very large state and people don’t realize the size of Idaho is primarily rural and honestly, forest land, national forest land and unused land wildlife lands. So when you’re coming from these little tiny towns, like even Lewiston, which is, you know, 45,000 people, about 45 minutes south of here Lewiston was one of the first places that I ever saw people openly walking around that were white nationals coming from the Midwest to here. And so there’s this understanding that for queer folks, it can be sometimes uncomfortable and at the very least in dangerous, if we go venture into these smaller towns where we may not be welcomed.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. I remember when we moved from Tucson to Bosco, I’m thinking, well, I’ll live Pullman because that’s at least in the state of Washington. And then I realized actually it’s better to live in Bosco. It’s like a really great, cool little blue dot as you said.

Baker A. Rogers:
Can I add one poster? Sorry. I was just going to say, I think it’s interesting too though. Being from a rural area, like my family would have been more worried about me if I moved to an urban area because they’re scared of urban crime. Right. And also the racism mixed in what that means. So I think a lot of times we push more feminine gay people to move to the city, but masculinity, my masculinity is still more accepted in the rule and my family is not so fearful. So I think we, we are gonna talk about this a little later about how it’s not monolithic identity and who’s pushed away from the rural areas and who’s, who’s pushed to the city and who’s pushed to stay in the country. Often looks very different depending on masculinity and femininity.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. That’s a really good point. And I also want to note for those who are listening, you know, all of, all of us appear white. I don’t know if we all identify as white, but like there are other intersecting identity piece there is that, you know, when we think about rural areas, are we also talking about the prevalence of whiteness? And Julia mentioned white nationals. So I think it’s hard to talk about just one aspect of rurality, right? It, it has lots of, lots of layers. And we could go down a whole other path. So I’m going to pull, I’m going to pull this back because I am really interested about this predator precursor to the college experience. And so Kip, can you talk a little bit about what the literature says about the kind of kindergarten through high school experience of queer students from rural areas and you know, what might be happening right before they come to college? And, and the prevalence of supportive environments or not in those spaces?

Carl (Kip) Sorgen:
Sure. So in order for us to understand queer college students from rural areas, we need to kind of look at where they came from, like Heather was saying. So I do want to say that many queer students value and identify with their experience and acceptance and inclusion in these areas, in these rural areas, they appreciate a close knit community and they’re connected to their rural roots. So I don’t want to say that rurality is not good for all students. It can be good for, for students, but in reviewing the literature, what the literature says is queer students from rural schools are more frequently victimized. They experience higher rate of bias, language victimization, and anti LGBTQ discrimination in policies and in practices. And when they do report incidences, half of them said that they were completely ineffective in the reporting response.

Carl (Kip) Sorgen:
We also have teachers who are under prepared to talk about queer issues in these schools, they may be prepared and they may be not recommended to talk about these issues in, in rural schools. They might receive little training, little in-service training on how to talk about queer issues or address queer issues. For social support, we know that queer students in rural areas more frequently utilize GSA gay, straight alliances. So they’re looking for social support. However, only half of the institutions or half of the school districts offer a gay straight Alliance compared with suburban or urban schools. So there are fewer gay, straight alliances, but yet the students use them even more. So they’re looking for social support. But I, I do want to mention that a lot of students thrive in a lot of Christians thrive in rural areas. But a lot of them moved to.

Baker A. Rogers:
Can I give a, a shameless plug here for my me and another sociology and a K through 12 educator just wrote a textbook called gender and sexuality in the classroom and educators guide. It’s going to be released within the next year with Rutledge I on education series. And I, as a sociologist, was it, I was very surprised and very disappointed to find that there are no textbooks like this for teacher training. There were some other books about education, gender, and sexuality that came out in the last few years, but not a single textbook for teaching this to K through 12 educators. So we wrote the textbook and I hope that educators will use it as, I mean, it’s just a starting point of like, this is what it is, and this is how to be empathetic and listen to our students so that they have better experiences, whether wherever they are. And I think it’s vital that all K through 12 educators get some of that training, at least a class of something.

Lexi Sylvester:
I so are there any other folks who have been in the classroom who have done K-12 teaching on the call? It’s just me. I, I have to admit when I re read the portion of the, of the chapter, that discusses teacher preparation, I felt a little defensive. I get very defensive of teachers as a former teacher and the child of two public school teachers. Because I think so, and, and it is a good point, right? My defensiveness is my, not the authors. But, but I think that so often we fall back on teacher preparation and teacher training when we talk about K-12 settings. And I think that that’s true, but I really want to highlight that I, you know, I taught in an urban school and I was actively in violently discouraged from doing any sort of LGBT education. My, the GSA that I co-founded with students started out as a club, under a different name.

Lexi Sylvester:
It was closeted. And then when it came out, my students were told that what they were doing was disgusting and I faced it, I faced disciplinary action, right. So, and I don’t feel that anyone saying that’s not the case, but you know, it’s not, it’s not a monolith. And I think that the history of our schools also matter so much. When we think about that K-12 experience and there, there are certainly trends, but I, I always worry about underscoring teacher preparation. Because I, in some ways, I think there’s no training, you know, and I just conducted training for an entire district. That’s going through, they recently fired two administrators who were promoting, you know, we’re seeing right now nationally, a lot of movement on discouraging LGBT education in K-12 settings. And these folks were part of that movement.

Lexi Sylvester:
You can check it out. It’s really wild. I can’t remember the name. I’ll, I’ll look it up and you can check out their website, but they, they were, they were fired. They were terminated for their work. I offer, I did training for that whole district or really rural district. And then those teachers were actually just reinstated and there was a school walkout and protest last night about the reinstatement. And so there’s in this really rural place. And so I think there are so many factors that go into this beyond teacher preparation. It’s about school board makeup. It’s about so, so many things, which I think you all are acknowledging as well. I’m just defensive of teachers.

Heather Shea:
That’s okay Lexi. Yeah. I think it’s a fascinating conversation. I also am, am engaged in some international conversations about how we’re preparing teachers through a study abroad that I lead. And I am learning that in the Netherlands and Belgium, like they do a better job actually of addressing issues of sexual and gender diversity in their classes. We pretend like it doesn’t exist here, I think sometimes. So I’m glad to hear that there’s a textbook, so Lexi and Julia, you both work in centers. And I do think what’s fascinating is that our centers, I also direct and the interim director of a center, you know, are often this place of community development and, you know, interaction between and among students from various backgrounds and where, regardless of where the institution is located, you know, students come from all over, you know, so even in Idaho, right, you can have people from downtown Boise coming to the University of Idaho that choose to come to the Idaho school. That’s the better. No, I’m kidding. But I am really curious, Julia, if you want to talk a little bit about kind of, what are the interactions that you notice among students who may come from different backgrounds rural and urban.

Julia Keleher:
Yeah. I think it’s kind of interesting you say that because I immediately went to a memory I had where we, I try to go to like every recruitment event that is like tabling or like sharing event that I’m allowed to go to. And I remember I had a student who came in from LA Los Angeles and their parents were concerned about coming to such a rural place in Idaho having this stereotype of being not welcoming to and transgender people. And I hosted a breakout session, so people could talk about like, what’s like to be a Vandal and being queer and trans. And I was like, oh yeah, we have lots of students involved. They’re going to be people here. And then unfortunately they were the only ones that showed up to that session. And so it was just me sitting in front of this PowerPoint slide going like, we, we there’s and trans people here.

Julia Keleher:
I promise it’s not just me. It’s not just like, just happened to be bad luck. And like I had to reassure these parents from California, Southern California, that there were going to be students for their student interact with. And I ended up getting another student really well and they succeeded. But it, we have a combination of folks here cause we have, you know, recruiting across the Western United States. And University of Idaho is very much marketed as a budget friendly hometown alternative prickly during the COVID three COVID and the pandemic. If folks are familiar with, if they’ve seen national news about Idaho, we are very, the state is very hesitant to do any sort of mass mandates vaccine mandates or social distancing. And when you know, the University of Idaho we’ve been in person since about June or July of 2020.

Julia Keleher:
So the, the, the distancing was that. So we’re definitely getting more students from more urban areas because we’re promoting this like traditional college experience in the time of COVID. So students can come to campus, go to events and live their best life with fewer restrictions than they would another school in the area that may be still remote or distance learning. So like we’re seeing students, you know, from Portland, Seattle, California, Colorado, like I work with students all over the place. And there definitely is a little bit of a culture shock. I feel for, especially for our trans students coming into a space where there’s a very few resources medically or affirmative care that they could go to and provide them with proper support. And I think, you know, and so that’s, that’s, that could be a concern as you come from big urban places where like, oh, I have a doctor and I see for my gender affirming hormone care.

Julia Keleher:
And then I get to Idaho and they’re searching for the few one, or the only sort of like four or five providers in this area that will provide gender affirming care that is not planned parenthood. And you know, obviously the planned parenthood is over is 15 or 20 minutes away, which is not that big a deal for urban folks, but a lot of our students don’t drive or don’t have vehicles on campus and we have no public transportation getting them to, and from these two different communities. And so that’s a lot of walking the distance if they need to walk or finding, you know, rides. And like rideshare is just getting into Bosco. Like we just recently had this big announcement that Uber was coming to Bosco. So we’re kind of always behind the times when it comes to these kinds of things. So it can be kind of a hard interact, a hard hard balance when coming from more urban areas. But when it comes to like student interactions, I don’t really see any big differences students come to campus and they succeed. And I think a lot of our students are from Southern Idaho. That’s where the primary bulk of our student population comes from. And so they’ve kind of, sometimes they have very similar experiences and the students who are local to Bosco are usually the minority in that.

Heather Shea:
Lexi. What about you talk a little bit about the specific gaps you see on your campus?

Lexi Sylvester:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think so. I think that a gap that exists on many campuses that I can say our campus sexually doing really well is specific to trans health care kind of, kind of, as Julia was talking about. So, and I’ve worked at campuses that are, are lots of different ways on this issue, but if you are a trans student at Southern Oregon University, you can, you can start HRT pretty much immediately. We have somebody who’s doing treatment at our health center and that’s a really uncommon experience. And so, and they’re doing it on an informed consent basis. You don’t need a letter from a therapist, right? Like this is like pretty wildly unheard of. And so a lot of what I do is like, pre-meetings kind of para counseling with people to like, make them now that there’s no barrier. Sometimes I watch students be like, oh, I thought it would be harder.

Lexi Sylvester:
I thought I’d have more time to adjust to the idea of starting hormone replacement therapy. And so I do a lot of that, but many campuses don’t have that surface the service it’s pretty unheard of. And awesome. And so I think when we, when we, and we’ll get to recommendations later, but I’m like, how can you work an advocate for that to exist at your college campus? As a student affairs, professional is one of the really big things you can do. Not that everybody wants to do hormone replacement therapy, but offering it and vocally offering it so that it’s not some backdoor thing where you have to know the person who will give you the referral to the nurse practitioner, who will give you the boy juice is like very important. I also think that one, one big gap that I see is we have a lot of trans students who are looking for these very direct services that in student affairs, we don’t always want to connect them to exactly.

Lexi Sylvester:
Like, I think in student affairs, one of the things that annoys me the most that I fall into and other people fall into is what I call fake resourcing, which is where I give you a list of links so that you can figure it out yourself. And for, for rural students, this is particularly hazardous because that list of links often will involve many, many steps to get to the thing, right, because we’re geographically far away from it. Maybe the thing is only open at certain times. It really depends what it is. And so I’m really focusing with my staff and student staff on how can we say we’re contracting with a voice coach and all you have to do is fill out this Google form, and then you have an appointment with the voice coach, a really direct and simple service. I think the pandemic has actually been really, you know, it’s, it’s hard to silver silver line, something that has been like emotionally and physically devastating and deadly for so many people.

Lexi Sylvester:
I think that for trans health care, the huge array of options that have popped up for telehealth are such game changers. And I think for rural campuses really focusing on, yeah, you can be a rural queer and trans person, and a lot of those resources still exist in the city, but now we have all these ways to link you to them. And it can just happen for you. I mean, that, that’s an, I’m seeing a doctor for my hormone replacement therapy. Who’s based in Portland, which everybody thinks all of Oregon is Portland. It’s not most of Oregon votes red by county in presidential elections. Actually, it’s just a few really big places to vote blue, just like everywhere else. It was wild. My parents, when I moved to Texas for like, you’re moving to Texas similar to, I think somebody else said this on the call, you’re moving to Texas.

Lexi Sylvester:
Oh my God. And I actually experienced a lot more bias and discrimination here in rural Oregon than I ever did in the greater Dallas area. So those are some, some of the gaps that I think are really affecting our students. And then just super briefly, I think that we can do such a better job as student affairs professionals in having strong relationships with gay, straight alliances at rural rural schools and really encouraging folks to higher education. And not just to higher education in urban or a metroplex areas, but bridging to, yeah, you can continue your rural experience here and be close to your family and there’s community happening at this school. And you can kind of continue, you know, usually folks who are in the GSA kind of want to do some sort of campus organizing when they get to a campus and showing them how that can go on is, is really important. And those are also hard relationships to cultivate. So those are some of the things that I think other,

Heather Shea:
Other comments or thoughts about gaps or differences between students.

Carl (Kip) Sorgen:
Well, I think identifying students from rural areas is a challenge in and of itself. It’s not something that they wear on their sleeve generally, unless they identify to you, you don’t really know whether or not the students are from a rural area.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. That’s a good, that’s a really good point. Yeah. I wanted to also jump, I think we kind of have alluded to the ways in which the pandemic has affected our engagement with students in general, but I am curious if we have some examples or stories of and Julia’s may, may, may or may not apply to you and your campus experience since Idaho has spared the pandemic all around. But Lexi, maybe you could talk a little bit about how remote learning affected or the stories that you’ve heard about how being at home potentially affected the queer and trans students on your campus.

Lexi Sylvester:
Absolutely. You know, it, it’s challenging when home environments are not supportive of queer and trans students, both in K-12 education and in higher education. And we absolutely saw that. I don’t think that I’m alone in having really kind of fostered communities on discord. If you’re not aware of discord, it’s sort of, it’s a social media platform, but you kind of, it’s more curated and that you’re not broadcasting to the whole world, and anyone can add you, you make things called servers that people then can join. It’s sort of similar. And from the same makers of slack, maybe if you’ve used that from work and then a discord server, you can have different sematic channels and kind of get organized and hang out with people. There are video rooms. And I saw students really leaning on those heavily, and I think queer and trans students actually for a long time.

Lexi Sylvester:
And they’ve done some work in scholarship about this in the past, have leaned on digital communities. And I think that the pandemic really made folks double down because that was kind of the option, especially on campuses that closed which ours did for much of the pandemic. So I think an increased emphasis on online communities. I think we’ve seen more opportunities for trans healthcare. We’ve also seen a lot of isolation. You know, one of the things that you may not know you can do as a student affairs professional, and that I’ve done many times, especially during the pandemic, is to help students pursue dependency overrides so that they can be financially separated from their parents who may be using the threat of not supporting tuition for a student as a way to make them not come out is a really common tactic that I see.

Lexi Sylvester:
I, you know, I have, I have conversations with students about that. I would say at least monthly. And so shepherding a through that dependency override is something I’ve done a lot in the pandemic so that their parents don’t have that way to manipulate them because they’re eligible for more aid. Are they taking on more loans? Yes. Are they less suicidal also? Yes. I, I think being with home with family is a real challenge and leaning on those digital communities is more important now than ever to call back 2019 talking point of for many people.

Julia Keleher:
Yeah. Discord is as highly used in our campus too, at least for those students that I work closely with using discord both when the pandemic did start, we did, we did quarantine here in Idaho at the university of Idaho for around like three or four months. And then we, we opened back up and our campus opened up in for the 2020, fall, 2020 year. And it’s, it was hard because we would open up, but then also the students were primarily doing remote classes because a lot of the instructors would have two classes. And so a lot of our students were stuck in their residence halls or their Greek houses on our campus or in their apartments, which are kept off campus apartments. And I think that led to increased isolation also because there really was no no outlet for them to get together, like for like social support.

Julia Keleher:
But also too, we also saw an increase of bias incidences occurring in our residence halls where students would have things said to them or vandalism because everyone was kind of looped. They were so cooped up together in one small space, which I know it seems counterintuitive in a pandemic. We have everyone together and these like buildings but like they weren’t allowed to go to each other’s floors or go to like each other’s common rooms. So a lot of people were just with their suite mates or their roommates in these small areas. And there was an increase in discrimination and bias that occurred. But having the online support was really great. We actually had a panic moment when we did go offline in March of 2020, because the University of Idaho at the time didn’t have first name changes without a legal name change in our system.

Julia Keleher:
And we were a lot of the supportive faculty and myself and Dean of students, staff, and other staff, our equity and diversity unit. We were scrambling to figure out ways that we can encourage faculty to ensure that trans students weren’t being outed in their classes, going from online to that. And thankfully zoom is a much more flexible option, but we’re transitioning away from BV learn this semester, but we were still using Blackboard learn and we did not have name changes in our banner system. And so the pandemic really sparked that call for the, our university, our President Greene to push for the ITSC, our information services to implement the first name changes. And that is something I’ve been working on since I started at the University of Idaho eight years ago. And that was a huge game changer for our students because we, we, they weren’t allowed to change their first names and without a legal name change cause an Idaho legal name changes are surprisingly complicated process.

Julia Keleher:
And I’m not sure if the other states and more rural areas, but Idaho you have to change your name. You not only have to go through the court system, but you have to list your name, change in our newspaper for one week to ensure, you know, so students have to pay for both the newspaper listing and the the court costs which can be prohibitive for students in lower, you know, reserved incomes. So that made things hard, but it’s kind of a positive and negative thing, but also to seeing the re revitalization of students excited to come in and do stuff like our gender sexuality Alliance, which was a long lasting student organization kind of disappeared during the pandemic. And it’s been back and in full swing and very involved in the students are very excited to get into stuff. And especially our returning students are our first, second years, and third years are ready to go out there and like go to events and talk to groups and organize and do activism because they didn’t have the opportunity then during their first year.

Heather Shea:
So let’s turn to the question about our population not being monolithic, right. So what are some of the needs of trans students, BiPOC queer, students and kept, do you want to kick us off and then we’ll kind of work around this question and talk some more about intersections of identity.

Carl (Kip) Sorgen:
Sure. So when we think about intersectional perspectives or intersections of identity in the volume that we wrote we talk about the reconceptualize model of multiple dimensions of identity. So people have a lot of different identities that they bring to the table that are part of their that’s part of their core, their nucleus of being and as we were writing this, we wanted to think about place-based as an identity, at least Kane wrote a chapter on what it means to be rural or from a rural area and how that influences one’s identity. But there are, we acknowledged that there are multiple layers or characteristics of identity. Somebody else want to jump off of that.

Lexi Sylvester:
Yeah, I think so. Absolutely. And, and I also think, you know, in student affairs, when we’re conceptualizing identity the way, and this relates to some earlier questions too, the way that I think queer and trans rural students conceptualize identity, absolutely aided by online avenues. But I think that coming from environments where there are not maybe as many out queer and trans people, the way that people come to that identity is, is really different than folks who come up in a school that has a really active GSA, right. Which is not many, not many of our rural schools as we’ve already talked about. And so I think in addressing the, not a monolith part, I think that what we really need to be doing as student affairs professionals is really listening and not projecting where we think somebody should go. And this relates a lot to the chapter and not assuming that people will move to urban areas and assuming that the place that they come from matters when I came to educate higher education, for example, it was the first time that I heard many people like describing themselves and talking about our communities as queer.

Lexi Sylvester:
And it was a different time. And that was like an emerging idea at that time. It’s been a few years since I was an undergrad, but that, that was a really big shock for me. And I still see that with queer and trans students who are coming to Southern Oregon university, they haven’t heard queer be used in a positive very much just to name one thing. Right. And so I think checking what can be an assumption, a lot of times, student affairs professionals, we want to know the right way to say it. A lot of times in queer and trans trainings, I’ll say this, isn’t say it right class, because even though queer and trans is how I talk about our communities in general, there are people for whom that’s a big shock, and this is one really specific example. But I think that people are coming from a width and breadth of experience, and we need to really challenge ourselves to take a breath and actually listen to what they’re saying.

Lexi Sylvester:
Instead of assuming that we know that what they need to do is move to Eugene or move to Portland in order to be happy. And I also think that like acknowledging our limitations and being really ready to, you know, I have, for example, a number of trans folks of color who are student veterans and their student veterans, because that helps them go to school. And because they saw a way to get some transforming healthcare they couldn’t otherwise afford, and they want to talk to folks trans folks of color and trans veterans of color. And so how can you flex your network to set up those connections so that folks can talk to somebody like them and, and, and have shared experience, I think is so pivotal, especially in our rural areas where they maybe have, they didn’t even conceptualize, there were other people like that there absolutely are. Right.

Julia Keleher:
Yeah. And I think sorry, I thought I had my I think that to it’s, it’s, it’s hard when you look at the demographics of a lot of our rural institutions, like, I’m not quite sure how big Southern Oregon is. But here at the University of Idaho, we’re about to like 11,000 students. And then obviously that’s, that’s not just our, this is much lower for our on campus campus, residential students here in Bosco, we have centers and correlate Boise, Idaho falls, twin falls you know, our extension offices and also that our dual credit students. So our high school students who were in our independent study students from all over the state here but like looking at the population. So, so my office and LGBTQA office, we’re part of the equity and diversity unit. And we’re, we’re pretty revolutionary here in Idaho when it comes to how this structure is made, because we wanted to make sure that we have the best setup we could for our identity-based offices.

Julia Keleher:
Due to the fact that there’s such small student population numbers already there, we’re actually in the process right now of hiring a, the first director for our brand new black student cultural center, which is not even created yet. They have, they have they have a location and they have a need, but we’re still in the process of hiring new director, which will join my team to provide that support. But our, you know, I’m not going to give exact numbers because I don’t want to be wrong. And then my colleagues are like, that’s wrong. But but you know, here at the University of Idaho, our, like our black identified students are less than 200. And our also our Asian identified students and our, you know, indigenous students are less than 200. And our largest population that we record is our Latin X student populations.

Julia Keleher:
Obviously Idaho being a highly agricultural background. We have a large portion of migrant and seasonal farm working students, which are you know, our nationwide renowned camp program, our college assistance migrant program here. So that, that makes it hard because we’ve had a lot of siloing because students are brought into this kind of family, like a very high touch advising situation, especially because we only track race and ethnicity in our application materials. And so for my office, at least a lot of the information that comes is through word of mouth. So students either are interested in it, they’re and they’re trans and they want to come to me, but they still have those communities where there may be their racial and ethnic communities are part of. And we still have that. Some, we have this understanding that sometimes you have to choose, and we’re trying to eliminate that, but also looking at the demographics of like, who’s working here, I’m a white white non-binary individual who works in this field.

Julia Keleher:
I’m getting a lot of white non-binary students coming to my services because they’re coming to places where they’re, they’re reflected in how they’re supported. So it gets lots of people who are big in geek culture and nerd culture, but, and then like our Latin X queer and trans Latin X students on it are using our services like our office of multicultural affairs in our camp program. But that’s where we strive as being a close unit of few professionals that we can provide those, like we call like our family events. So we have a lot of family things, things are familiar, you know, like these these programs and educational services that are focused on family to try to keep and to try to have some intermingling of our services. But that’s something we’ve been struggling with for years,

Lexi Sylvester:
I think, oh, sorry, Heather.

Heather Shea:
Yep. I go ahead. I was just going to move us along, but make your point. Yeah.

Lexi Sylvester:
To too long. The other thing that I think of is, you know, there there’s nothing natural or supposed to be about the predominant makeup of these rural places being white, right? Like that’s a result of the colonization of the United States. I’m in Oregon, which has a history as a, as a white exclusionist state. Like there is a reason why we’re all areas here are majority white and that has to do with like the violent, the violent cultivation of that idea by white colonizers, who like I am descendant from and continue to occupy land as like a history of that legacy. And I think that that’s, that’s another thing we really need to think of a lot of times I find myself saying that we in training, like when I’m referencing a cultural idea about masculinity, like we think men should do this. I think as student affairs professionals, it’s really important that we challenge ourselves when we say things like that.

Lexi Sylvester:
Like what we are we talking about? Because when I say that I’m talking about we as in like mostly like white people in my growing up experience in a rural white community, but indigenous folks, for example experienced, like there are, we is a lot different than their experience of gender, if we can call it that, because gender is an idea that comes from colonization is really different, right? And, and it’s impacted by like, what does it mean when there’s a pandemic and maybe as a queer trans two-spirit indigenous person, you are, you know, watching white folks, bungle and mishandle a pandemic and people in your community and on this land are dying when that land was called and occupied in the first place. What does it mean when climate change brought on by industrial revolution revolution from people who colonized this place is impacting salmon populations, which are inexplicably in exhaustively linked to gender ideals in your community, right?

Lexi Sylvester:
That climate change has the real impacts on how you experienced gender. And then you go to a rural institution where the predominant users of and trans spaces are white queer people, and then experienced that violence all over again. And so how can I do have done a presentation about white by default queer and trans spaces and, and how you can counter that. And I think it’s asking yourself, like things, what is the history of where you are meeting in a room or in a building, what songs you’re playing or not playing who’s leading the meetings, how do they happen are using Robert’s rules. These are all things that undergird white supremacy in your space and exclude queer and trans folks of color and queer and trans indigenous folks. And how, how can you really subvert those things? And I think this matters even more, perhaps at a rural serving institutions where folks are coming from communities into a predominantly white institution and then experiencing more harm in those spaces.

Heather Shea:
I think a follow up conversation is definitely about kind of this intersection of identities with queer college students. I think that is a fascinating kind of further piece that we should be unpacking. So thank you for bringing that Lexi as well. So Baker let’s turn to resources. I know that chapter does a really good job of outlining what campuses should be thinking about and providing in terms of prep for college life support for students. Can you kind of talk through some of the things that you all mentioned and then we’ll put, tossed us out to the larger group too.

Baker A. Rogers:
Yeah, of course. So to start with, I mean, schools try to provide this wrap-around service, right, for all students, and they’re not doing a very good job for queer students. So schools need to provide the resources that meet the physical, psychological educational and emotional needs of queer students. And when we’re specifically thinking about queer students from rural areas, what there are specific needs. So we talked about healthcare. I think healthcare is one of the biggest that we’ve talked about today, quite a bit. And Lexi mentioning the program for trans people at your school. It’s just like in Georgia, that would be unheard of. So we have we’re in a rural area and then students, most of our students come from rural areas in Georgia and we still don’t have the resources. Right. It’s the biggest city. A lot of them have been in and it’s still a rural area.

Baker A. Rogers:
So there’s nowhere to go to get the resources for especially trans affirming health. And then we talk about things like there needs to be specific sexual health information and education, because most in Georgia, at least at Georgia Southern students coming from rural schools in Georgia usually did not receive sex education. If they received it at all, it did not include queer people. It definitely did not include trans people. So sex education and sexual health information is necessary and, and even more necessary for these students, queer students coming from rural areas. I think mental health is also an area that’s we need to focus on because a lot of these students, the bias around mental health in the south, and then also in rural areas is very strong. And coming to a school, it might be the first time they have access to mental health care, but is that mental health queer care friendly is a big question that still looms in a lot of schools.

Baker A. Rogers:
I know at Georgia Southern working very hard and there’s some people working very hard, but there are also like this bad memory, historical memory of things, not being that great for queer students. So this fear of getting help. So I think that, and then the other issue I’ll talk about just briefly that I think we bring up that a lot of the research hasn’t talked about a lot is what do we do about students returning home, whether that be for the summer or whether that be on the Christmas break or whether that be you know, after they graduate, if they want to return home someplace, some students don’t have safe places to return to. We’ve talked about on campus, opening up dorm rooms over holidays and things, but nothing has actually happened for queer students to stay. Because there’s a steer, like there’s a lot of students that have problems at home, but this, we also know this is very specific homelessness of queer youth and, queer youth being kicked out of their home is very specific, especially from these more conservative, rural areas.

Baker A. Rogers:
So thinking about how do we support students returning home, how they have to interact with their families. And this made me think about like a lot of the things we said about things moving online for COVID really helped in a lot of ways, trans students and students, but a lot of our students also had to return home to families that weren’t supportive. And they had to take classes during that semester. I was teaching straight trans studies and taking a trans studies class in the house with your little siblings or your parents who are not supportive, can be very hard. So thinking about what that means to return home for queer and trans students, especially in these rural areas where resources are even fewer and far between than they are on their campuses is a big, is a big part of what we need to really focus on.

Heather Shea:
That’s great. Thank you for that. So I’d love to open it up for anyone else who wants to talk about broadly beyond resource centers, what recommendations we have for the field. Maybe things that we should be emphasizing in our professional prep programs and scholarship. I think that this chapter kind of opens up a whole feel a whole area of potential scholarship and some interesting studies maybe down in the horizon. So other recommendations and resources and supports,

Carl (Kip) Sorgen:
Well, I think the limited research on this, it impacts our practice. So I would like to see this is a start, but this go broader and the research go broader. So thanks to the folks who are here today and also to anybody who’s listening to this, who’s interested in it. I think we need to ascertain what queer students from rural backgrounds need to be successful. We need to ask them or start thinking about this, or keep thinking about this likely it’s not drastically different from what other queer students need. However, there may be some differences. We also need to question how the ways that we serve students might vary by institutional characteristic, whether the institution is in a rural area or the institution is in an urban environment. And that’s really where most of the research on queer rural students has been as has been of the location of the institution, not necessarily where the students themselves are coming from. But really all this revolves around thinking about how urban normative assumptions influence our practice.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. And shout out to another podcast, the rural college student experience podcast. I don’t know how that, how that’s interacted at all with your monograph. But I do think if we can put more media out there in the world, we may be helping to kind of unpack some of these issues in more direct ways. So yeah. Other thoughts on recommendations.

Lexi Sylvester:
I think that as a field we need to, and I, you know, I chose to do resource center work because I care a lot about this. And so it’s, it’s hard sometimes to take on the perspective of folks who may be in another functional area because in resource centers, we function, we function a lot. Like the deans of students have a really particular group of students that, you know, that’s kind of, that’s kind of how the, how the work is. But I think that when you’re looking at your college campus does your college have a functioning and annually returning group that is by and for black indigenous and people of color queer and trans folks. And if it doesn’t then asking yourself, why not? And what am I doing to foster or not foster that group thriving because the presence or not those students are there it’s whether or not they have enough resource and empowerment money to do that thing.

Lexi Sylvester:
And how can you in whatever functional area you’re in, you’re part of that. You know, and I think that that really looks at challenging your assumptions. If you are a person in housing and you have found yourself like, oh, why aren’t students doing this? You know, like, well, what, what could I do to make this possible? How could I reach out to a student? Say, have you, have you thought about starting this? I think it would be great. Here are some funds for it. Here’s a space where you could meet, like, this would be such an exciting thing if you want, or what is it that you and your community need. Right. Asking those very real questions instead of sending people lists of links to the Trevor project, which is not helpful.

Heather Shea:
So let’s go to final thoughts. I know we could keep going. And so if you have remaining comments about any of the other questions, we didn’t get to please add those in your thoughts. So Lexi, I’m going to start with you any, any final thoughts that you want to leave our audience with today? Things that you’re thinking about now.

Lexi Sylvester:
I think so often in higher education, around any equity and inclusion topic, it can be really tempted, tempting for folks. And I group myself in this too. We think, oh, I’d like to add some knowledge and information to what I already know so that I can serve people even better. And I think that what this chapter is asking folks to do is to actually fundamentally ask you to challenge and change your perspective on how you think of things. This isn’t additive information, how in your interactions will you change your daily interactions with folks so that you are honoring who they are and where they’re coming from. So not this work isn’t additive. It is restructuring. It is the work of decolonization, I think.

Heather Shea:
Yeah, that’s really well said. Thank you for that. Kip final thoughts

Carl (Kip) Sorgen:
Thanks to all who are here in participated in again to all who are listening, but not all small towns are monolithically homophobic. There are some small towns where people feel very supported and valued, and some students go back to those towns. They value their roots. They appreciate where they came from. They want to make a difference in their, in their home communities at a college or university. Supporting queer students from rural areas is something that’s just being started to being looked at. And so I’m excited to see what goes farther from here. So thanks to everybody who’s thinking about this it’s important and what needed.

Julia Keleher:
Yeah, I think personally and scholarly with my work in graduate school, I’m really looking at now is moving away from looking at queer rural students and like a deficit model, few point where like, oh, poor them. They live in the middle of nowhere like this, their state doesn’t have laws that protective all these different things and looking at the students as whole beings. And part of that is encouraging, you know, your administration or your, the way your departments or your institution is set up to do more tracking of queer and trans students. So not just like an optional identity, like our student involvement or another organization, but as like a true form of diversity as a true form of of identity in the university. So tracking enrollment and that’s, that comes with its own complications. That could be whole entirely different conversation.

Julia Keleher:
But that’s something we really strive to do here at the University of Idaho is tracking the retention, we’re tracking the, the student’s success. So we can ensure that we’re doing the best we can and providing that holistic support through advising and high touch advising. So not just like once a year, you talk to me or once a semester, we talk every month, every week. But also to understanding that there is multiple identities as part of that thinking of like neurotypes students who now are coming into higher education, universities are needing to scramble to set up for students who are on the autism spectrum or have ADHD, or have all different types of neuro the neuro diversity within these universities. And so we’re not only doing that. We’re also seeing that these students are coming out and they’re being out and they’re providing support. And so it’s understanding those students as whole beings.

Heather Shea:
Great. Thank you. I appreciate that too. Baker final thought from you.

Baker A. Rogers:
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking kind of goes right along with what Julia said. I think we, all of us have to continue to educate ourselves and educate others on these issues because things are changing so fast. And I think that equality is not something or equity even better obviously was not something we’re ever going to attain because intersectionality is so complex. And we’re just now starting to talk about like BiPOC queer people, right. There are so many other things we haven’t even really started talking about is very few people are talking about the intersections of queerness and ability like Julia mentioned. I just think that it’s something that we’re all going to have to continue to be educating ourselves on and continue to think about these different intersections, whether it’s place, whether it’s ability, whether it’s race, whatever that is taking an intersectional perspective to make sure we’re meeting all of our students’ needs. And, and like I said, I don’t know that that’s something we ever arrive at, but that’s something we should hopefully all be striving towards.

Heather Shea:
Wonderful. Well, I am so grateful to all of you for your time. I thank you to Kip and Baker for writing this piece that sparked this conversation and Julia and Lexi. I am so grateful for you all and sharing your experiences both individually as well as professionally. So thank you for, for contributing to this episode to also just a huge heartfelt appreciation to the dedicated behind the scenes work of our production assistant Nat Ambrosey. Thanks for making us look and sound and, and read really, really well with our transcript and everything. If you’re listening today and not already receiving our weekly newsletter, please visit our website and add yourself. You can then also check out our archives while you’re there. If you found this conversation helpful, please share it with your networks. And then also share how you’re using it in your, in your classes or in your professional development opportunities.

Heather Shea:
And we’ll send you a pack of stickers for your sharing of that with us. Also just a final shout out to our sponsors a little bit more about them. This episode was sponsored by Anthology. Transform your student experience and advanced co-curricular learning with Anthology Engage. With this technology platform. You are able to easily manage student organizations, efficiently plan events, and truly understand student involvement to continuously improve your engagement efforts at your institution. Learn more by visiting anthology.com/engage. And finally, Stylus is also proud to be a sponsor of the podcast, browse their student affairs, diversity and professional development titles at styluspub.com. Use the promo code SANow for 30% off all books plus free shipping. And you can find Stylus on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter @styluspub. If you go to our website, you can click on sponsors and learn more about each of them. Again, I’m Heather Shea thanks to our listeners and everyone who’s watching and listening today. Make it count everyone.