Toward Exclusion through Inclusion: Engendering Reputation with Gender-Inclusive Facilities at Colleges and Universities in the United States,2001-2013

Abstract

Ample sociological evidence demonstrates that binary gender ideologies are an intractable part of formal organizations and that transgender issues tend to be marginalized by a wide range of social institutions. Yet, in the last 15 years, more than 200 colleges and universities have attempted to ameliorate such realities by adopting gender-inclusive facilities in which students of any gender can share residential and restroom spaces. What cultural logics motivate these transformations? How can their emergence be reconciled with the difficulty of altering the gender order? Using an original sample of 2,036 campus newspaper articles, I find that support for inclusive facilities frames such spaces as a resource through which an institution can claim improved standing in the field of higher education. This process of engendering reputation allows traditional gender separation in residential arrangements to be overcome, but it also situates institutional responsiveness to transgender issues as a means of enhancing a college or university’s public prestige. This, in turn, produces novel status systems in the field of higher education—albeit ones that perpetuate familiar forms of institutional and cultural exclusion.

Keywords

transgender higher education organizations symbolic boundaries LGBTQ

In the past 15 years, more than 200 colleges and universities in the United States have adopted policies allowing undergraduate students to reside in gender-inclusive housing, and dozens more have converted some of their restrooms into degendered facilities.¹ As such spaces have surged in popularity across the country, interdisciplinary scholarship on transgender issues has identified them as integral to minimizing the “harassment and violence” experienced on campus by transgender students, faculty, and staff (Gershenson 2010, 195) and, moreover, to conveying a broader message of institutional inclusion for students with “diverse gender identities and expressions” (B. Beemyn et al. 2005, 52).² Beyond the sphere of higher education, nonprofit organizations and national media alike have also celebrated institutions that have adopted gender-inclusive facilities, understanding such innovations to be, as one Washington Post article described them, a profound “victory in a long fight to create a ‘culture of respect’ on campus” for queer and transgender undergraduates across the country (Svitek 2014).

Yet sociological research about gender and organizational change has long found that attempts to transform the social organization of gender—especially within educational institutions—are often met with substantial resistance. Building from Joan Acker’s canonical formulation of gender as “a constitutive element in organizational logic” (Acker 1990, 147), sociologists have thoroughly documented how gender ideologies saturate organizational function: from circulating images of male dominance to interactional norms that promulgate gender conformity, the cultural foundations of gender inequality are inextricable from everyday organizational function (Britton 2000; Britton and Logan 2008). In fact, even when formal organizations acknowledge transgender individuals and their experiences, they often do so in ways that leave cultural ideologies about inherent gender difference and heterosexuality intact—particularly when such changes involve gender-segregated spaces (Westbrook and Schilt 2014). What, then, could motivate institutions of higher education to challenge long-standing interdictions about the physical gender segregation of undergraduate students and adopt gender-inclusive housing and restrooms?

To answer that question, I analyzed public debates about gender-inclusive facilities as they unfolded in campus newspaper media from 2001 to 2013. Drawing from an original sample of 2,036 published articles, I found that proponents of gender-inclusive housing and restrooms use three broad approaches to justify their support for facility change on their respective campuses. The first strategy, familiar to scholars of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) identity construction (Bernstein 1997), is a universalizing approach that emphasizes similarity between transgender and cisgender students. Such discourses valorize the individual rights to which students across gender identities are entitled: more choice, autonomy, and practical freedom in their living arrangements—none of which, they argue, should be contingent on a gender-specific need. The second, also consistent with the literature on nationwide LGBTQ social movements in the United States (S. Epstein 1999), involves articulating a collective identity for gender and sexual minority students and, more importantly, using claims about the distinct needs of that identity group to lobby for gender-inclusive facilities.

But undergraduate students, campus staff, and university administrators also go beyond such student-centered logics, as their discourses frame inclusive facilities as institutional currency: that is, a valuable means through which a college or university can craft a public image of itself as attentive to gender and sexual minority students. Third, then, newspaper discourses imagine degendered spaces as a way for an institution to gain notoriety for its progressive gender and sexual politics, channel that reputation into an advantage over its peer institutions, and, above all, convincingly claim membership among a highly selective, highly ranking subset of institutions of higher education. This strategy, which I refer to as engendering reputation, frames institutional responsiveness to transgender issues more as a vehicle for enhancing a college or university’s prestige than for meeting the residential needs of their gender-diverse student bodies. Consequently, discursive support for gender-inclusive facilities leverages the promise of campus inclusion in ways that reinforce hierarchies of institutional status. That process, I argue, ultimately produces novel status systems across the field of higher education—albeit ones that reproduce familiar inequalities.

In what follows, I first develop a theoretical framework for engendering reputation by synthesizing existing sociological research about gendered institutions, transgender issues in higher education, and cultural influences on organizational change. I then offer a brief overview of my methodological approach before I present my findings in two sections: one devoted to student-centered logics of individualism and identity, and one devoted to institutional logics of reputation and rankings. Within each section, I provide a descriptive account of the various discursive logics underlying support for (and, occasionally, opposition to) gender-inclusive facilities, as well as analytic threads that explicate the conceptual interrelationships among those common themes. I devote extra attention to those interrelationships that engender reputation—because of their centrality to my argument—by connecting identity claims to matters of institutional standing. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the implications of engendering reputation, both for theories of the gendered organization and for the real-world tension between inclusion and inequality.

Gendered Institutions, Gendered Transformations, and Gendered Violations

Social life hinges upon categorical distinctions between men and women (Gerson and Peiss 1985; C. F. Epstein 1988), and social institutions are a fundamental source of the categorization schemes which fuel that differentiation in everyday cultural processes (Martin 2004; Risman 2004). Formal organizations are thus a crucial link connecting institutions to ideologies, as they physically and symbolically segregate men and women, contribute to the construction of female and male gender identities, and disseminate potent images of masculine privilege and feminine deference (Acker 1990, 2006). Though the specific manifestations of that “gendering” process vary across institutional fields and geographic boundaries (Britton 2000; Britton and Logan 2008), ample sociological evidence exposes the imbrication of gender distinctions in routinized and often invisible aspects of everyday organizational functioning. Within higher education in particular, persistent cultural logics of gender difference pervade campus life: not only do they perpetuate economic disparities between men and women, but they amplify countless other social privileges for men, disadvantages for women, and harmful ideologies about heterosexual complementarity (Hamilton 2014; Armstrong, Hamilton, and Sweeney 2006).

Although much of this scholarship has focused on ideological stasis within the gendered organization, sociologists have recently turned to exploring the possibility of change. In keeping with Joan Acker’s (2006) call to identify specific “inequality-producing mechanisms,” such work highlights how, for instance, changes to protocols for hiring or women’s presence in positions of authority can help ameliorate gender-related inequities throughout an organization (Huffman, Cohen, and Pearlman 2010; Kalev 2009). But even when organizations make such modifications, background beliefs about gender categories often continue to produce discriminatory and unequal outcomes for women, albeit in ways that are less bureaucratically scripted (Kelly et al. 2010; Ridgeway and Correll 2004). Within higher education, a parallel and equally tacit process of cultural reproduction can be seen through self-selection processes: traditional beliefs about men being better suited for mathematics routinely induce female math achievers to pursue other talents; likewise, self-evaluations of one’s personality as predominately emotional or rational—themselves labels inflected with gendered expectations—pull men and women toward different areas of study and occupations (Cech 2013; Charles and Bradley 2009).

Research about transgender issues further illustrates the resilience of such ideological foundations of the gender order. Although gender variance has been central to gender theory in sociology since Howard Garfinkel’s (1967) study of “Agnes,” sociological attention to transgender phenomena has undergone a substantial renaissance in the last few years. Much of that recent work moves beyond exploiting gender variance to theorize the gender order (see Vidal-Ortiz 2009), focusing instead on the lived experiences of gender-diverse people in their own right. In some such work, sociologists have found that individuals and institutions alike tend to manage gendered bodies, identities, and behaviors in ways that police any semblance of a gender category transgression (Connell 2010; Lucal 1999); in other work, the different experiences of different kinds of transgender people serve as evidence that male privilege, institutional disadvantages for women, and heteronormativity are all ongoing (David 2015; Meadow 2010; Schilt and Connell 2007). Similar patterns emerge within the interdisciplinary literature on transgender issues in higher education. Whether scholars explore the experiences of transgender students and staff firsthand (e.g., Garvey and Rankin 2015; Pryor 2015), institutional policies and practices related to those students and staff (e.g., Marine and Nicolazzo 2014; Nanney and Brunsma 2017), or the state of scholarly research about gender diversity in higher education (e.g., Renn 2010), they routinely find that “genderism, transphobia, and gender-bashing” (Hill and Willoughby 2005, 534) are commonplace on college and university campuses.

Whether they focus on the particulars of transgender experience or the gendered organization writ large, however, these diverse threads of gender scholarship all share an emphasis on the fixedness of categorical gender ideologies. In other words, they collectively find that individuals and social institutions alike respond to seemingly radical challenges to the gender order in ways that recurrently shore up existing gender boundaries and categories rather than erode, “depolarize” (Lorber 1996), or “undo” them (Deutsch 2007). Given those realities, the steadily increasing popularity of gender-inclusive housing and restrooms across the field of higher education is puzzling. If organizational transformations to the gender order are so difficult to mount, and if social institutions exclude transgender lives and experiences much more often than they embrace them, what could motivate an increasing number of colleges and universities to adopt gender-inclusive facilities with each passing year (see Figure 1)?

Figure 1:

Count of Institutions with Gender-Inclusive Housing Policies by Year, 2003–2015

From Gendered Violations to Engendering Reputation

Sociological theories of organizational behavior beyond the realm of the gendered organization suggest one possible resolution to this puzzle. Like other formal organizations, colleges and universities exist neither in complete isolation from one another nor within purely local networks of exchange; instead, they operate within a much wider-ranging field of other, similar organizations. That institutional field, in turn, exerts a powerful influence on how and why organizations undertake particular kinds of action (Carroll 1984; Powell and DiMaggio 1991). Classification processes have long been at the heart of that relational influence. The categories to which an organization belongs, whether imposed externally or established within organizations themselves, comprise an important part of an organization’s identity (Hsu and Hannan 2005; Zuckerman 1999). In turn, that identity fundamentally affects if, when, and how an individual organization will adopt innovative policies or practices (Navis and Glynn 2010). Moreover, those categories have a decidedly reputational function: beyond the organization itself, category membership shapes how external audiences interpret an organization’s actions (Pontikes 2012; Smith 2011), sometimes in ways that can supersede the details of those actions themselves.

Yet categorization also implies evaluation (Galperin and Sorenson 2014; Lamont 2012), and contemporary turns in the literature on organizational behavior have thus begun documenting the role of “status systems” (Sauder 2006) in such relational dynamics. Recent evidence demonstrates, for instance, that organizations in high-status cultural categories are often shielded from negative consequences typically associated with norm violation (Phillips, Turco, and Zuckerman 2013), adopting illegitimate products (Jensen 2010), or even eroding long-standing categorical boundaries (Rao, Monin, and Durand 2005). Furthermore, if a boundary-violating innovation diffuses among other high-status organizations, lower-status organizations become more likely to adopt that innovation, simply because it becomes increasingly perceived as legitimate (Johnson, Dowd, and Ridgeway 2006). The very survival of a new organizational form thus depends not only on perceptions of that innovation’s legitimacy (Meyer and Rowan 1977) but, moreover, on how high-status organizations within a given institutional field respond to that innovation (Podolny 1993, 2005). In short, prestige powerfully influences how external audiences evaluate the acceptability and value of a new organizational practice (Delmestri and Greenwood 2016; Sharkey 2014).

For colleges and universities in particular, such status hierarchies have become especially consequential in recent decades. Although higher education has expanded over the twentieth century to accommodate unprecedented numbers of enrolled students (Schofer and Meyer 2005) and that collective student body has become more gender-integrated and racially diverse (Baker and Vélez 1996; Charles and Bradley 2009), such democratizing transformations have also enabled novel status systems to emerge. Today, public measures like the U.S. News and World Report rankings induce educational institutions to use a range of appearance management strategies to optimize their performance on such metrics (Bowman and Bastedo 2009; Espeland and Sauder 2007). In fact, the continuous threat of external surveillance has become so institutionally normalized that concerns about rankings now permeate into countless aspects of everyday organizational function (Sauder and Espeland 2009). Plus, because those rankings further impact the enrollment decisions made by prospective students, the allocation of administrative and other institutional resources, and ultimately, placement on subsequent rankings (Bastedo and Bowman 2011), they fuel a “reputation race” (Hazelkorn 2015) with wide-ranging consequences for social inequality in the United States and beyond.

Unexplored in that literature, however, is the possibility that changing gender ideologies and recent developments around transgender inclusion in higher education might entwine with such status hierarchies. Consequently, by bridging together several threads of gender scholarship with recent sociological insights about organizational status, I theorize negotiations of gender issues as a potent engine of institutional distinctions and their corresponding inequalities, such as those between organizations considered high-status and thus worthy of emulation by others and organizations considered lower-status and inimitable.

Methods

The data for this project derive from an original sample of articles published in campus newspapers from 110 colleges and universities in the United States that adopted gender-inclusive housing policies between 2001 and 2013.³ My initial article sample drew from the 54 colleges and universities listed in the College Equality Index as offering gender-inclusive housing and restrooms in June 2011 that had online, searchable archives of their student newspapers.⁴ I searched each newspaper’s website for a range of phrases associated with gender-inclusive facilities (such as “gender-blind housing” and “all-gender restrooms”), and I downloaded the articles that resulted from that process for later analysis. As the College Equality Index listed additional institutions and articles in my initial sample named other institutions with inclusive facilities, I incorporated those institutions into my sample. As of December 2013, when I ceased data collection, that process yielded 4,705 articles; I then removed articles that were not predominately about gender-inclusive facilities, which yielded a final sample of 2,036 articles. Articles in the final sample come from a wide range of institutional types (see Table 1), and they encompass a variety of formats, including editorials, letters to the editor, and regular coverage of campus events.

Table 1:

Counts and Percentages for Institutional Characteristics

	Institutions		Articles
	n	%	n	%
Institutional funding
Public	54	49.1	790	38.8
Private	56	50.9	1,246	61.2
Institutional mission
Research	67	60.9	1,445	71.0
Liberal arts	32	29.0	417	20.5
Comprehensive	11	10.0	174	8.5
Student body size (as of 2015)
<5,000 undergraduates	31	28.2	398	19.5
5,000-15,000 undergraduates	28	25.5	532	26.1
>15,000 undergraduates	51	46.4	1,106	54.3
Endowment size (as of 2015)
<$100 million	19	17.3	361	17.7
$100-$500 million	34	30.9	817	40.1
$500 million-$1 billion	20	18.2	300	14.7
$1-$10 billion	29	26.4	366	18.0
>$10 billion	8	7.3	192	9.4

My analytic approach involved both quantitative and qualitative content analysis (Krippendorf 2004). Rather than attempting to approach the data without preconceptions and existing theories as traditional grounded theory methods would proscribe (Charmaz 2006), I used a more flexible approach that balanced theoretically informed codes with inductive codes driven by recurrent themes in my data (Ragin 1994). Consistent with Wendy Griswold’s (1987) contention that coding categories for cultural analysis should derive inductively from one’s data, I used the language of the newspaper texts themselves for each code. Thus, combining the conventions of frame analysis common in media sociology (Earl et al. 2004; W. A. Gamson et al. 1992; Gitlin 1980) and organizational sociology (Hoffman and Ventresca 1999; Kaplan 2008), I used the discursive frameworks occurring in newspaper accounts of a contentious social issue—in this case, gender-inclusive housing and restrooms—as a means of understanding how cultural ideologies are constructed and deployed within the context of formal organizations.

My coding process thus proceeded in three stages. My first pass through the articles focused on three overarching questions: who are gender-inclusive facilities for; how is gender conceptualized in this article;⁵ and why should an institution adopt (or not) gender-inclusive facilities? Next, a second pass of coding allowed me to assess the frequency with which each code occurred. Because most articles included a range of answers to all three research questions, each individual article could receive between 0 and 32 codes; the mean number of codes from each article was 8.78. A second coder analyzed 5 percent (n=102) of the articles to check for interrater reliability, and I calculated a Cohen’s kappa statistic for each code (Cohen 1960; see Table 2). I then took a third and final pass through the articles to qualitatively explore the most salient codes in my sample and construct integrative memos about their interrelationships. Those memos form the foundation of the analysis below (see Appendix for specific articles cited).

Table 2:

Counts, Percentages, and Interrater Reliability

	n	%	Cohen’s κ
Who are gender-inclusive facilities for?
All students	157	7.7	0.904
“Transgender” students	933	45.8	0.919
Students with diverse gender expressions	247	12.1	0.766
Gender and sexual minority/LGBTQ students	1,220	59.9	0.911
College or university itself	821	40.3	0.976
Why adopt gender-inclusive facilities?
Friendship transcends gender categories	206	10.1	0.870
Students are adults/mature enough for co-residence	125	6.1	0.884
Personal preferences should be respected	82	4.0	0.991
Personal growth or development for individual students	57	2.8	0.798
Safety of transgender/gender and sexual minority students	707	34.7	0.914
Right for transgender/GSM students	654	32.1	0.856
Comfort of transgender/GSM students	621	30.5	0.888
Unique challenges faced by transgender/GSM students	178	8.7	0.762
Institutional commitment to diversity	450	22.1	0.816
Institutional commitment to inclusivity	383	18.8	0.825
Institutional commitment to progressiveness	363	17.8	0.810
Possibility of falling “behind” other institutions	255	12.5	0.808
Possibility of moving “ahead” of other institutions	148	7.3	0.660
Possibility of improved reputation for GSM issues	399	19.6	0.933
Possibility of improved ranking performance	265	13.0	0.803
Possibility of improved status relative to regional peers	367	18.0	0.855
Possibility of improved status relative to national leaders	438	21.5	0.888
Why not adopt gender-inclusive facilities?
Trivial/unimportant issue	369	18.1	0.758
Excuse for premarital cohabitation	37	1.8	0.823
Too few transgender/gender and sexual minority students	114	5.6	0.761
Case-by-case arrangements exist	169	8.3	0.773
Threat to cisgender and heterosexual students	84	4.1	0.787
Danger to female students	320	15.7	0.898
Risk of health/emotional consequences	169	8.3	0.804
Risk of reassignment requests	245	12.0	0.885
Risk of broader moral decay	17	0.8	0.725
Risk of external attack on institution	231	11.3	0.775

Logics of Student Need: Individualism and Identity

Across institutional types and article characteristics, student newspaper discourses written in support of inclusive facilities tended to describe such spaces as beneficial for one of three core groups. The first group, emphasized in 7.7 percent of the total article sample, was the entire undergraduate student body on a given campus. In other words, many supportive discourses rested on the assertion that all undergraduate students were more similar than different—regardless of their gender identity or expression. This was the case in an editorial from the Miami Student in 2009, which described facility change as a “good step to make all students . . . feel welcome and comfortable” [emphasis mine] on campus. Similarly, as the Columbia University editorial board opined with more gendered language in 2009, “Allowing male and female students to live together would facilitate the needs of the many students who feel more comfortable sharing a room or suite with someone of the opposite sex” [emphasis mine], later adding, “The incorporation of gender-neutral housing would mark an acknowledgment that the closeness of a friendship is in no way related to the sex of the two parties involved.”

Often, articles coupled universalizing discourses with one or more individualistic justifications for that approach. Specifically, they asserted that every student’s personal autonomy and freedom of choice related to living and toileting arrangements should be maximized. Two common subthemes under that penumbra of individualism were the notion that friendship transcended gender identities and categories, occurring in 10.1 percent of the total sample, and that students’ idiosyncratic living preferences should be respected whenever possible, occurring in 4.0 percent of the sample. One first-year University of Pennsylvania student epitomized both codes in 2011 when she quipped, “I have often complained to fellow friends that I wish I could just room with a guy because girls tend to be very catty or clingy, while males tend to be low maintenance.” Another recurring thread, present in 6.8 percent of the articles, was the idea that all college students were mature enough for co-residence. In one such article, the president of Lawrence University’s Community Council said, “After conversations with a number of students, I thought that mandatory divisions between men and women on campus were unnecessary for college students,” because students were “intelligent and responsible enough to decide for ourselves if we wanted to live with a person of the opposite gender.” A few articles, comprising 2.8 percent of the article sample, even suggested that degendered spaces might allow students to develop that maturity: one opinion writer from SUNY Geneseo acknowledged in 2009 that while “‘gender wars’ between men and women” may happen within gender-inclusive housing, it could also “very easily have the opposite effect by forcing residents to deal with these issues rather than subscribe to them.”

More common, however, were justifications geared toward the second core grouping: a specifically delineated subset of students understood to be the exclusive beneficiaries of inclusive facilities. 45.8 percent of the articles named “transgender” students as that grouping. One student activist from Tufts University in 2011, for example, argued that existing on-campus “housing options for transgender students” were “too limited” and needed to be much more expansive. Many articles also referred to gender diversity in broader terms: 12.1 percent of the overall article sample used either a detailed listing, such as the attention paid to “trans, gender non-conforming, genderqueer, and trans ally students” in one 2010 Grinnell College editorial, or a broader catch-all phrase, such as “people who don’t fit gender norms” from a feature article from the University of Massachusetts in 2002. Yet the most frequently mentioned identity category was the most expansive of all, covering both gender and sexual variance: 59.0 percent of the sampled articles leveraged the broader umbrella of “LGBT,” “LGBTQ,” or even, as one student journalist’s 2010 article from Columbia University described, genders and sexualities “off the beaten path.”

Regardless of the specific label used, however, such discourses connected assertions of that collective identity to a collective purpose (see J. Gamson 1995; Taylor and Whittier 1992): they documented why such changes would be advantageous for that particular group of students. Three interrelated subthemes were especially common in such justifications. First, in 34.7 percent of the articles, campus activists contended that gender-inclusive facilities would ensure the safety of gender and sexual minority students. In one 2010 piece, the Assistant Director for Residence Life at the University of Vermont offered, “It is really important that those students who do not identify as male or female feel safe. . . . When you give them only male or female options on campus, that does not make them feel safe, and we are losing students because of it.” Second, 32.1 percent of the articles described gender-inclusive spaces as a specific right to which students were entitled. As one student journalist’s 2010 article from American University reported, a student-led initiative “advocated for the inclusion of transgender rights in housing policies.” Third, in 30.5 percent of the articles, traditional gender-segregated facilities posed an obstacle to the comfort of gender and sexual minority students. Lehigh University’s queer student group, for instance, described gender-neutral housing in 2010 as “a logical next step for Lehigh in its efforts to make the university a more welcoming and comfortable place for those who identify as LGBTQIA.”

Logics of Institutional Standing: Reputation and Rankings

But the third core grouping moved away from a student-centered focus altogether and toward an institutional one—by positioning facility changes as beneficial for colleges and universities themselves. In fact, in 40.3 percent of the total article sample, university students and staff alike framed their support for inclusive facilities primarily in terms of the public image that such spaces would enable. This manifested in one of three ways. The first, appearing in 22.1 percent of the article sample, was an emphasis on diversity. One Goucher student, for instance, reported in 2010 that gender-inclusive housing would “benefit the college,” because it “fit right in with Goucher’s ‘commitment to diversity,’ and ‘transcending boundaries’ of gender!” In 18.8 percent of the sample, inclusivity was the salient critrion. When Guilford was considering gender-blind housing in 2007, one student offered, “As the third oldest co-educational school in the nation, we should carry on Guilford’s legacy of inclusion by rejecting heterosexist policies and offering gender-blind rooming options.” Finally, 17.8 percent of the articles imagined that inclusive facilities would distinguish their college or university as especially liberal, forward-thinking, or progressive. One student from the University of California at Santa Cruz, for example, described how switching to “unisex bathrooms in most of its dormitories” in 2007 could help it remain “one of the most progressive schools in the UC system.”

Such matters of reputation, incidentally, were also powerful foundations of opposition to inclusive facilities. In 11.3 percent of the article sample, adversaries of facility change envisioned that eroding gender segregation would invite external threats to their institution’s integrity. This was the case in a series of articles from Columbia University’s campus newspaper, one of which reported that “negative coverage, most notably from the New York Post, said the proposal [for gender-inclusive housing] would allow couples to ‘live in sin on their parents’ dime,’” and that press slowed down administrative approval of gender-inclusive residences. Often, such imagined threats were directly connected to the specter of campus sexual assault (see Westbrook and Schilt 2014)—but at a level primarily concerned with negative publicity, not the risks posed to individual students. At the University of Chicago, when the Inter-House Council passed a resolution recommending gender-neutral housing in 2007, only one student representative voted against it. Although he reported being unopposed “in principle” to gender-blind housing, he believed that a “narrowly tailored” policy was essential: “You’re going to have essentially just guys and girls living together. From the University’s perspective, that’s a really dangerous thing. You’ve got massive potential for lawsuits.”

But where proponents and opponents of facility change converged on the importance of institutional repute, the details of their justifications diverged in two key ways. One difference was scope: that is, whether they took an insular versus relational approach. For opponents of inclusive facilities, concerns about institutional reputation, such as those quoted in the previous paragraph, focused unilaterally on the author’s institution and devoted little, if any, attention to the actions or reputation of other institutions. Discourses supporting inclusive facilities, on the other hand, overwhelmingly considered their institution’s actions in a comparative framework. In 12.5 percent of articles, for instance, supporters of facility change worried that their school’s failure to act on behalf of their students was a dangerous path to follow, as it might cause them to fall behind other colleges and universities. For one author of a Brandeis editorial in 2008, that concern came in the form of a question: “Is Brandeis falling behind in the realm of student rights, denying these individuals the permission to live at ease with their classmates?” Meanwhile, in 7.3 percent of the article sample, newspaper discourses hypothesized that inclusive facilities could allow their institution to move ahead of others—perhaps in ways that encouraged those others to mimic their example. As one student commentator observed to The Guilfordian in 2011, “Perhaps if Guilford makes this progressive and needed change, other schools will follow suit.”

More important was the second difference: whether or not student-centered logics and institutional logics systematically intersected. Opponents of inclusive facilities tended to treat student-centered justifications as distinctive from institutional ones. Thus, where 4.1 percent of the total article sample grounded their opposition in the explicit construction of symbolic boundaries—that is, the sorting of objects, spaces, and people into cultural categories, typically in binary opposition to one another (Lamont and Molnar 2002)—those boundaries only existed between gender and sexual minorities and the cisgender, heterosexual majority. As one editorial from Princeton University in 2009 asserted, “There are many good reasons why establishing GNH campus-wide would create as many problems as it would solve. There are two simple ones: We could be exchanging one currently uncomfortable minority (transgender students) for another, probably much larger minority (those who are uncomfortable with GNH [gender neutral housing] for any reason).” But supportive discourses that constructed similar us-versus-them boundaries tended to link such student categorizations to institutional categorizations. In 19.6 percent of the sample, then, authors and activists imagined that expanding policies geared toward gender and sexual minority students could allow their college or university to engender a more positive reputation for itself. At Carnegie Mellon in 2007, for instance, an intern from the Office of Student Development remarked, “It would be a huge step for CMU if they offered co-ed housing. . . . It would possibly put our campus in the top 20 schools for GLBT students.”

As that mention of “top 20 schools” suggests, such intersections also presented gender-inclusive facilities as a strategy that institutions could deploy to improve their performance on external metrics. Thirteen percent of the article sample featured such a connection. A 2010 staff editorial from Washington University in Saint Louis, for instance, celebrated their “gender-neutral housing program” as an integral component of their “five-star rating” on the Campus Climate Index, a measurement tool specifically designed to evaluate institutional progress around queer and transgender issues on university campuses. Another, from Oregon State University, described their housing policy as “on the cutting edge in the Pacific Northwest” and as an integral component of their ascent up “the top 100 Best LGBT-friendly higher education institutions in the United States.” In fact, such claims also went well beyond rankings specifically geared toward gender and sexual issues. Indeed, one Northwestern University staff writer worried in 2009 that, despite moving toward “more unisex bathrooms on campus and gender-neutral housing options,” the institution’s progress around transgender issues was lagging behind other “schools in the Big Ten” such as “University of Iowa and University of Michigan.” Without rectifying those shortcomings, that author worried, such a lag might become a factor that could cost the school their status among “U.S. News & World Report’s top 15 national universities.”

But perhaps the clearest examples of engendering reputation came in the 18.0 percent of articles in which supporters of inclusive facilities mentioned specific institutions by name. Often, such groupings made reference to an institution’s immediate peer networks or geographic regions: they explicitly compared their college or university’s facility-related choices to those made at other institutions and, more importantly, attached a normative judgment to that comparison. In one such article from Stanford, a staff writer described their 2008 gender-neutral housing proposal as comparable to those recently debuted at “Wesleyan, Oberlin, Clark, Dartmouth, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania.” In another, Lehigh University’s director of LGBTQIA services described the urgency of their efforts to implement housing “inclusive of transgender and gender nonconforming needs” in 2009 as arising from such peer assessments: “Right now,” he said, “50 percent of the campuses we compare ourselves to have gender-neutral housing, such as Penn State, Muhlenberg and Bucknell.” Certain institutions were listed more often than others, however. In 21.5 percent of the article sample, such name-dropping was aspirational—emphasizing nationally ranked colleges and universities as the worthiest of emulation. As one 2007 editorial from American University explained in the course of the newspaper board’s call to create inclusive housing, “AU is already fairly progressive in its student housing. . . . This is just another step to keep AU in line with the likes of Columbia University and UC Berkeley.” And, as one author at the University of California, Santa Cruz, argued in 2008, gender-neutral housing might give the university a crucial edge over nearby schools such as “Humboldt State, the California Institute of Technology, and UC Riverside,” but more importantly, it also promised an upward trajectory into a national spotlight shared with “Brown University, Oberlin College, Columbia University, Vassar College, and University of Pennsylvania.”

Conclusion

Whether they describe facility change as an opportunity to become more “LGBTQ-friendly” than their local peers or they imagine that gender-inclusive facilities might advance their school onto a national listing of elite institutions, newspapers discourses in support of gender-neutral facilities tend to entwine student-centered logics with institutional ones. Thus, while supporters and opponents of gender-inclusive facilities both consider the consequences of degendered spaces for their college or university’s broader public image, only supportive discourses engender reputation as they do so. That is, they construct discursive distinctions between institutions on the basis of their responsiveness to transgender issues; compare their institution’s treatment of gender and sexual minority students (and performance on relevant external metrics) to the treatment by (and performance of) other institutions; evaluate well-known, well-regarded, and well-ranked institutions more positively than those unknown, unregarded, and unranked; and leverage facility changes as a means for their institution to improve its position within such status hierarchies. The net effect is that efforts to catalyze more inclusive campus spaces for gender and sexual minority students—or even all students—within particular institutions of higher education come in tandem with subtle, discursive assertions of exclusivity across those very same institutions. Consequently, rather than being wholly student-centered or invested in queer and transgender inclusion for its own sake, discursive support for inclusive facilities tends to concretize institutional inequalites even as it strives to dismantle individual experiences of marginalization.

On one hand, then, my analysis shows that much has changed at U.S. colleges and universities for gender and sexual minority students in recent years. Discussions of the issues facing transgender students are now commonplace in the offices of university administrators, the deliberations of student governing bodies, and campus media alike. Additionally, I find ample evidence that many colleges and universities now consider their transgender students an organizational priority, that students and administrators alike are challenging cissexist and heteronormative assumptions, and that more dynamic gender ideologies are emerging on campuses around the country. Thus, while studies of trans-spectrum students in higher education are right to point out that much institutional change is still needed, especially in realms like health care and athletics (see G. Beemyn and Rankin 2016), they are also right to point out that more and more colleges and universities are invested in creating a gender-inclusive campus on multiple fronts.

At the same time, however, public calls for such transformations tend to imply that they are valuable only insofar as they improve a college or university’s placement in local and national status hierarchies, particularly as such advances allow institutions to outperform their peers. To be fair, such rhetorical strategies have indeed helped to diffuse institutional support for gender-inclusive spaces throughout the field of higher education in the United States, making them particularly effective collective action tactics (Davis 2016). Yet as Dean Spade (2011) argues about a range of broader legal interventions meant to improve the lives of queer and transgender citizens, policy change alone often leaves the underlying cultural bases of inequality unaltered. So, too, is true of support for gender-neutral facilities. The centrality of reputation and relational claims to the discourses I study suggest that progressive gender politics may now function as a novel status system of their own in higher education (Lifschitz, Sauder, and Stevens 2014), such that aspirations for new forms of institutional prestige can allow certain colleges and universities to override the deeply engrained social and cultural fabric of the gender order. But more perniciously, the frequent invocation of formal rankings and of the names of elite, private institutions within my newspaper sample also reproduce the status quo of existing educational hierarchies—and I emphasize “status” there deliberately—more than they signal genuine institutional evolution.

At a more theoretical register, my analysis further suggests that there are an increasing number of social and cultural advantages available to those institutions who cultivate a “taste” (Bourdieu 1984) for gender and sexual diversity in the twenty-first century. Much like Mitchell Stevens and Josipa Roksa’s (2011) observations about “the diversity imperative”—the expectation that elite universities adopt institutional policies that ensure racial heterogeneity alongside academic excellence—I find evidence that the expansion of gender-inclusive facilities does not signal a unilateral commitment to eradicating social inequality. Instead, colleges and universities continue to seek quantifiable methods of distinguishing themselves from their peers, and expanded attention to “diversity and inclusion” is an important means through which they can now do so (see Ahmed 2012). Plus, given the omnipresent role of education in shoring up the existing privileges of elites in the United States (Khan 2016; Rivera 2016), progressive gender and sexual politics may also be emerging as an essential component of cultural capital for individuals in the twenty-first century. Future research should thus explore engendering reputation at an interactional register. Such work also could offer a much-needed intersectional counterpart to this project, elucidating how other axes of social inequality, such as race and (dis)ability, inflect discursive debates about transgender inclusion in higher education; that work could also consider the possibility that “trans-friendly” changes themselves may differentially impact students on the basis of their multiple, intersecting identities.

But at its core, engendering reputation is an institutional process. More research is therefore needed to document if, where, and how that process informs more durable forms of social stratification. Although discursive conventions do make “the merely intersubjective seem objective,” as Eviatar Zerubavel (2016, 70) writes, and thereby contribute to the reification of structural inequalities, such inequities merit sociological attention on their own terms. As USA Today and Inside Higher Ed celebrate the “changing climate” for gender diversity within higher education, for instance, they mention elite private universities more often than their public regional counterparts (Eaton-Robb 2016; Grasgreen 2013). Such disparities in publicity may differentially shape resource allocation for future institutional action. Moreover, against a broader backdrop of increasing income inequality (Piketty and Saez 2003), engendering reputation may extend into institutional spheres beyond higher education alone. As attitudes toward gay rights in the United States continue to liberalize (Loftus 2001) and attitudes toward transgender rights are slowly following suit (Norton and Herek 2012), attention should be directed toward assessing whether and how reputation might be relevant in other settings. Especially with the rise of legislation such as North Carolina’s House Bill 2 (Gordon, Marks, and Peralta 2016) and the Supreme Court’s debate about whether or not to address a Title IX case from a trans-identified Virginia high school student about restroom access (Barnes 2017), degendered spaces are likely to be a nexus through which a wide range of institutions continue to achieve symbolic exclusion through the guise of inclusion.

Footnotes

Appendix

Author’s Note:

The author wishes to think Betsy Armstrong, Bethany Bryson, Tey Meadow, King-to Yeung, Judy Gerson, Margot Canaday, Deborah Nord, Erin Raffety, members of the Fall 2010 Rutgers sociology of gender graduate seminar, and the attendees at Princeton University’s Gender and Sexuality Studies works-in-progress colloquium series for their helpful feedback throughout the development of this article.

Notes

Alexander K. Davis is a lecturer at Princeton University, where he studies gender, sexuality, and social inequality through the lens of cultural and organizational sociology.

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