Safety Strategies and the Impact of Misgendering Among Nonbinary College Students: A Minority Stress Perspective

Nonbinary college students are a large yet under researched population. Nonbinary college students experience a host of minority stressors which impact their mental health and academic success, such as discrimination, harassment, and gender nonaffirmation. Through a qualitative phenomenological study (n = 6), we explored how nonbinary collegians assess their safety based on their identities and make meaning of their experiences of misgendering on campus. Participants developed hypervigilance based on their gender identities as a way to assess their safety, which led to anticipating others’ reactions toward their genders. They named the emotional toll of being misgendered, which depended on the context of who misgendered them. We close with implications for clinicians and educators on how to support nonbinary young adults and the importance of seeing nonbinary people’s true gender identities.