Dr. Melissa Chesanko
Director of Sexuality & Gender Inclusion and Interim Assistant Dean of the Class of 2024
Last week, the Voice published a Viewpoint titled, “Name change process inaccessible” which detailed students’ personal experiences navigating the name-change process at The College of Wooster. In order to provide updated facts and assistance with navigating the process, Director of Sexuality & Gender Inclusion Melissa Chesanko has issued the following response:
The identity documents policy and practices related to updating one’s chosen name, pronouns and gender identity at The College of Wooster (C.O.W.) is on par with our peer institutions. As our policy currently stands, we state that C.O.W. “is committed to using the gender, pronouns, and chosen name of all members of the community in all materials to the extent that the College is not legally required to use that person’s legal name or legal gender/sex.” This means that we focus on the name that should be used in a given situation, regardless of the audience.
It is true that many students may choose to not add a chosen name into the system because of the concern of their parents or guardians seeing their chosen name. This a real fear and not to be minimized. We have no way of knowing what percentage of our trans and nonbinary students have updated their name and those who have not. As Interim Associate Vice President for Student Affairs & Senior Associate Dean of Students, Dean Justin Adkins states, “a chosen name is very different from a nickname and thus there are some big decisions that students need to make. People use different names for many reasons. The chosen name policy centers trans and non-binary students, staff and faculty and recognizes and is applicable for non-trans identified folks as well.”
Regardless of the name listed in the system, the expectation to honor names and identities is written into our policy. The policy states that, regardless of whether records are changed, “the College will endeavor to ensure the person’s name and pronouns will be respected in non-official capacities. It is expected that members of the Wooster community respect and refer to a person by the identity that they have shared with others.”
Any document that is a legal document will continue to use legal names. This includes: W-2s, payroll, billing and insurance information. Keeping a student’s legal name confidential is also an important part of not outing someone as trans given there are many trans and nonbinary students who want to ensure that their legal name is not known. Our policy attempts to balance all of these needs.
Our model, which is actually not antiquated, is in fact still the best practice in the field in order to maintain student safety. According to Dean Justin Adkins, “the a la carte model can be problematic because with multiple computer systems that are used in a variety of contexts there is no quick way to know when speaking with a parent, future employer, medical provider, etc. which name to use. It is actually for the trans or non-binary person’s safety that we need to choose. As frustrating as it can be, systems like this prevent anyone from inadvertently outing a student by using their legal name or their chosen name.”
As the director of sexuality & gender inclusion at the College for the past six years, I have been able to witness the progress that the institution has made over this time. The process for updating your name and pronouns currently involves only going into Colleague Self-Service and changing your information. This has been streamlined to automatically update in all areas of our systems, which should now be much smoother than it was five, or even two, years ago.
Serving in this role, I would like to be the first to point out where there are gaps in the system. For instance, regardless of name in the system, we would like to choose the correct name for students in all platforms, including virtual. Microsoft Teams, for instance, does not allow a chosen name, unless it has been systematically added and does not permit pronouns. This is a deficit of the software, not our institution, and we will continue to advocate to Microsoft to update this capacity.
Dean Justin Adkins, has worked in Student Affairs for 13 years and was on the board of the Consortium of Higher Education LGBTQ Resource Professionals as the Trans/Gender-Queer chair for many years and affirms that we are on track with our policy, stating that “College of Wooster policy continues to follow best practices in higher education.” Please reach out to any of us listed in this article if you have more questions or concerns about the process. If anything isn’t going as it should be for you, we’d like to resolve it.
To view an example of a new policy from a leader in LGBT inclusion at UC California:
https://architect.campuslgbtqcenters.org/system/files/docs/2020/grln_policy_ucop.pdf
For more information on the policies at the College of Wooster:
https://www.wooster.edu/offices/sgi/resources/name/
Dean Melissa Chesanko mchesanko@wooster.edu
Dean Justin Adkins jadkins@wooster.edu
Title IX Coordinator Lori Makin-Byrd lmakin-byrd@wooster.edu
