Update: As of Wednesday afternoon, the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs page has added a gender-neutral bathroom list which can be found here.
Monday night, the Gamecock Pageant Club held the Miss SC Gamecock Pageant. The event was met with protests over its exclusion of transgender women. Byron Thomas, organizer of the pageant, defended the position by explaining that as a feeder pageant, it had to abide by the exclusionary rules of the organization above it. Caleb Coker, leader of the protests, claimed they were not directly attacking the pageant, but rather protesting the exclusion of transgender students in general.
Forced exclusion by higher organizations is an oddly salient narrative at USC, a public university of a state not known for social tolerance.
To start with, the state recognizes no difference between sex and gender. This means that students in university housing are assigned to share bathrooms or bedrooms with people of the gender they were assigned at birth, rather than their actual one.
Additionally, names cannot be changed in university records until they are changed with the state. But doing so requires multiple court appearances, a trip to the police station (not always a pleasant ordeal for transgender people) and reams of paperwork. On top of that there would be fees around $200, minimum, followed by $35 for a new CarolinaCard. All of this is necessary just to avoid being automatically outed at the start of every class and with every CarolinaCard purchase.
School resources on transgender policy are generally ambiguous or non-existent. While there is a page on the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs website, not much of it is clear. A guide on gender-neutral bathrooms has been “coming soon” for months. Even the apparently official transgender resource guide’s section on health care begins “I have, like, no idea.”
Transgender exclusion at USC is hardly limited to pageants. And that is frankly unacceptable.