When RODG Goes to College, Environment Matters
By Stella O'Malley
Contributing to the Genspect American College Survey helps families know what to expect
College has always been seen as a time for “finding yourself.” For generations, young people have left home, made new friends, tried on new identities, drunk too much, partied too hard, fallen in love, gotten their hearts broken, stayed up until 3 a.m. arguing about politics and philosophy, discovered books and ideas they’d never encountered before, and slowly stumbled their way into adulthood. Most parents understand this instinctively. We know our children need to pull away from us a little during those years. They need to shake off their parents’ influence to figure out the kind of adult they might want to become.
This makes the process of applying to colleges bittersweet. There is an almost ritualistic sequence in the US: the campus visits, the glossy brochures, agonizing over applications; endless conversations about rankings, dorms, sports, prestige, affordability, and distance from home. But for the parents of trans-identified children, the entire college process is shrouded in a sense of silent terror.
They know that many young adults who medicalize do so while in college, surrounded by a bubble of LGBTQ+ celebrations, LGBTQ+ perks and accommodations, activist peer groups, and access to financial aid for hormones and medical procedures.
Parents of ROGD kids have become masters at evaluating how any given youth culture will affect their trans-identified child, and this is why the lack of information about the college environment is so terrifying.
There is an almost seductive quality to the social justice ideology that has become enormously fashionable on many campuses. LGBTQ+ culture now carries the kind of social prestige and cultural cachet that the Beatles or Bob Dylan carried on college campuses in the 1960s. For many students, LGBTQ+ represents rebellion, meaning, belonging, moral certainty, and status, all wrapped into one.
For ROGD students, such environments do not broaden their horizons so much as channel them in a single direction, with consequences they are still, even at college age, not mature enough to fully comprehend.
Beyond Policies
This month, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte announced that it would stop allowing students to request gender-affirming housing and would instead assign housing according to biological sex. The university said the decision followed changes in federal guidance and Title IX interpretation under the Trump administration.
Predictably, the reaction was intense. Critics argued the policy would harm transgender-identifying students. Supporters argued universities should never have reorganized intimate living arrangements around self-declared identity in the first place.
The sobering reality is that trans ideology is no longer confined to activist departments or online debates. It now affects housing, counseling, healthcare, administration, and everyday student life across large parts of higher education. Official university policies only tell part of the story. The lived reality on campus is often very different.
Parents deserve to know what kind of environment their children are entering, and that is why Genspect created the American College Survey.
Unlike other guides to American colleges, which answer practical questions about campus safety, accommodation, course quality, and graduate placement, Genspect aims to help parents form a clearer picture of the trans-related culture and policies operating within American universities.
We are gathering information about counseling approaches, campus climate, housing policies, student experiences, healthcare practices, and the broader ideological environment. Some campuses may turn out to be more balanced and open than people expect. Others may not.
Genspect’s American College Survey answers questions such as:
• Will my trans-identified child share a room with another trans-identified student?
• Will my child share a room with someone of the opposite sex without knowing it?
• Will my child be free to change their identity?
• Will there be an insistence on celebrating trans identities?
• Will counseling services encourage careful exploration of distress, or immediate affirmation?
• Will campus health centers offer medical interventions for gender distress with immediate affirmation?
• Will vulnerable young people encounter thoughtful adults or ideological certainty?
These are no longer fringe concerns. Politics and ideological fashions have always been part of the university experience, but in today’s world, they have also become a hothouse for medical interventions.
A Formative Experience
The English historian G. M. Young said that, whenever he sought to understand a man’s character, he asked: “What was happening in the world when he was twenty?” The answer to this question for many of today’s twenty-year-olds is “trans ideology.”
The experience of college students today is starkly different from that of previous generations. The messy process of becoming an adult is often reframed through the lens of gender identity. Trans ideology has had a profound impact on university counseling centers, student health services, housing policies, DEI offices, classroom culture, and peer environments, in ways that would have been almost unthinkable fifteen years ago.
Increasingly, ordinary developmental struggles are being interpreted through the language of identity and medicalization. Any student is vulnerable. Lonely students, socially anxious students, depressed and disappointed students who are struggling to fit in, or frightened of growing up, are particularly susceptible to identifying as trans or A.N Other gender. They feel uncomfortable in their mind and ill at ease in their body. Young adults are psychologically malleable anyway – and these are the defining and formative years. They are unsure of themselves and often leap headlong into the LGBTQ+ identity, just as Alice fell down the rabbit hole. Why? Essentially because it provides certainty, a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, the potential for freedom — an alluring (but often false) idea of freedom. These elements successfully fulfill the primary emotional needs of the human: fun, freedom, belonging, power, and survival. Peer influence becomes extraordinarily powerful at precisely the moment identity is still unstable.
We Need Your Help
Your experience plays a vital role.
Official university policies tell only part of the story. The lived reality on campus is often very different. Parents, students, graduates, staff members, and visitors all see things researchers cannot easily capture. We know many of you have visited college campuses in recent years, and we want to hear about your experiences. Our information is only as good as the information parents generously provide. The survey asks questions like:
• Did you feel free to speak openly?
• Did counseling services push affirmation?
• Did ideological pressure shape classroom discussions?
• Were vulnerable students encouraged toward medicalization?
• Did the college manage to create an environment that was thoughtful, pluralistic, and genuinely supportive?
Please take five minutes to share your experience, even if it is a couple of years old. It can be helpful to say, “I attended on a day visit with my child in Spring 2023 …” Every little helps to form a full and accurate picture.
If you have attended, visited, or worked at an American college, please consider contributing to the survey.
Share your experiences here.
You can explore the project and look up individual colleges here.
The Genspect American College Survey is an ongoing project to catalog the gender-related climate and practices of every four-year college in the United States. Preliminary ratings are up now, along with brief overviews of what our researchers have found.
Only you can help us improve these findings—by leaving feedback on the colleges you’ve attended or visited, and by sharing this project with anyone else who might be able to help. Please submit feedback here: College Feedback Form