sophiaphilemon:

So, I’m in college partially on scholarship. One of the terms of my scholarship is that I do a semester of study abroad. This is great! I’d love to do study abroad and since it’s a scholarship from the school the school has offices and people who know the process the scholarship kids have to do inside and out, including different advice for different majors.

But guess what the study abroad department implicitly assumes?

That only their cisgender, heterosexual students will do study abroad. There are zero resources on the study abroad website for non-cis/het students. There are no resources on the pages of the study abroad programs the school affiliates with for non-cis/het students. I asked the person in student life who’s responsible for ‘LGBTQ Affairs’ (who is a pretty awesome guy, and I have a whole other issue with how it’s a two year position so we can’t retain anybody with real experience) for some resources, and he sent me some stuff. It was all general, but it was nice to know that stuff exists somewhere.

I figure, if I search ‘study abroad LGBTQ’, somebody will have stuff. I search it, a bunch of pages from other colleges come up. Not as many as anyone would like, but there are people who at least realized that ‘hey, non-cis/het students have more stuff to think about with study abroad than our cis/het students’.

So I start opening pages and reading through them. They all sound really similar, and I’m starting to get pissed.

Then I realize why.

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I absolutley agree with you cause you still wont find all that much but a term you might want to try is [university name] followed by student union, su or whatever that is in the language of the country your going to is? How most uk universities do it is that the student organisation (the students union) has its own webpage and groups made by and for students are listed here (and linked to if they have there own site) rather than the main acedemic university website, as well as anything else that’s student run really. The idea is that students have complete control over the content that way and I know it works that way in several other european countries so it might be worth a try? (I’m acctually surprise that in america that content is control by the university as much as you imply)

The kind of information on US websites you talked about is not incredibly useful from an international perspective either, though I like the idea of the campus pride index thing – a not just US version of this would be fantastic but I think gearing it to international students would involve something a bit more? because its not as centralised in a lot of cases but that information does exist in other countries not just the US in a way thats useful to home students at least. Even if that is contacting the lgbt organisation at the uni and having them give you the information, the fact is they wont know how you deal with all the extra stuff being an international student brings and that information just isn’t anywhere out there, because like you said they just assume that only cishet students do study abroad. Even looking at laws alone finding out how foreign nationals fit into that is incredibly difficult.

I guess what I’m saying is from the perspective of someone who’s looked at studying abroad in the USA I’m not getting this ‘quality of information’ you’re talking about. (although this might well be because I’d feel I needed more info as a home student with regards to gender rather than sexuality let alone as an international one than I have found for any foreign university including those in the US)

Some kind of campus pride type website that covered universities worldwide and was geared towards studying as an international student as a priority -as this would still be of benefit to home students just with a load of info they don’t need rather than not having that stuff for people who do- would be the ideal…but I have no idea where you’d even find that information to put on it.