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Higher education organizations need to support trans students' use of self-identified first names (in place of legal names given at birth) and self-identified pronouns (in place of assumed pronouns based on sex assigned at birth or other's perceptions of physical appearance), but the literature provides little guidance on how best to do so. This article addresses this gap in the literature and uses institutional ethnography (IE) as both a methodology and critical framework for uncovering what IE refers to as texts and relations that can operate in unintended ways to undo practitioners' efforts to provide consistent and effective support of trans students' use of self-identified first names and pronouns on campus. The author uses examples from their experience as a higher education LGBTQ resource professional at the University of Vermont (UVM) to add depth to the analysis.

This article examines instances in which transgender students have been outed and/or misgendered or where they have been unable to accurately represent their gender on campus. Such instances occur when trans students are asked to provide personal information through surveys, forms, and processes that lack sufficient choices regarding name, sex, and gender and/or when an inappropriate first name or honorific is used to address or identify students in on-campus settings-for example, on door signs in residence halls, class rosters, e-mail addresses, and directory listings (Beemyn 2005b; Brown et al. 2004; Seelman 2014).

This author attempts to reveal how everyday processes and practices reinforce a fixed, binary gender norm within higher education organizations, effectively rendering people who identify with genders beyond male and female invisible or even 'impossible' (Wentling 2015). Specifically, institutional ethnographic analysis is used to examine the intersection of identity information management and communication practices, the needs of students with fluid and non-binary gender identities, and the heteronormative and binarygendered higher education environment. Institutional ethnography is also used as a critical theoretical framework for raising questions about common expectations and assumptions about how names and gender operate as identity classifiers. The objective is to reveal how seemingly logical assumptions upon which everyday information management activities are built 'hide in plain sight,' complicating and frustrating efforts to support transgender students' use of self-identified names and pronouns in on-campus communications at every turn.

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