The University of Minnesota GLBTA Programs Office is now the Gender and Sexuality Center for Queer and Trans Life. In an announcement last week, the office debuted the name change.

The name change process begin in early 2015, according to a letter to the community by Director Stef Wilenchek:

Starting in the spring of 2015, the GLBTA Programs Office staff began the enormous task of working to change our name. Language around gender and sexuality has shifted since our office came to be known as the GLBT Programs Office in 1993 (with the A added in 2006). While we continue to serve gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and allied people, we recognize the need to change our name to better reflect a broader community and to highlight currently unrecognized constituents in our communities: queer people and people with diverse and gender non-conforming identities. A rapidly growing number of students identify with terms like queer or trans, and we want our name to reflect the language of the people we serve.

The Center solicited feedback from the community and narrowed the field down to two names: The Gender and Sexuality Resource Center and The Center for Queer and Trans Life. With more community feedback, the decision was made to combine the two names, and the Gender and Sexuality Center for Queer and Trans Life was born.

Wilenchek acknowledges that the name has some limitations, just as the previous one did:

Our intention is to be more inclusive with language. Nonetheless, we recognize that not all people accessing our programs and services will identify with the phrase Queer and Trans. Our staff took this feedback very seriously. We acknowledge gender and sexuality identities are complex and no one term, name, acronym, or list of letters will ever sum up the vast diversity of our communities and multiple dimensions of our identities. We will continue to promote space for individuals and communities to self-identify with words that best represent and validate one’s identity. Our hope is that the phrase Gender and Sexuality Center helps facilitate and invite this openness.

The Center has posted a rationale behind the name change that it hopes will explain the choice of language, particularly the terms “queer” and “trans” which many students are now using.

More and more students (as well as faculty and staff) are using the term queer to define themselves. Students often recognize and use queer as a more inclusive term that acts as an umbrella to define many variations of sexuality and/or gender identity and expression. We often hear students referring broadly to the LGBTQIA+ community as the “queer community” as compared to the phrase “gay community” that was used more historically.

Other rationale for the name change includes a historical reclaiming of words, the academic use of the terms, and a trend in academic institutions using queer and trans in the names of support services for LGBTQ students.

The GLBTA Programs Office, now the Gender and Sexuality Center for Queer and Trans Life, was founded in 1993. It was the 9th such office in the Midwest at the time and was the first such office to include “Transgender” in its name.