I'm a senior in high school and this past weekend we did a college visit, i'm starting to get pretty nervous about college especially the fact that once i'm out of high school that is when i'm starting to transition (waited until after high school because people there can be dicks, pardon my french). Does anyone have any tips or tricks to surviving college? Also, how does housing work if your transgender?
high school kids can be awful, so can grade school kids, and collage kids and adults ok everyone can be awful but high school has special situations too. Collage is a pretty common place for people to come out and start transisioning, many trans people have concerns about there home life and family and find the freedom of collage especially when living on campus a chance to finally be themselves, most have some form of LGBT support group and collages tend to be a bit more progressive than the rest of the world.
That said every collage has its own policy on how to deal with and house transgender students. in some they don't care how you feel they will stick you in with your birth assinged gender. In others they at least have co ed dorms and you might be given preferential status for a single room rather than having a roommate. In a few collages if you have had at least most of your information changed and your living full time (usually on hormones for x amout of time) they may even be wiling to let you be in the women's dorm, though they may still want you in a single room, though after you have been there for a while I have heard of girls who made good friends with someone and managed to get the administration to bend some rules and let the trans girl and her friend room together but thats always fuzzy and legally questioned so don't expect anything like it.
so really you need to talk to the school your planning on attending and you may need to call around a lot to find the right person who actually knows whats going on, a good trick might be to look for that collages LGBT alliance type group and talk to them first, asking them about how the school is to them and others like them and who is best to talk to to get things done, those students are likely to be more informed about the schools LGBT policy than most of the staff you meet.
Serena