Christian Universities as Cisgendered Organizations: Discriminatory Policies Toward Transgender and Nonbinary Students in Christian Higher Education

A growing body of scholarship shows that many religions promote binary conceptions of gender; a separate line of scholarship on cisgendered organizations examines how binary conceptions of gender pattern many organizational policies. However, little research to date considers how religion shapes organizations’ decisions to maintain cisgendered policies. In this article, we address this gap by analyzing policies toward transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students at 624 4-year U.S. Christian colleges and universities. Using original data and binary logistic regression, we show that evangelical Protestant colleges and universities are significantly more likely than other Christian colleges and universities to maintain explicitly discriminatory policies toward transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students. Evangelical Protestant schools are also more likely to lack nondiscrimination policies inclusive of gender identity or gender expression. We argue that these patterns reflect evangelical Protestants’ distinctive moral schemas and identities, which in turn shape the unique organizational characteristics of evangelical Protestant colleges and universities themselves. Our findings advance theory by demonstrating how religion can influence organizations’ decisions to maintain cisgendered policies. The article also contributes to the development of a conceptual framework for understanding why and how cisgendered policies become institutionalized across other organizational contexts.