You don’t know me: Welcoming gender diversity in schools via an ethic of hospitality

Abstract

Canadian public school authorities are busily producing gender diversity policies in order to meet their new legal responsibility to provide an environment free from gender identity and gender expression discrimination. These policies tend to offer specific guidance about how administrators and educators should respond to the needs of particular students: those who are (currently legible to school actors as) somehow transgender. Leveraging Claudia Ruitenberg’s writings on enacting a Derridean ethic of hospitality in education, however, I argue that it is ethical to not intend that policy, pedagogy, and curriculum address the needs of particular children and youth in order to do something about how gender rigidly organizes life in schools. De-centring these subjects does not mean doing nothing about this problem; it means doing something paradoxically impossible, yet ethical precisely because it is so impossible: preparing to welcome a student who may never arrive and who the teacher can never know, gender-wise, even and perhaps especially if there are out transgender students in one’s very own school. I offer three orientations to guide teachers, in particular, towards enacting this welcome: not seeking to know the transgender student in advance of their arrival, not trying to be a good teacher for transgender students in particular, and being wary of curricular representation as a strategy of welcome.

Keywords:

• Transgender
• gender non-conforming
• K–12 school
• hospitality
• education policy

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my colleagues Dr. Kyle Kirkup, Jacob DesRochers, and Allie McMillan in whose excellent company the Diagram emerged as a source of inspiration, and Drs. Claudia Ruitenberg and Heather McGregor for generously providing feedback as this article came into being. The reviewers and journal editors’ feedback greatly strengthened the paper. Errors and omissions are my own. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 There is ongoing community debate about the precise meaning of gender-fluid as a gender identity and its inclusion underneath the transgender umbrella. In my own work, I include gender-fluid people under the transgender umbrella because, like transgender men, transgender women, and nonbinary people (i.e., with gender identities that are not either man or woman; see Richards et al., 2017), a gender-fluid person’s gender identity and/or gender expression deviates from expectations based on their assigned sex at birth.

2 Transgender people are commonly described as people whose gender identity and/or gender expression does not match stereotypical expectations for people of their assigned sex.

3 The we/us address here and in other places throughout the article indexes my own positionality as a nonbinary transgender person and community member.

4 I use the term “proto-transgender” to refer to children who currently indicate that they may be under the transgender umbrella, whether or not they so come to be. My usage of the “proto” prefix is indebted to Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009), who coined the phrase “proto-gay” to describe the child-subject with whom (queer) adults make affective attachments that have a life of their own, regardless of who a child may be or become.

5 In this section, I briefly bring together queerness/sexual diversity with transness/gender diversity, whereas the article’s topic is in fact gender diversity. By “gender diversity,” I mean the full range of ways in which gender is lived and not only transgender lives. A focus on gender diversity necessitates attending to cisgender peoples’ experiences of gender non-conformity (I return here in the article’s conclusion; see Airton et al., 2019; Kirkup et al., 2020). Many non-heterosexual people are gender non-conforming, and many heterosexual people are read as queer and thereby experience harm from others by virtue of their gender non-conformity; as transgender lives emerge into public consciousness, it is conceivable that gender non-conforming cisgender people may also be read as transgender, and experience harm for this reason. A focus on gender diversity is therefore a broad project, particularly in relation to children- and youth-serving areas of social life where one’s relationship to gender and other aspects of identity is often in process (see Airton, 2009 for an extended treatment of this claim).

6 The term “cisgender” simply means that one is not transgender or that one’s assigned sex at birth has led one into the expected gender identity. It is not a substitute for “woman” or “man” but a status appended to those terms as in “cisgender woman.” Like transgender people, cisgender people are incredibly diverse in their gender expression and in their individual relationships with their gender identity of man or woman, boy or girl.

7 Of course, some transgender youth may fervently desire a welcome—even at first meeting—which directly produces them as unexpected, exceptional, etc. However, the determination “trans youth who desire ordinariness” and “trans youth who desire exceptionalism” is yet another unethical claim to know the trans youth in advance. The teacher cannot know this and should not be required to conduct themself as if they do. Much of what I propose in the article is most relevant at the beginning of a teacher-student relationship: the initial moment of welcome. As long as the door is always open—the “trans youth who desires exceptionalism” may come to desire ordinariness and vice versa—sustaining the student’s exceptionalism may well be hospitable over the long term.

8 See, for example, www.dayofpink.org

9 See Ruitenberg’s (2010) analysis of two similar initiatives—Day of Silence and Call in Gay for a Day—which are also mediated in their impact by participants’ contextual legibility. In these initiatives, “the subjectivity of the political protest is disconnected from identity, and a space is opened for ally work” (p. 631). By contrast, my argument here is that the teacher’s legibility as cisgender and (assumed straight because) gender-conforming is a liability and not a site of useful ambiguity. It is not the teacher’s risk of being seen to be “gay” or “trans” (etc.) that is most concerning under an ethic of hospitality, but the risk of being seen as “the opposite.” Our different view might be explained by the fact that Ruitenberg’s analysis is not grounded in hospitality ethics but in the Rancièrean view of politics as the distribution of the sensible.

10 Please note that I make absolutely no claim here as to teachers’ “actual” sexual orientation, gender identity, etc.

11 By offering concrete suggestions to teachers about practicing via an ethic of hospitality, I may be producing “appropriate affective responses.” However, the background of the common school, as with all dominant culture institutions like the university (see Ahmed, 2012), is cisheteronormative whiteness. Learning to respond with one’s affect “as if” X was exactly what one expected to hear even if it most certainly was not, is to remake school. In other words, if transness is not produced as a moment of arrival, what transness intervenes on is simultaneously weakened.

12 This profanity is deliberate and aims to conjure the sense of shock and dislocation a teacher might feel in this sort of encounter. That said, by anticipating a response from my reader (or guest, perhaps), I am being a terrible host.

13 To clarify, I am not arguing that a cisgender teacher knows more or something different about transness but rather that the teacher knows more or something different—perhaps because they are endeavouring to practice within an ethic of hospitality—of the problems with producing, in the moment, ironclad boundaries around categories of belonging with which different youth will always have different relationships.

14 This is a good moment to remind the reader of this international journal that I am a Canadian scholar who is writing on particularly Canadian contextual issues related to gender diversity in schools. In 2023, the most pressing problems faced by transgender students in many US schools, for example, are not about whether they are receiving a hospitable gender diversity curriculum, or whether their teacher is enacting trans-positive pedagogies in the best possible way; the pressing problems are becoming basic issues of survival and whether completing school is tenable where one is, or in a district (or city, or state) to which one’s family can relocate, or whether school staff will report one’s trans-affirming parent or guardian to child protective services. Increasingly, the Canadian and US contexts do not hold hands even as the North American field of gender and sexuality studies in education developed across the artificial Canada-US border over several decades. And so, broken-hearted and heartfelt solidarity for my US-based readers who may find some of my examples to be shockingly unserious in light of what is happening where you are.

15 See Airton (2013) for a sustained engagement with positive and negative rights in relation to gender and also sexual diversity in schools.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lee Airton

Dr. Lee Airton is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies in Education at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Their public scholarship includes the blog They Is My Pronoun, the No Big Deal social media initiative, and the book Gender – Your Guide: A Gender-Friendly Primer on What to Know, What to Say and What to Do in the New Gender Culture (Adams Media - An Imprint of Simon & Schuster). Their newest book with Dr. Susan Woolley is Teaching About Gender Diversity: Teacher-Tested Lesson Plans for K-12 Classrooms (Canadian Scholars Press). Dr. Airton’s current SSHRC-funded research explores how Ontario K-12 schools are responding to the inclusion of gender identity and gender expression protections in human rights legislation, and how to make the collection of gender-based data in large studies more reflective of how gender is read and negotiated. Dr. Airton also leads an action research project in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University, collaborating with staff to remove barriers for transgender and/or gender non-conforming teacher candidates. Their scholarly publications have appeared in the journals Gender and Education, Sex Education, Curriculum Inquiry, Teachers College Record, Journal of Education Policy, Teaching and Teacher Education, and the Canadian Journal of Education.