The chalice (or, how to occult yourself, gender-wise): An affective exploration of ‘teaching about gender diversity’

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Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgments

We thank the attendees at the 2019 Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theorizing for their suggestions and encouragement to see this experiment through to publication. We also thank Hassina Alizai, Jacob DesRochers, Mandeep Gabhi, Shay Hadley, William Horton, Alex O’Leary, Kel Martin, and Beck Watt for their generative feedback on an earlier draft. Errors and omissions remain our own.

Notes

1 The term cisheteronormativity is an adaptation of the more familiar heteronormativity to account for transgender studies critiques of how heteronormativity presumes and produces cisgender subjects, bodies and desires as the norm. Cisgender is an adjective that applies to people who are not transgender, or, whose assigned sex and gender identity are in alignment.

2 In this article and in our other work (e.g., Airton, 2018b), we position transgender as a spectrum in order to signal the range of identities and ways of living gender that have come to be situated under the transgender “T,” whether binary or nonbinary, fluid or consistent.

3 Nonbinary people have a gender identity that is not neatly either man/boy or woman/girl. Whereas mainstream societal understandings of “transgender” have tended to be binary (i.e., that transgender people are necessarily either women or men), nonbinary ways of living gender are reemerging, particularly among youth and young adults, and tend to be situated under the transgender umbrella due to a departure from expectations for people of one’s assigned sex. Many nonbinary people have gender-neutral personal pronouns of reference, such as singular they/them (see Richards et al., 2017).

4 While we strongly advocate that schools become supportive of transgender students, we note that many adults in schools are not sufficiently educated about human gender diversity to avoid reinforcing binary assumptions about transgender children’s gender identities and gender expressions, or to affirm the gender non-conformity of cisgender children without presuming they are or will be transgender (see Pyne, 2014) and therefore necessarily “at-risk.” Our critique here speaks back to the assumption that becoming-identifiable to cisgender adults as a transgender child or youth is a necessary good given how schools are currently organized.

5 These suggestions have been adapted from Airton (2019b), which was published during the process of writing this article.

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge the support of Colgate University Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Lee Airton

Lee Airton is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies in Education at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada (www.leeairton.com).

Susan W. Woolley

Susan W. Woolley is an Associate Professor of Educational Studies and LGBTQ Studies, and Director of the LGBTQ Studies Program at Colgate University, New York (www.susanwoolley.com).