A trans pedagogy of refusal: interrogating cisgenderism, the limits of antinormativity and trans necropolitics

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we reflect on the ethico-political and epistemological implications of a critical trans pedagogy that takes as its focus the generative stance of refusal. Our purpose is to identify and explain the significance of key axiomatic principles at the heart of our conception of such a pedagogical endeavour, which entails an interrogative stance vis-à-vis cisgenderism, antinormativity and trans necropolitics. These principles define a governing logics and rationality for enacting a trans pedagogy of refusal in its potential to create curricular spaces of recognition and intelligibility in educational institutions that are committed to addressing the erasure of trans and non-binary people. They also illuminate a necessary pedagogical commitment to centring desubjugated and submerged knowledges of transness and the blackness of transness that defy the limits of antinormativity and necropolitics.

KEYWORDS:

• Trans pedagogy
• cisgenderism
• necropolitics
• antinormativity
• trans colour of critique; transgender

Introduction

In this paper, we reflect on the epistemological significance of what we term a trans pedagogy of refusal. We draw on the notion of refusal as it is articulated by Tuck and Yang (2014) and apply it to our understanding of a trans pedagogical approach to addressing important questions of gender justice. At the heart of such a pedagogy ‘is not just a no’ (Tuck and Yang 2014, 811), but an embrace of a generative analytic practice that is committed to interrogating cisgenderism, antinormativity and trans necropolitics (Kennedy 2018; Riggs and Bartholomaeus 2018; Wiegman and Wilson 2015; Snorton and Haritaworn 2013). As such, we are committed to addressing the logics of antinormativity as a defining feature of a queer pedagogical practice (Britzman 1995), which scholars such as Stryker (2006) point out does not speak to ‘transgender phenomena [which] constitute an axis of difference that cannot be subsumed to an object-choice model of antiheteronormatvity’ (7; see also Bettcher 2014; Keegan 2020; Rubin 1998). Thus, we turn our analytic attention to the pedagogical necessity of interrogating cisgenderism as central to envisaging and enacting a trans pedagogy of refusal – one which is concerned to educate about ‘the cultural and systemic ideology that denies, denigrates, or pathologises self-identified gender identities that do not align with assigned gender at birth, as well as resulting behavior, expression, and community’ (Lennon and Mistler 2014, 63; Kennedy 2018; Riggs and Bartholomaeus 2018; Kean 2020; Frohard-Dourlent 2018). However, Ansara (2010) understands cisgenderism to include the systemic impact of ‘the individual, social, institutional attitudes, policies, and practices that assume people with non-assigned gender identities are inferior, ‘unnatural’ or disordered and which construct people with non-assigned gender identities as ‘the effect to be explained’ (37).

Hence, central to such a pedagogy is an embrace of a gender ethics that underscores an interrogative stance and critical focus on gender entitlement ‘where we arrogantly project our worldview, our norms, our expectations and assumptions about sex, gender and sexuality onto all other people, regardless of whether it resonates with them or not’ (Serano 2013, 242). Miller (2016), for example, explicates the specific terms of such a pedagogical refusal, which they argue needs to be understood in terms of addressing the identity erasure and invisibility of trans and gender diversity in schools where ‘learning that affirms and creates and then sustains classrooms of recognition and school spaces’ for educating about trans personhood and gender expansiveness can be fostered and embraced (see Kennedy this edition; Paechter, Toft and Carlile this edition).

Central to our conceptualisation of a trans pedagogy of refusal, therefore, is one which cannot be extricated from a politics of trans desubjugation, recognition and legibility that is committed to the ethical project of centring ‘the kind of knowledge that transgender people, whether academically trained or not, have of their own embodied experience, and of their relationships to the discourses and institutions that act upon and through them’ (Stryker 2006, 13). As Rubin (1998) has argued, this approach requires a refusal of an antinormative lens for making sense of trans people’s own accounting of themselves which relies on an ‘essentialist/constructionist binary’ (277; Elliot and Roen 1998). This interpretative frame fails to understand that what is thought about as an essentialised gender tends to eschew a knowledge and awareness that ‘these essentialised identities are always in progress – identities that are at one and the same time, ontologically distinct from the material body and in process of unfolding through a process of bodily change’ (Elliot and Roen, 277; see also Connell 2012). An embrace of trans desubjugation also requires an understanding that trans is an umbrella term which includes a diversity of people ‘whose gender is not the same as, or does not sit comfortably with the sex they were assigned at birth’ (Stonewall 2019, n.p.). Twist, Barker and Gupta (2020), for example, point out that in the past decade or so ‘more stories of non-binary, genderqueer and agender individuals have started to be told within Western cultures’ (15; see Robinson 2020). They provide accounts of a range of non-binary people from different backgrounds which offer intersectional insights into the lives of gender diverse people and point out that while many non-binary people identify as trans, not all do (see Paechter et al. this edition).

A trans pedagogy of refusal is also grounded in an epistemological understanding of the limits of a trans necropolitics which requires critical interrogation of the ‘ways that visibility, legibility and intelligibility structure a grid of imposed value on the lives and death of black and brown trans women’ (Snorton and Haritaworn 2013, 68). As Aultman (2021) points out, what is required is a pedagogical commitment to a trans of colour critique (Gill-Peterson 2018) with its focus on ‘track[ing] the various ways that narratives are submerged but recovered’ (12). Snorton (2017), for example, explains that a consideration of how ‘blackness, as it has been given meaning by antiblackness, could acquire new spellings to engender itself (and queerness and transness) as symbolically and materially livable’ (184). In addition, as Tuck and Yang highlight, a pedagogy of refusal dovetails with a politics of recognition that rejects the necropolitical logics that drives the impulse to serve up ‘stories of pain and humiliation’ as a defining feature of representing disenfranchised and ‘disposed peoples’: ‘Analytic practices of refusal involve an active resistance to trading in pain and humiliation, and supply a rationale for blocking the settler colonial gaze that wants those stories’ (812). Such a pedagogy, as Driskill (2010) points out ‘opens up conversations about ongoing decolonial struggles and the relationship between sexuality, gender, colonization, and decolonization’ (70) that engage with Two-sSpirit critiques and perspectives on ‘gendered identities and experiences outside dominant European gender constructions’ (73). In fact, Tuck and Yang conceive of the goal of such a pedagogy not so much in terms of investing in a humanising practice of enhancing subjectification, but rather as taking up a stance of objection, one that is committed to ‘interrogat[ing] power and privilege, and trac[ing] the legacies and enactments of settler colonialism [and anti-blackness, ableism, cisgenderism] in everyday life’ (814). Thus, it necessarily entails a turning back of the gaze on cis-hegemonic and ‘colonial modalities of knowing persons as bodies’ with the specific political objective of interrogating institutions and power structures (Tuck and Yang 2014, 817).

Given the above framing of refusal, we now turn to a fuller explication of the three key axiomatic principles of a critical trans pedagogical orientation. Central to this pedagogy is a commitment to addressing both the erasure of trans and non-binary people and its underside of illuminating submerged knowledges of transness with respect to fostering curricular knowledge about gender expansiveness (Blackburn, this edition; Ferfolja and Ullman this edition; Francis and monakali this edition; Keenan 2017; Nicolazzo this edition; Rands 2009; Kean 2020).

Axiomatic principle 1: the refusal of cisgenderism

A necessary corollary to a trans pedagogy of refusal is commitment to a critical interrogation of cisgenderism and cissexism as a foundational basis for enacting trans education.

Trans activists such as Serano (2007) argue for a critical focus on dismantling cissexual privilege which refers to the privilege accrued to those who identify with their birth-assigned sex which is simply taken for granted. Serano (2014) argues that the specificity of ‘identify[ing] and liv[ing] as members of the sex other than the one we were assigned at birth … lead us to be viewed and treated in very particular ways by society and this treatment (particularly with regard to our gender identities and sex embodiments) [which] differs significantly from that typically experienced by cissexuals’ (n.p.) (see Doan 2010). Thus, there is an onto-epistemological specificity to Serano’s use of this term which she believes is not encapsulated by cisgenderism. However, she does point out that terms such as ‘cis’ and ‘cisgender’ can result in an erasure of ‘non-transsexual transgender identities’ and, hence, people’s experiences of non-binary gender diversity (np). Such distinctions are perhaps captured by Ansara and Hegarty’s (2012) definition of cisgenderism as an ‘ideology that invalidates or pathologises self-designated genders that contrast with external designations’ (137). Kennedy (2018) specifically distinguishes between cultural cisgenderism as ‘a tacitly held and communicated prejudicial ideology’ and transphobia as ‘an individual attitude’, which ‘represents a systemic erasure and problematising of trans people and the distinction between trans and cisgender people … [that] essentialises sex/gender as biologically determined, fixed at birth, immutable, natural and externally imposed on the individual’ (308).

However, Ahmed (2016) highlights how transphobia and cisgenderism are intertwined in the lives of many trans women who experience ‘transphobia in feminism’ as ‘a hammering, a constant chipping away’ at their being: ‘To experience that hammering is to be given a hammer, a tool through which we, too, can chip away at the surfaces of what is, or who is, including the very categories through which personhood is made meaningful – categories of sex and gender, for instance, that have chipped away at us’ (22). Such experiences of having one’s legitimacy as a woman constantly and repeatedly questioned highlight the necessity of a refusal of such anti-feminist and anti-trans discourses which rely on a weaponisation of biological sex that is driven by a cisgenderist logics. As Radi (2019) points out, these terms illuminate crucial analytic concepts that are central to our understanding of a pedagogy of refusal, which attends ‘to making sense of experiences of [trans] marginalization’ and to exposing the systemic forces at play in the production of knowledge about gender, sex and bodies and treatment of trans people which deny them ‘trans epistemic agency’ (53).

It is also within such frames, as Serano (2007) points out, that trans people have been turned into objects of inquiry through the deployment of the cisgenderist gaze, with clinicians and researchers employing language and concepts to account for trans people’s embodied experiences and identities, while their own ‘cissexual attributes are simply taken for granted – they are assumed to be “natural” and “normal” and therefore escape reciprocal critique’ (161). These practices of inquiry and knowledge production constitute what Tuck and Yang (2014) define as ‘an invading structure’ (813) and result in problematic modes of knowledge production and objectification of trans people which are antithetical to creating pedagogical spaces of recognition and reciprocity that are conducive to fostering self-determination and epistemic agency for trans individuals in the education system. However, Krell (2017) offers a critique of Serano’s conceptual work, arguing that it ‘elides race and class and allows white middle-classness to stand in as universal, greatly diminishing the capacity of transmisogyny [and cissexism] to describe the oppression(s) that trans women of color, and Black women in particular face’ (232). Such a criticism underscores Ansara and Hegarty's (2012) assertion that ‘cisgenderism and ethnocentrism may intersect’ (149), despite the tendency for ‘race and class identities [to] go unnamed’ when discussing cisgenderism (Krell 2017, 232). Krell points out that the ways in which ‘Black and native bodies’ have been subjected to and subjugated by the medical industrial complex and settler colonialist invading structures, as well as how ‘racialized transmisandry’ helps to explain the policing around Black masculinity for Black transmasculine persons have been effaced in a white-centric and classed framing of cisgenderism and cissexism (234). As we elaborate later in the paper, this point relates to questions of trans necropolitics and its pedagogical implications.

In pedagogical terms, Kennedy (2018) highlights that a problematisation of the difference between cisgender and transgender people forecloses a necessary critical interrogation of the external imposition of sex/gender categories and classificatory attributions. This not only reinforces trans erasure and de-legitimation, but also results in conditions of unintelligibility vis-a-vis trans selfhood, which we would argue needs to address the question of racialised bodies. Kennedy, for example, illuminates how children are not being provided with opportunities to learn a new lexicon to access trans-related discourses that foster the development of their own self-understandings outside of cisgenderist frameworks for making sense of their personhood (see Pyne 2014). Hence, Kennedy (this edition) calls for more open pedagogies in schools that foster a sense of agentic learning for trans children that are cognisant of the need to create self-determining spaces for them to speak into existence their personhood in a language and in terms that are generative of their of own self-understandings and knowledge of their lived experiences (see also Blackburn this edition; Francis and monakali this edition; Paechter et al. this edition). As she points out, trans and non-binary youth are already creating and accessing counter hegemonic spaces online which are conceived as providing such agentic possibilities that have implications pedagogically for envisioning a more gender expansive education in schools (Martino, Omercajic and Cumming-Potvin this edition).

Malatino (2015) specifically addresses the implications of the enactment of a trans pedagogy of refusal in the Women’s and Gender Studies classroom in the higher education context which aligns with a more universalist focus on how systems of cisgenderism and cissexism are implicated in the production of knowledge about the gendering of bodies. She specifically raises concerns about the guest speaker approach whereby the individual trans person is invited into the classroom to share their ‘coming out’ experiences as an inadequate basis for ‘increasing awareness and action regarding the intense institutional and systemic discrimination trans and gender nonconforming folk regularly encounter’ without requiring students to turn the critical reflexive gaze on their own experiences of gendering and the impact of cisgenderism (399).

Malatino is also critical of a pedagogical approach to course organisation that relies on inserting narratives about trans and intersex bodies which are used to teach about the problematics of biological essentialism. The problem with such a pedagogical approach is that the deployment of trans narratives are considered to be of value only in terms of their capacity to teach about ‘exemplary disruptive bodies … positioned as privileged objects of inquiry, rarefied beings with a unique perspective on the gendering process [while] cis-gendered folk are left off the hook’ (402–403). This critique is consistent with Tuck and Yang’s notion of embracing analytic practices of refusal that resist the terms of such subjection and objectification of trans people in the classroom. It is not that Malatino rejects the need for trans desubjugation (Stryker 2006) and its pedagogical import, which we discuss at length in the following section, but rather stipulates that individual trans narratives can be deployed to provide productive insights into the disciplinary effects of gender and corporeal normativity as well broader institutional regimes of biopolitical subjugation: ‘Trans pedagogy, in its disruption of hegemonic certitudes about corporeal stability, sex determination, gender dimorphism, and naturalised linkages between gender enactment and sexuality, is infused by a concern with the mediation between disciplinary and biopolitical power, on the one hand, and on the other enactments of self-determination and autonomy’ (408). It is in this sense that Beauchamp and D’Harlingue (2012) argue that ‘the pedagogical use of personal experiences’ need to be contextualised with respect to a critical consideration of how they are implicated necessarily in systems of power relations and regimes of practice in accounting for oneself (41; Butler 2001).

Malatino’s pedagogical endeavour, in fact, is aligned with Beauchamp and D’Harlingue's (2012) exhortation to a critical genealogical approach to the study of gender which is not so much built around an identity politics per se that comes to constitute the liberal terms of trans inclusion and representation of individual trans people in the curriculum. Rather it considers the ‘assignment of gender categories to particular bodies [which] organizes social relations and maintains matrices of power’ in their historical specificity and emergence (34): ‘Such an approach requires consideration of questions pertaining to transgender bodies and subjects, and the institutions and social processes that interpellate them in conceptualizing the entire curriculum’ (32). It is in this sense that analytic attention is directed to an historical inquiry into accounting for the constitution of identity categories, and how the ‘assignment of sex and gender is always bound up with the production and assignment of race’ (34) through colonial biomedical practices and interventions that ‘produce racialized populations’ (Beauchamp and D’Harlingue 2012, 37; See Snorton 2017).

Thus, topics related to the production of transgender subjects are conceived within an overall critical analytic framework that attends to regimes of cisgenderism and cissexism in the assignment of sex and gender. However, these critical practices need to account for the imbrication of racialised bodies and the transness and fungibility of gender in a biopolitical enterprise of necropolitics that has a historical legacy in settler colonial domination, slavery and what Snorton (2017) refers to as the founding of American gynaecology in ‘the medical plantation’ (40). As such, Malatino concurs that a trans pedagogy requires a critical genealogical engagement with histories of ‘medico scientific conceptions’ of gender normativity (408), which both Snorton (2017) and Gill-Peterson illuminate are deeply embedded in a racialised trans necropolitical social imaginary, a topic which we elaborate on later in the paper.

Axiomatic principle 2: the refusal of antinormativity

Understanding the ontoformative aspects of trans embodiment and liveability are integrally tied pedagogically to a political commitment to trans desubjugation and a refusal of antinormativity.

Central to an understanding of antinormativity is queer theory’s preoccupation with examining ‘the relationship between the normative and the transgressive’ in its interrogative focus on exposing how ‘norms are produced and come to be taken for granted’ (Wiegman and Wilson 2015), a logics which Keegan (2020) argues has resulted in a tendency to deploy trans bodies ‘in ways that affirm its own investments’ (351). It is the antinormative imperative implicit in the designation of heteronormativity as a misapplied analytic frame vis-à-vis its capacity to account for the inimical effects of cisgenderism, both in terms of generating knowledge about trans intelligibility and matters of liveability for trans and non-binary people, which is central to a pedagogy of refusal as we conceive it. Namaste (2008), for example, has highlighted how such a deployment of queer theory is invoked by posing the ‘Transgender Question’ which depends on ‘looking at transsexual and transgendered bodies in order to ask its own epistemological questions’ (12), thus deploying trans identities as a means to an antinormative end. Often, this results in the valorisation of what Serano (2013) terms gender artifactualism, which ignores the lived and embodied experiences of trans people by ‘conceptualiz[ing] and depict[ing] gender as being primarily or entirely a cultural artifact’ (117). In doing so, antinormativity hinges on a preoccupation with unsettling norms by ‘misappropriating transsexual identities … as tools to serve their own projects of criticizing the sex/gender binary’ that effectively ‘obscures transsexuals’ concern with social and political processes involved in becoming and living as the other sex’ and therefore ‘their refusal of an original or (mis)assigned gender is mistakenly assumed to represent a critique of the binary sex/gender system instead of a “different embodied position within that system”’ (Elliot 2010, 35–36).

At the heart of a trans pedagogy of refusal, therefore, is this problematisation and rejection of the logics of antinormativity, which fails to account for ‘the phenomenology of embodied experience, invalidating the categories through which the [trans] subject makes sense of its own experience’ (Rubin 1998, 265). Such a trans pedagogy, therefore, requires the foregrounding of trans self-constitution, where experiential accounts by trans people are fundamental. However, as trans scholars such as Malatino (2015) have pointed out, it is important to be ‘pedagogically attentive’ to the effects of filtering these narratives ‘through a liberal plural sensibility’ (407) and decontextualising them without interrogating broader biopolitical, historical and systemic forces at play in the ‘medico-scientific conceptions of normality and irregularity, ability and debility’ (408) vis-à-vis the disciplining and racialised gendering of bodies (Krell 2017). This pedagogical project, she argues, requires a necessary engagement with trans theory and, as we highlight, with the scholarship of black trans scholars, such as Snorton (2017) and Gill-Peterson (2018). Hence, Nicolazzo (2017) advocates for embracing the knowledge generated by trans and non-binary people themselves who are ‘pushing the boundaries of how trans* people have been previously understood … [with their] narratives and scholarship centring on the life chances of those of us who have been previously made to be absent, peripheral or unworthy … [and which] serve as a reminder that nobody runs our gender show but us’ (212). It is in this sense that Beauchamp and D’Harlingue (2012) assert that ‘[p]ersonal narratives can serve as texts for critical analyses, rather than seemingly transparent facts of experience, and link transgender bodies, subjectivities and politics to broader course topics and theoretical concepts, avoiding the additive model of syllabus design’ (44).

Such a trans pedagogical engagement is necessary given the evidence of epistemic violence (Teo 2010) that emerges through the ‘inappropriate use and application of queer theory in imposing a heteronormative lens to make sense of a transgender person’s own embodied understanding of their gender identity and personhood’ (Martino and Cumming-Potvin 2018, 690). Specifically, Kaufmann (2010), in proffering an antinormative interpretation of a trans woman’s experiences of her own embodied selfhood and gender identity as an object of her research, imposes a heteronormative lens that ‘understands the male-female binary as socially constructed and gender as performative, fluid, fictitious, and/or unnecessary’ (108). In fact, Kaufmann, deploys Jessie’s account of her embodiment and sexual desire by relying on a reductive and problematic deconstructive antinormative analytics that is governed by a fundamental political imperative ‘to emancipat[e] gender from heteronormativity’ (104). Such an approach underscores the dangers of gender artifactualism given Kaufmann’s reliance on queer theory and its antinormative conventions to deconstruct gender at the expense of effacing and delegitimating Jessie’s own embodied knowing, who ultimately rises up in objection to being placed in an ‘unassimilable, antagonistic, queer relationship’ (Stryker 1994, 243): ‘You have taken away the identity I have worked all my life to build … Who am I if you take this away?’ (104). In this sense, the antinormative queer politics underscoring Kaufmann’s interpretive approach to making sense of Jessie’s interview ‘risk[s] a profound misrecognition of their personhood, of their specific mode of being’ (Stryker 2006, 10). As such, it is this very pedagogy of refusal of the ‘god-gaze’ in qualitative research and, in this case, cis objectification in generating knowledge about the trans other – that Tuck and Yang (2014) rail against (815). By discounting the terms of Jessie’s own account of being and living as a trans woman, Kaufmann fails to turn the gaze on the very systems of cisgenderism and cissexism at play in generating ‘knowledge about bodies and bodies of knowledge’ and her own implication in this knowledge production (Britzman 1995, 151).

A trans pedagogy of refusal which emphasises self-constitution and agentic narration, therefore, is fundamental to a politics of trans desubjugation, and has important implications for thinking about the deployment of trans narratives in the classroom. As Malatino has argued, it is necessary to refuse exceptionalising trans people and ‘calcifying their alterity’ with the inimical effects of turning them into objects of a voyeuristic cis gaze while failing to turn the critical gaze on the very cisgender racialised privilege that produces such objectification and the broader disciplining effects of gendered bodies in the first place (2015, 399). This critical practice necessarily entails a pedagogical commitment to what Stryker terms trans desubjugation where the ‘insufficiently elaborated knowledges’ of trans people which have been submerged, effaced ‘disqualified as nonconceptual knowledges, as insufficiently elaborated knowledges: naïve knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges’ (7) can be mobilised in creating spaces in classrooms and in developing courses for educating about gender expansiveness more broadly that defy the logics of a liberal embrace of trans inclusion (Martino, Kassen, and Omercajic 2020).

We see such a pedagogical focus and commitment to a refusal of antinormativity and an embrace of trans desubjugation as aligned with Connell’s (2012) ontoformative framing of gender and trans embodiment which ‘continuously brings social reality into being’, who argues that ‘to treat gender as performative and citational is not enough’ (866). Connell conceives of ontoformativity as a multifaceted process of gendered embodiment which recognises that individuals are articulating their gender iteratively through engaging in social practices and relations with others and the self on an ongoing and evolving basis that ‘continuously brings social reality into being [with] that social reality becom[ing] the ground of new practice through time’ (866). As such, it is an understanding of the sometimes contradictory and conflictual ‘relations between changing bodies and changing structures of gender relations’ in their temporality as an ongoing iterative process of subjectification and becoming that is central to Connell’s conceptualisation of trans ontoformative becoming in ‘thinking of the powerful process of social embodiment as constantly engaging bodies and bodily agency, as well as social practices and cultural meanings in a complex “co-construction”’ (867).

Engaging with reflexive autoethnographic narrative accounts of trans scholars, such as Nordmarken (2014) and Doan (2010), provide significant insights into trans bodily becoming as an ontoformative practice that is central to fostering trans intelligibility and desubjugation at the heart of a pedagogical refusal of antinormativity. Nordmarken, for example, reflects on his experiences of transmasculinity in terms of engaging in processes of social embodiment as an ongoing dialogic and co-constructed relationship. He writes of his social locations and relations with others as constantly shifting and in their temporality, emphasising his own awareness of his ‘masculine bodied femininity’ in terms of ‘a state of constant movement … [a]n articulating of movements rather than a sequence of moments’ in terms that lead him to experiences his transness as inhabiting evolving spaces of ‘inbetweenness of genders and in borderlands of oppressions’ (39). Nordmarken reflects on his own transmasculine embodying of femininity in ontoformative terms that exceed an intelligibility about gender performativity and its antinormative logics: ‘And, as I am always forthcoming and already past, this gendered expression is both new movement and remnant of itself, which has and will continue to change’ (39). It is in this ontoformative analytic capacity that such narratives can be deployed to enhance an understanding of trans intelligibility and gender expansiveness which speak to the terms of a pedagogical refusal of antinormativity.

Similarly, Doan (2010), as a transgender woman reflects on her ontoformative experiences of navigating and orienting herself in gendered spaces ‘which exert a pervasive influence’ in dealing with the hammering effects of coming into contact with transphobic harassment and cissexism in public spaces such as airport terminals, public transit, malls, bathrooms and elevators (Ahmed 2016). Doan reflects on the intransigence and tyranny of such gendered spaces of sociality which Connell understands ‘as a structure of society and as a structure of personal life’ (868) that are experienced interactively through relations with others on a daily basis (see Nicolazzo this edition). For example, Doan experiences gender as mutually constituted in such spaces in her interaction with others ‘where my gender was constructed and reconstructed with each fleeting moment’ (645). As one such example, she writes about an unexpected experience of sexual assault in an elevator at a hotel where an older man accompanied by his younger female companion upon exiting approaches Doan and lewdly grabs her breasts in an instant that magnifies her body as a target of transmisogynist violence. Doan’s reflections on the female partner’s complicity and collusion as a bystander in this violence who she believes would not have so readily acquiesced had such behaviour been directed at a cis woman, reminds her of her legibility as a visible trans woman and, hence, her altered embodied position in a cis-heteropatriarchal gender order as it manifests itself in this particular ontoformative moment of interaction in this public space.

This focus on ontoformativity as an interpretive analytic frame highlights its centrality and pedagogical potential for both interrupting the ciscentric gaze in classroom spaces and refusing antinormativity. Thus, a commitment to trans desubjugation through the deployment of such narratives has the capacity to foster a ‘new lexicon’ and imaginary of trans intelligibility for trans and non-binary people (Kennedy 2018, 316; Twist et al. 2020). However, as we explain in the following section, the fostering of such intelligibility must also entail a commitment to interrogating a trans necropolitics.

Axiomatic principle 3: the refusal of necropolitics

Interrogating necropolitics is central to enacting a pedagogy of refusal that is committed to black trans desubjugated knowledges and ‘a trans of colour critique’.

Snorton and Haritaworn (2013) draw on Mbembe’s (2003) notion of necropolitics ‘as a form of power that marks some fraction of a population for death even while it deems other fractions suitable for life-enhancing investment’ and apply it to elaborating a trans colour of critique in accounting for the disproportionate violence that is enacted against black trans people and specifically black trans women (66). They provide critical insights into a necropolitical value system and a rationality of governance that result in rendering and producing black trans bodies as disposable. The circumstances leading up to the death of Tyra Hunter, a black trans woman involved in car accident at the hands of transphobic firefighters and a doctor who failed to provide necessary medical attention, are recounted as an exemplification of the material enactment of such a trans necropolitics ‘as a racialized and gendered apparatus’ (Gossett 2017, 183). Snorton and Haritaworn, however, extend the pedagogical terms of a refusal of necropolitics through the deployment of this account in its capacity to expose the racialised and gendered biopolitical ‘dynamics of gaze, space and power’ (Tuck and Yang 2014, 815) embodied by those invested with the authority of the State to take care of individual citizens in crisis, to a consideration of the necropolitical ‘work of legibility’ and disposability that continues on after her death (70). They detail how she was misgendered and deadnamed by the media and government officials in the aftermath of her death with even the GLOV (Gays and Lesbians Opposing Violence) framing the incident as a gay-related matter of violence.

It is in this sense that Snorton and Haritaworn call for both a race and gender-based analysis that attends specifically to the experiences of trans people of colour ‘as distinct from queer subjectivities’ in effacing the transphobic violence that is enacted disproportionately against trans women of colour thereby erasing what happened to Tyra as an example of ‘transgender repudiation’ (69–70). Such a critical practice attends to interrogating both the broader necropolitical and racialised forces at play in the rendering of trans bodies as disposable and their erasure and appropriation under the banner of queer inclusivity. As Gossett (2017) argues ‘Black lives matter, and for black trans women in particular, the struggle for life in all its capaciousness is a struggle against ongoing premature death … [which] cannot be addressed through the politics of trans visibility’ but understood in terms of a historical legacy of the ‘violence of colonialism and racial slavery’ (185). It is in this sense that the story of Tyra is deployed as an exemplification of a critical practice that is committed to exposing the broader necropolitical forces at play in the lives of black trans women and how ‘blackness still figures as a surrogate body for white appropriation’ of a queer political project in its failure to account for racialised trans embodied intelligibility (186). In fact, Gossett claims that an analytic focus on cisgenderism alone ‘lacks the explanatory power to account for the colonial and anti-black foundational violence of slavery and settler colonialism through which the gender and sex binary were forcibly rendered’ (185; Driskill 2010).

Indeed, both Snorton (2017) and Gill-Peterson (2018) provide significant insights through their genealogical analyses of a desubjugated racial history of trans identity which exposes the effects of ‘the violence of slavery and the colonialization of blackness’ (Gossett 2017, 186). The deployment of their work signals a pedagogical potential in terms of a refusal of narratives of ‘murderous [trans] inclusion’ in lieu of an embrace of trans vitality that captures the potential blackness of trans representability and intelligibility in its capacity to interrupt ‘the nominal and numeric repetition’ of discourses for recuperating and humanising the ‘respectable trans subject’ (Snorton and Haritaworn, 74). Snorton (2017), for example, unearths archival accounts of black lives and deaths under slavery as a basis for generating a thesis about the fungibility and transitivity of racialised modes of gender mutability and transitivity that are rendered opaque or simply effaced by focusing on ‘the genealogy of transgender as a category’ (Ellison 2018, n.p.). He provides an account of the lives of Ellen and William Craft who devised and executed a plan to escape their conditions of enslavement on their respective plantations. Ellen, who ‘as near white’ could both pass as white and as a man when dressed in man’s clothing, was able to transform herself into the performative role of master with her husband as a fugitive slave passing as her servant (Snorton, 75).

Snorton presents such narrations of the Crafts’ ‘thousand mile run for freedom’ under such a calculated and performative ruse ‘as an example of fungible fugitivity wherein the gender and race of Ellen and William were reiteratively rearranged in their quest for freedom’ (74). Thus, he presents fungibility ‘as another expression of the multiple deployments of black flesh in its capacity to make and remediate personhood through ontological rearrangement’ (74), and in so doing, illustrates ‘how the ungendering of blackness … opens onto a way of thinking about black gender as an infinite set of proliferative, constantly revisable reiterations figured “outside” of gender’s established and establishing symbolic order’ (74). It is in this sense that black fugitive flight under conditions of slavery opens up space for theorising about the transversality and transitivity of gender as the grounds for thinking about its relationality to blackness, and serves as a basis for articulating a refusal of necropolitics in thinking about the terms of a pedagogical commitment to trans desubjugation that entails a necessary engagement with genealogical accounts of transness, blackness and coloniality.

In another example, Snorton exposes the submergence of black trans lives that have remained in the shadows of history both prior to and following the emergence of Christine Jorgensen in the 50s as the ‘exceptional figuration of [white] trans embodiment’ (139). He illuminates how Jorgensen’s rise to fame consolidated a discourse of transsexual embodiment of white womanhood as achieved through medicalised intervention and served as a figural representation of the realisation of the liberal promise of freedom to be oneself and to live ones’ life. However, as Snorton points out, Jorgensen’s narrative of ‘liv[ing] life and the freedom to live it’ as a white transsexual woman eclipsed the underside of such liveability for those black trans individuals who were ‘acutely aware of how unfreedom – in the forms of criminalisation, colonialism, imperial conquest, internment, Jim Crow, and other modes of repressive, quotidian violence – figured black life in the United States and around the world’ (141). He goes on to provide accounts of the lives of black trans women such as Lucy Hicks Anderson who was convicted for impersonation in the 40s. Snorton focuses on Hick’s reported testimony in court with her assertions of her claim to womanhood, which he argues underscore that while ‘black trans life was subjugated … [it was] not completely subjectified by criminal and carceral logics’: ‘To view Hicks Andersen’s responses as instances of counter power requires acknowledging the discursive contradictions that shape “how the world moves” and therefore as illustrations of the ways norms and normativity function as capillaries of power that can sometimes be obstructed’ (149).

Numerous black trans figures and their travails with the law serve as examples of a refusal of necropolitics and a gesturing of a trans vitality and liveability that are cast in the shadows of history by illuminated white figures of transsexual embodiment such as Jorgensen who comes to represent ‘a new iteration of U.S. exceptionalism’ and imperial medical conquest (Snorton, 144). However, as Snorton points out such lives need to be understood, not so much in terms of their absence and erasure in being cast into such shadows, but in terms of their black trans liveability and vitality which are captured in ‘their moments of notoriety’: ‘… they lay the groundwork for understanding trans/gender embodiment in relation to the kind of violence that inflect black and trans life, only one of which is the violence of erasure, and for which that erasure is about not an absence but a persistent and animating presence’ (144). It is such concern with what Snorton refers to as ‘subterranean convergence’ (187) that informs our understanding of a pedagogical refusal of trans necropolitics in its capacity to address the terms of such a disavowal of and failure to imagine the liveability of what Bey (2017) refers to as ‘the trans*-ness of blackness and blackness of trans*’ (275) (see also Santana 2019; Ridley 2019).

In fact, Gill-Peterson (2018) argues that such a trans queer of colour critique ‘exposes how the whiteness of transsexuality actively interferes with the intelligibility and material viability of black, brown, indigenous, and other of trans of colour and nonbinary lives, making them more invisible, marginal, or exceptional than they otherwise would be’ (615). Her own resurrecting of the life of Billie, a black trans person, from the archives of ‘hermaphroditic’ patient files lodged at the Brady Urological Institute at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in the early twentieth century provides productive insights into the distortion, silencing and opacity of black trans and trans of colour liveability prior to any official designation of transsexuality as an identificatory category. Gill Peterson highlights the violence enacted by doctors such as Young who served as the gatekeeper responsible for assigning sex to non-binary children and intersex adults diagnosed as ‘hermaphrodites’. She exposes the racialised logics at play in intersex medicine as a triumphal accomplishment of manipulating sex into a binary form which resulted in only white bodies being considered amenable to such surgical plasticity with blackness signifying ‘both as a devalued fungibility and a kind of super-humanity of the flesh’ thereby rendering black bodies as intelligible through an official discourse of ‘exceptional pathology’ (611).

It is against such a medicalised context of racialisation that the opacity of Billie’s transness and blackness need to be contextualised in accounting for his erasure as a black trans man. Gill-Peterson unearths how black trans life was able to find expression in Billie through his refusal to undergo medical reassignment which she proposes might be read as ‘an irruptive heterogeneity of black trans life’ (613). Billie emerges as yet another instance of the necropolitical refusal which Snorton explains as ‘still life’ which ‘describes the interface of survival as that form of life that exceeds life’s meanings and posthumous life wherein black and trans life continues to accrue meaning after the event of death, gives expression to black and trans ghosts that persist and linger, as if they are not from the past but from the not-so-distant future’ (197).

Conclusion

In this paper, our purpose has been to both generate and explain key axiomatic principles at the heart of enacting a trans pedagogy of refusal. We see these principles as intertwined and embedded rather than as single axes of determination in thinking through the terms of a critical trans pedagogical approach that exceeds ‘exceptional and additive inclusions of transgender and gender non-conforming bodies and subjects’ in the development of a curriculum and the consideration of course content (Beauchamp and D’Harlingue 2012, 46–47). We have attempted to articulate productive pedagogical and epistemological insights into ‘the work that must be done to create classrooms that truly integrate trans lives into current curricula and classrooms’ that serve as a gesturing and orientating focus in thinking through the terms of a commitment to enacting transgender and gender expansive education (Courvant 2011, 26). Central to this pedagogical endeavour are the axiomatic terms of refusal informed by our reading of Tuck and Yang’s (2014) conceptualisation of the phenomenon which we have elaborated in this paper with respect to an understanding of trans desubjugation in its capacity to generate ontoformative accounts of transness ‘where trans narratives/identities are not reduced to a matter of normative reproduction and/or subversive deconstruction’ (Raun 2014, 16).

We believe that what is needed is an embrace of trans intelligibility that refuses the tendency to employ a bifurcated framing and categorisation of binary and non-binary selfhood (see Bower-Brown et al. 2021) – a lexicon which defies how many trans, non-binary people articulate a sense of trans intelligibility that simultaneously straddles and embraces both identificatory categories (Eckstein 2018; Kennedy 2018; Martino, Omercajic and Cumming-Potvin this edition). Bettcher (2014), for example, argues for the need to recognise ‘the existence of multiple worlds of sense, worlds in which terms such as “woman” have different, resistant meanings, worlds in which there exist different, resistant gender practices’ that allow for an embrace of gender expansiveness and becoming that ‘involve radical departures from dominant practices of gender and hence, an alteration in the meaning of terms such as “woman” and “man”’ (403). As Connell (2009) argues, ‘gender does not in itself imply inequality’ and that a political project of democratisation and gender justice which she advocates is one that seeks to ‘equalize gender orders’ rather than to eradicate gender (146). However, there is also a need to learn from and to create desubjugated spaces for promoting an understanding of non-binary lives in classrooms as a necessary project of gender justice (Twist et al. 2020; Paechter et al. this edition). In this respect, a trans pedagogy of refusal attends to the need to reflect on the impact of cultural cisgenderism and trans ontoformative desubjugated knowledges and what they have to offer educators with respect to deepening their understanding of trans and non-binary intelligibility and gender expansiveness. Central to such an ethico-political pedagogical project is also a trans of colour critique in its refusal of a necropolitics which entails what Snorton (2017) identifies as ‘a demand for new structures for naming that evince and eviscerate the conditions that continually produce black and trans death’ (195).

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This paper is supported by SSHRC (Social Sciences Humanities and Research Council of Canada) grant entitled: Supporting transgender and gender diverse youth in schools [435-2015-0077]