Unlearning gender—Toward a critical communication trans pedagogy

Gender eludes definition. Thus, to teach gender is to work with and against the ineffable, the uncertain, and the particular. Gender is ineffable because it is far too expansive a cultural and personal phenomenon to grasp with any meaningful complexity. Gender is uncertain because it is animated in the liminal space between identification and interpolation or between self and/as other. Gender is particular in the sense that gender is rendered legible exclusively through competing ideological discourses that attempt to contain the ineffable and the uncertain despite their elusiveness. In short, teaching gender is necessarily complicated. Teaching gender that affirms transgender and transsexual¹ subjects (henceforth “trans subjects” unless specificity demands otherwise) provides a unique set of challenges. These challenges include at minimum (1) mass-mediated representations and (2) the institutionalization of trans studies coupled with liberal inclusionary gestures.

First, the recent proliferation of mass-mediated representations of trans subjects has ranged from the profoundly problematic to the ontologically complex. The result is a bevy of competing ideological orientations. And while it is reductive to suggest media provides the primary means of acquiring knowledge about marginalized groups, recent evidence suggests the broader public continues to avoid genuine dialogic relationships with trans subjects. For perspective, a recent YouGov survey found that while 40% of respondents know a transgender person, 27% are unwilling to befriend transgender men or women. Moreover, the survey found roughly three-quarters of respondents are unwilling to date a trans person and even more were unwilling to engage in sexual activity with a trans person. More than “preferences,” these results indicate a larger systemic patterning that positions trans subjects as being outside the scope of sociability. And in the rare moments when trans persons are present, their/our bodies emerge as unwilling pedagogues of another’s presumed terrain. Lacking dialogic encounters, cisgender and/or nontrans folk may rely on mediated representations of trans and gender non-conforming folk as pedagogical means. This may include students, just as it may include instructors and senior faculty.

Several scholars have noted the skewed mediated representations of transgender identity across various mediated platforms.² In the end, trans persons emerge as spectacle to a mass-mediated audience that is more likely to know conceptually rather than to know dialogically a trans person. Mass-mediated representations, in short, provide a contradictory, politically rife and reductive, and largely incompetent approach to trans-affirming discourse.

The second challenge includes the institutionalization of transgender studies both in and out of the communication discipline over the past decade coupled with the humanization of trans subjects more broadly through institutional policies, practices, and procedures. Janice Raymond’s (1979) anti-transsexual monograph The Transsexual Empire proffered a violent enactment of epistemic erasure justified under a guise of “feminism.” In articulating one of her diatribes, Raymond targeted Sandy Stone who at the time worked as a sound engineer at the woman-only music collective Olivia Records. In response, Stone (2006), who would become a trans pioneer, penned “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” In it, Stone envisions “transsexual” less as a class and more as a “genre—a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire” have yet to be realized (p. 231). She additionally argues for “a deeper analytical language for transsexual theory, one which allows for … ambiguities and polyvocalities” (p. 231). Stryker, Currah, and Moore (2008) seek to develop a deeper analytic language in their special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly titled “Trans-, not Trans, and not Transgender.” In their introduction, they deconstruct and reconceptualize trans-gender:

“Trans-” thus becomes the capillary space of connection and circulation between the macro- and the micro-political registers through which the lives of bodies becomes enmeshed in the lives of nations, states, and capital-formations, while “-gender” becomes one of several set of variable techniques or temporal practices (such as race or class) through which bodies are made to live. (p. 14)

At the same time, scholars and artists spanning multiple disciplines and paradigmatic commitments increasingly explore both trans subjects and the analytic potentiality in “trans,” effectively crafting an epistemic foundation on which to create a field of study (i.e. Cotten, 2011; Enke, 2012; Stryker & Aizura, 2013; Stryker & Whittle, 2006).

Setting an institutional tone, University of Arizona (UA) launched the Transgender Studies Initiative (TSI) in 2013 while opening a number of tenure track lines focused on Transgender Studies. Susan Stryker, who was then Director of the Institute of LGBT Studies, proposed TSI and in 2014 co-founded the flagship journal Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ). In 2016, TSI hosted their inaugural international transdisciplinary conference titled Trans*Studies and express plans for a master’s program (Joselow, 2016). Meanwhile, the University of Victoria announced Aaron Devor as endowed chair in transgender studies; what they claim is the first of its sort (Jaschik, 2016). The larger point we are making is the institutional weight of a shifting discourse. The discursive development of a trans discourse via a formalized “transgender studies” risks championing a particular formation that we intend to cite and resist in this issue. Rather than assume pedagogues approach the same conversation with the same bank of knowledge, or assume that this issue can resolve the tensions that emerge through contextual uncertainty, we construct this introduction in a way that highlights productive links to larger conversations; that is, as invitations for you to develop your own trans pedagogical repertoire. On this note, we invite you to approach the conversation of transness embracing the potentiality in failure (LeMaster, 2017; McIntosh & Hobson, 2013; Muñoz, 2009).

The increasing proliferation of reductive and problematic mass-mediated representations of trans folk coupled with the discursive constitution of a formalized transgender studies provides pedagogues with a bevy of competing discourses and resources. When confronted with gender difference, however, the limits of respectability quickly fade away. Indeed, while there is increasing access to discourses about trans people, there is far less interaction with trans peoples. To reiterate an earlier point, folk tend to know trans folk conceptually rather than dialogically. Thus, as institutionalized inclusionary gestures work to increase enrollment and retention of trans students necessarily, pedagogues are confronted with the limits of their/our embodied knowing about gender in the midst of a changing discursive landscape. In fact, most institutions are ill-equipped to cater to the unique needs of actual trans folk once they/we enter new institutional terrain under the purview of inclusionary gestures. Higher education is no exception (Park, 2016; Pomerleau, 2012; for a discussion on trans pedagogies, see Nicolazzo, Marine, & Galarte, 2015).

It’s one thing to include trans folk and an entirely different thing to confront the very real material conditions and embodied effects of cissexism in an interpersonal context. The National Center for Transgender Equality (2015) found in the largest survey of its kind (a sample size of 27,715 trans-identified folk) that 15% of respondents experience harassment at work as a result of their gender, while 27% of respondents engage in self-disciplinary practices that seek to “suppress” gender difference so as to avoid harassment, including avoiding bathroom use entirely or refusing to eat or drink so as to minimize bathroom usage. Moreover, the inclusion of trans folk—especially the most vulnerable among us—necessarily requires reconciling embodied traumas as a result of endemic poverty (29% live in poverty while 15% experience unemployment compared to 5% of the general population), including homelessness (23% experienced housing discrimination while 30% navigate homelessness as 26% avoid shelters as a result of discrimination [70% have experienced discrimination at homeless shelters and similar support services]), as well as persistent surveillance and state intimidation (86% harassed by police [33% of black trans women assumed to be sex workers]) and verbal (46% experience verbal harassment) and physical and sexual violence (47% report surviving sexual assault [72% of sex workers, 65% of homeless, and 61% of disabled trans folks survived sexual assault]). Jones and Calafell (2012) write against the neoliberalization of the academy, specifically refusing the individualism demanded of it subjects. They caution, “When identity is seen as fixed, stable, and emanating from within an individual, it is much easier to blame that person for their problem” (p. 965). To be certain, these statistics do not order the lives of every trans person. Rather, they help to construct a broader conceptual frame for the potential mundane traumas a trans student might bring with them to the classroom. That is, trans students embody components of this statistical picture in varying ways. Thus, their struggle is never theirs alone.

At the same time, the trans students with whom we work enjoy the privilege of higher education. And yet, even within the context of learning, trans students encounter violence (77% experienced discrimination during their K-12 education, while 24% experienced discrimination in college or vocational school), too often leading to complete withdrawal (17% drop out of school due to discrimination). Though scant, trans-affirming pedagogy research is developing. In a special issue of Radical Teacher titled “Beyond the Special Guest—Teaching ‘Trans’ Now,” editors Agid and Rand (2011) feature a collection of insightful pedagogical pieces. For example, Spade (2011) offers steps toward making higher education accessible to trans students, including a critical conversation on how to talk about gendered bodies. He closes his contribution with a useful “Pronoun Etiquette” guide. More recently, Nicolazzo, Marine, and Galarte (2015) edited a special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly titled “Trans*formational Pedagogies” in which the editors sought to “explore trans* subjectivities, identities, and experiences in educational contexts” (p. 367). In the Transgender Communication Studies reader, Barnett (2015) is the only one to discuss pedagogy at the intersection of transness and communication studies. Offering an early contribution, Lovaas, Baroudi, and Collins (2002) seek to minimize and navigate what they term “trans-anxieties” that emerge in and through uncertainty when met with bodily difference in pedagogical spaces And in the journal Communication Teacher, McGrath’s (2014) “Teaching Sex, Gender, Transsexual, and Transgender Concepts” offers the lone voice on the subject. In short, this special issue emerges in the space where critical communication pedagogy (CCP) intersects with trans-affirming pedagogy.

This special issue seeks to provide a foundation on which to construct and to leverage a disciplinary call for trans-affirming pedagogies that can be integrated throughout the communication discipline. Of particular importance to a critical trans-affirming pedagogy is unlearning and releasing normative conceptualizations of gender—this includes teacher and/as student. Thus, this is a call to unlearn what we think we know. As critically oriented scholars and pedagogues, CCP informs our approach to a trans-affirming pedagogy. Fassett and Warren (2007) name 10 commitments of CCP. These commitments inform our approach to this special issue and to forming a critical trans-affirming pedagogy more broadly. Thus, the remainder of this introduction moves us through these commitments so as to exhibit how they emerge in and through our pedagogy as we perform a trans-affirming criticism. Specifically, we engage the latest edition of Gendered Lives (Wood & Fixmer-Oraiz, 2017) and consider the ways in which questions of gender are regarded in this flagship text as we interweave developments in the burgeoning field of transgender studies as mediated by CCP. Our hope is that the reader will have access to a line of trans-affirming criticism not only that can be deployed in their own classrooms but also that will be a means of indicating areas where the reader may want to further develop their own trans-gender understanding. To be certain, this is not a call to abandon any gender communication texts but to supplement our readings and curriculum with a critical trans-affirming lens that holds the potential to transform any communication course into a trans-affirming space. With that, let us consider the commitments of a CCP.

Critical communication trans-affirming pedagogy

First, communication constitutes identity (Fassett & Warren, 2007, p. 39). Recent developments in transgender studies challenge the rhetoric used to describe gender both in the communication discipline and within larger culture more broadly (e.g. Serano, 2016). In short, at the core of a trans-affirming pedagogy is a labor that seeks to shift the hegemonic ways in which we communicate, or are expected to communicate, gender identities. Enke (2016) reflects on a gender-neutral pedagogy, suggesting trans-affirming pedagogy “invite[s] people to become comfortable with change” (p. 225) and to become “friends with not-knowing” (p. 227). Within the communication discipline, Julia Wood’s Gendered Lives has served as a flagship text used to explore and understand gender from a communication perspective since its initial publication in 1993. Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz co-authored the most recent 12th edition of the book and is lauded as having helped complicate Wood’s understanding of the ways “gender and power are imbricated” (p. xvii). The result is a desire for intersectional complexity, including a gesture toward transgender competency, though, we argue, we can do better. Indeed, we have more “not-knowing” to realize.

Wilkinson (2014) observes the lack of competency about trans and gender non-conforming (GNC) folk is tied to significant cultural barriers, including “discrimination, harassment, and violence” (p. 68). The language used to describe gender as it is defined by Wood and Fixmer-Oraiz (2015) reveals the mundane ways in which trans and GNC subjectivities are rendered abnormal or pathologized, even if unintentionally. Wood and Fixmer-Oraiz define sex as “a biological classification based on external genitalia (penis and testes in males, clitoris and vagina in females) and internal sex organs (ovaries and uterus in females, prostate gland in males)” (p. 19). Here, biology is gendered (penis = male, clitoris = female) and left unquestioned except when expressed in the context of transgender folk whose embodied experiences challenge normative articulations of biological absolutism. We will return to this momentarily. First, let us also consider gender. Wood and Fixmer-Oraiz define gender as “the social meaning assigned to sex” that is “less stable, more fluid” than sex (p. 20). A trans-affirming pedagogy calls into question the supposed rigidity of biology (assumed to be more stable and less fluid than gender) while championing a broader context for gender that is about more than a means of communicating the alleged immutable “truth” of biology. Serano (2016) finds gender difference is exaggerated so as to overlook the vast overlap between folk of different gender. That is, masculine men and masculine women may have more in common with one another than perhaps masculine men and feminine men or masculine women and feminine women. In this regard, exaggerating gender difference not only works in service to upholding two mutually exclusive genders but also as a means of reifying the assumption that gender is only ever defined through binary options effectively dismissing the subjectivities, identities, and expressions of GNC folk, including genderqueer and non-binary folks (Bornstein, 2013). Communication scholars are especially equipped to interrogate the discursive constitution of gendered biology. That is, the equations “penis = male” and “clitoris = female” can be understood as culturally derived and working in service to securing the fiction that cisgender experience is “normal.”

This deconstructive labor highlights two further interrelated commitments of CCP: mundane communication constitutes larger social systems and communication constitutes culture (Fassett & Warren, 2007, pp. 48, 43). Wood and Fixmer-Oraiz’s (2015) means of defining sex and gender sets a tone that normalizes the belief that cisgender subjectivities, identities, and expressions are “normal” compared to trans or GNC ones. The privileging of cisgender subjectivities highlights what is termed “cisgender privilege.” “Cisgender” is used to describe folk whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth based on culturally sanctioned definitions of bodily morphology (e.g. genitals as sexed and gendered). “Transgender” is used to describe folks whose gender identity does not align with the sex they were assigned at birth. The systemic privileging of cisgender subjectivities, identities, and expressions is referred to as “cissexism.” Serano (2016) defines cissexism as “the belief that transsexuals’ identified genders are inferior to or less authentic than those of cissexuals” (p. 12; see also Johnson, 2013). This often manifests in subtle, mundane ways such as in a fleeting textbook definition.

Wood and Fixmer-Oraiz (2015) write “transgender individuals believe that their biologically assigned sex doesn't match their true sexual identity—they are women, despite having male bodies, or men, despite having female bodies” (p. 26, emphasis added). Cissexism orders this core definition. Fassett and Warren (2007) position social and cultural critique as a fourth commitment to CCP (p. 45). Based on the authors’ framing, cisgender people do not “believe” their genders are “true”; they simply know. It is taken as fact that a cisgender person’s gender self is unquestioned and thus “natural” when compared to a transgender experience that is defined by believing something contrary to the “truth” of biology. Indeed, a follow-up sentence elaborates: “Very recent evidence suggests that transgender people may be right about their ‘true’ sex” (p. 26, emphasis added). That the affirmation of transgender subjectivity and identity is predicated upon “evidence” dislocates and minimizes the importance of transgender and GNC subjectivity and agency. We inquire to what degree cisgender folk are forced to prove their gender authenticity. Moreover, Wood and Fixmer-Oraiz’s (2015) framing fails to recognize the ways in which cisgender folks negotiate the question of gender identification by positioning the question in terms of bodily morphology alone. Indeed, the unquestioned insistence on transgender women “having male bodies” and transgender men “having female bodies” reifies a presumed “true” self bound by body morphology—a standard defined in terms that exaggerate the difference between transgender and cisgender identities and subjectivities. To be explicit and blunt, these sex/gender articulations are trans-exclusionary. Some women and females have a penis. Some men and males have a clitoris. A transgender woman has a female body. A transgender man has a male body. We must broaden our definitional criteria, which was defined by cisgender people to reflect and privilege their own bodies.

Fassett and Warren (2007) advocate CCP is committed to nuanced subjectivity and agency, including ways in which those subjectivities counter normative communicative logics (p. 52). This commitment demands pedagogues affirm the subjective lived experience of trans and GNC folks without reverting to a normative standard that was designed to exclude difference. Fassett and Warren (2007) suggest reflexivity as another commitment for CCP (p. 50). Reflexivity marks a praxiological desire for cultural transformation through the embodied performance of critical theory. And because, as Fassett and Warren (2007) add of their commitments, power is fluid, complex, and pervasive, “intersectional reflexivity” provides an especially productive path toward realizing a trans-affirming pedagogy. Jones (2010) writes, intersectional reflexivity “requires one to acknowledge one’s intersecting identities, both marginalized and privileged, and then employ self-reflexivity, which moves one beyond self-reflection to the often uncomfortable level of self-implication” (p. 122). For pedagogues and/as students, this requires embracing the limits of our not-knowing and grappling with the ways our unique sense of gender may work to exclude those around us, including those with whom we claim alliance or political coalition. We maintain gender is always already intersectional (Collins & Bilge, 2016; Hayden & Hallstein, 2012). In the introduction to their edited collection Standing in the Intersection, Griffin and Chávez (2012) remind us no one exists outside intersectionality. They write, “[E]ach individual stands and swims in the intersections of race/gender/sex/sexuality/ability/economic means and more” (p. 19). Indeed, a trans-affirming pedagogy that is not equally committed to critiquing and ending white supremacy, ableism, sizism, and other intersecting vectors fails to acknowledge the ways gender is animated only through its intersectional links to other cultural vectors. That is, gender makes sense only in contextual relation to the other identities we embody, as well as in relation to the intersectional identities of those around us.

Fassett and Warren (2007) suggest an additional commitment: culture is central, not additive (p. 42). That is, subjective gender is defined in, through, and against macro-cultural mechanisms, including normative gender expectancies (cisgender, cissexual) and intersecting cultural vectors, each regulated through respective normative frameworks constraining and animating, for instance race, class, ability, sexuality, citizenship as they intersect with gender. Moreover, Fassett and Warren (2007) offer pedagogy and research are praxis (p. 50). Trans-affirming pedagogy requires teachers and/as students to search continually for complicated understandings of gender. Gender is, as Bornstein (2013) remarks, “a form of communication” that may require translation (p. 115), although intersectional reflexivity refuses to place the onus of that translation work solely on the trans or GNC subject. Embracing not knowing encourages teachers and/as students to desire to learn more, to listen more, and to do better—to implicate ourselves in perpetuating such systems as cissexism, even if unintentionally. Especially as cissexism (regardless of intent) is compounded by intersecting structures: racism, heterosexism, ableism, sizism, for instance. In this regard, teachers and/as students who embrace a trans-affirming pedagogy understand that teaching gender requires perpetually (un-/re-) learning gender. And as pedagogues, performing trans-affirming pedagogy exemplifies the humanization of gender difference; that is, such performances are praxiological in that they enact the worlds we desire (radical trans-affirmation) versus the constraining world in which we currently reside (denying trans subjectivity). Thus, trans-affirming pedagogy is about more than learning new words; it is about implicating ourselves within the larger matrix of gender potentiality. And we accomplish this through voicing and performing our self-determined genders set in dialectic tension with broader cultural expectancies. Fassett and Warren’s (2007) final commitment includes dialogue (p. 54). Through voicing our self-determined genders (Yep, Russo, & Allen, 2015), we are equipped to engage a “process of sensitive and thorough inquiry, inquiry we undertake together to (de)construct ideologies, identities, and cultures” (Fassett & Warren, 2007, p. 55).

The articles included in this special issue employ trans-affirming pedagogical activities that embrace and realize these 10 commitments in multiple and varied ways. In “Communicating Variations of Blackness: An Intersectional Trans and Intersex Africana Studies Perspective,” Mel Michelle Lewis offers a four-week unit utilizing Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness and Alexi DeVaeux’ Yabo alongside a student-curated digital archive of complimentary materials designed to help students get to know the authors from dialogic spaces versus conceptual (mis)understandings. Dr. Lewis includes one assignment per week in the four-week unit, in-class activities, and discussion questions that push students to connect deeply to intersectionality as a lived experience; analyze power, privilege, oppression, resistance, and resilience as they relate to structure and interpersonal experiences; explore their own situatedeness and social locations; recognize the personal as political; and survey varied media utilized by the adopted text and extrapolate meaning from poetry, prose, mythology, fiction, memoir, storytelling, testimony, and so on.

In “Integrating Critical and Trans-Affirming Pedagogies in Argumentation and Debate: A Heuristic Narrative,” Meggie Mapes maps a unit-specific activity for argumentation and debate courses that utilizes a prompt to generate discussion around building arguments, school uniforms, gendered clothing, and how narratives can lead to erasures of experience and identities. The result is a nuanced means of enacting a heuristic trans-affirming pedagogy as what Mapes terms a “key rhetorical frame in communication studies courses.”

In “Object Lessons: Using Trans Porn in Class to Explore Gender Fluidity,” Andrew Spieldenner pairs students and asks them to locate a pornographic text and leads the class in a discussion about the scene. The presentations are designed to explore gender identity, sexuality, and sex work, increase critical thinking around fluidity, gender, and sexuality, and push students to demonstrate the capacity to be more attentive to trans issues in conversation. Paying careful attention to inherent triggers in pornography, Spieldenner includes a list of resources and best practices to enforce a productive learning space for the entire classroom community.

In “Star Gazing: Transing Gender Communication,” Benny LeMaster uses the concept of gender as a galaxy and the verb “transing” to push students to think about their own gender identities as a series of choices, performances, questions, embodiments, and push backs. Students begin by identifying their own gender galaxy, and then adding layers of materials, images, thoughts, and push backs to think of gender as intersectional, administrative/performative, and self-determined.

In “Gender on the Box: Self-Reflexivity as a Starting Point,” Amber Johnson centers the intrapersonal in interpersonal context. Specifically, they engage the subconscious ordering of gender in mundane cultural performance. Their self-reflexive activity acts as an introduction to how students and faculty talk about and express gender identity, as well as the assumptions they may have about gender identity norms and expression. The activity illuminates student’s subconscious behaviors and understandings of gender, pushing them to self-reflexively sit with their own understandings of gender as an identity, expression, binary, and a potential locus of shame/freedom.

Together, these five articles radically imagine what constitutes trans-affirming pedagogy, how we can bravely introduce trans subjectivities in our classrooms in ways that aren't normativizing or reductive, and how we use our own bodies as sites of (not) knowing, understanding, learning, and emulating trans affirmation. We strongly encourage instructors utilizing these activities to assign this introduction alongside the activity to offer critical context around the importance of trans-affirming classrooms and to ensure those commitments to critical pedagogy continue throughout the planned activity and beyond.

Notes

1. Following Johnson (2013), we understand transgender as “an umbrella term for persons who challenge gender normativity” (p. 137). Conversely, Booth (2016) informs our understanding of transsexual: “[I]dentification with, and a desire to live as, the binary gender category that does not correspond with one's designated sex at birth, regardless of one's current or future surgical status” (p. 114; see also Snorton, 2009).

2. For further reading, see Serano (2016), Booth (2011; 2016), Lester (2016) Miller (2016), and Lovelock (2017).