Transgressing purity: Intersectional negotiations of gender identity in Swedish schools

Abstract

The vulnerability of gender nonconforming young people is all too well documented. Arguably, “trans issues” in schools are not restricted to transphobic comments, and need to be analyzed intersectionally. Guided by Lugones’ discussion of the politics of purity read together with the analysis of cisnormativity, this article draws on interviews with Rakel, Robin and Mika, who were part of a larger study with 13 trans and nonbinary young people and young adults in Sweden, the first of its kind in Sweden. It engages their analyses of how schools and teachers express a desire for cisnormative purity in their interactions with gender nonconforming students. Normative whiteness and fat-phobia, as well as adultism and schools’ reluctance in instituting nondiscrimination regulations and policy frameworks into appropriate, affirming and reliable practices, violently affect gender nonconforming young people just as much as schools’ and teachers’ poor knowledge about gender identities. In examining participants’ negotiations with schools, this text reads both cisnormative oppression and gender nonnormative transgression as a condition of a specific moment in the Swedish political landscape marked by the simultaneousness of control and liberation, of imposed cisnormative purity and concurrent negotiation.

Keywords:

• School
• trans and nonbinary youth
• cisnormativity
• purity
• intersectionality

Introduction

Yes. It is really hard to be a teenager generally. So it’s even harder to be, well, trans and unaccepted by the teachers for that matter as well. (Robin, 16 year-old trans guy).¹

The vulnerability of gender nonconforming young people is all too well documented. At the same time, recent work challenged and reevaluated the framing of gender nonconforming young people as vulnerable victims and analyzed both their resilience and agency to affect change (Jones et al., 2016; Rasmussen et al., 2015; Singh, 2013). In Sweden, reports indeed indicate vulnerability and victimization of trans and other gender nonconforming young people (e.g. Armuand et al., 2020; Westerlund et al., 2022); yet little is understood about the specific ways in which trans and nonbinary young people experience and negotiate schooling as a normative space regarding understandings of gendered subjection and intelligibility.² Existing literature is primarily handbooks and students’ theses (e.g. Summanen & Summanen, 2017).

This is why the conversations with young people in this study are so important, not least in the Swedish context. Through the analysis of the interviews with Rakel, Robin and Mika, who were part of a larger study with 13 trans and nonbinary young people and young adults in Sweden, this text addresses these questions: How are the experiences of trans and nonbinary young people and young adults produced in interactions with adults and administrative systems in schools (Schmitt, 2022a)? How do intersections with racism and fat-phobia, as well as adultism and harsh school climates co-produce Rakel, Robin and Mika’s gendered experiences? With this text, I argue that schools often lack the tools to support and affirm gender diverse students and that these experiences are inherently intersectional.

I am placing this analysis in the context of transfeminist and queer (education) research (McBride, 2021; Nicolazzo, 2017; Nicolazzo et al., 2015; Travers, 2018), and intersectional and Black and of Color trans scholarship (Aizura et al., 2014; Gill-Peterson, 2018). These approaches read gender as both intrinsic and relational and go beyond individualizing logics of bullying or inclusion, and are sensitive to structural understandings of oppression and workings of norms. Gender nonnormative students are not read as exceptions, but as embodying formations that subject all students to a normative rule, reflecting the ambivalence of education as being both restrictive and a practice of freedom (Nicolazzo et al., 2015, p. 368). Analytically, I engage the critique of politics of purity as suggested by the late decolonial feminist philosopher Maria Lugones with conceptualizations of cisnormativity.

Before presenting the participants, the methodology and the analytical framework, and engaging with the material, I shall briefly provide an overview of some specificities of the Swedish schooling context.

Ambivalences of the gendered welfare state

Importantly, education in Sweden is comprehensive, compulsory until Grade 9, based on a national curriculum, and publicly funded, including Special schools and Sami schools.³ Many will argue that the situation in Sweden is exemplary compared to other contexts. Moreover, we can rely on a continuity of norm-critical anti-oppressive education work in Sweden. Yet, after decades of blatant neo-liberalization, moves to the right and closed borders, schools are less able to balance students’ social background than before, leading to growing disparity in school results (Reimers & Martinsson, 2017). Also, “[s]uccessful nation branding has constructed Sweden as one of the most modern, good, non-racist, LGBTQ friendly and gender egalitarian nations in Europe, with an equally successful separation from a national history of advanced racial biology that resulted in eugenics” (Bremer, 2013, p. 332). Gender equality often refers to hegemonic ideas of gender that overlook racial and colonial histories and presents (de los Reyes & Mulinari, 2020; Tlostanova et al., 2019). Recently, ultra-conservative understandings of the naturalness of gender, the sanctity of (some) genitals, and fear of regret are voiced in successful attacks on trans rights and access to gender affirming care (Alm, 2018). Waiting lists for gender-affirming care are long, and in 2022 the National Board of Health and Welfare has limited access to hormonal treatment for people under 18 seeking gender confirming care. Thus, the negotiations that will be discussed in this paper mark a specific moment in the Swedish political landscape.

Schools in Sweden are ordered through binary understandings of gender (Martinsson & Reimers, 2008; Schmitt, 2012). Gender identity has been one of seven grounds for nondiscrimination since 2009 and schools are mandated to work proactively against discrimination; the National Agency for Education offers resources for norm-critical pedagogies and the government has commissioned the Agency for Youth and Civil Society to coordinate the work to support LGBTQI young people in schools. Yet, the limitations of policy are demarcated by other policy: Sweden recognizes only two legal genders, which are marked in the social security number.⁴ “Citizens’ interactions with the state are, hence, per definition, gendered” (Alm, 2021, p. 221). For a student to use a name other than the one linked to the social security number often produces ongoing negotiations with staff and teachers. While efforts are made to equip teachers with the necessary training, this is yet uneven and mostly not mandatory. This study shows how these structural ambivalences create a specific situation for gender nonconforming young people.

Material, methods, and research ethics

The conversations with Rakel, Robin and Mika that are at the core of this text reflect both central issues in the broader material such as irresponsive adults and structures, and binary understandings of gender, and some of Rakel, Robin and Mika’s specific experiences that shed light on the intersectional production of gendered subjectivation in schools: racism and fat-phobia, as well as adultism and violent school climates.

Rakel was 19 years old and had recently finished secondary school when they/ze met up with me.⁵ They spoke of lack of support from zir mainly white (upper)middle-class school at a time when their parents did not support Rakel in zir nonbinary gender identity. For Rakel, experiences of racism and gendered norms were clearly intersecting issues. Robin was a 16-year-old trans guy and had just finished primary school. Also at his school, there was a lack of structural support, even when other pupils harassed him after his coming out, though his mentor was supportive. Mika, a 16-year-old girl, described school as a “horror of mobbing,” with a harsh school climate where teachers tried to intervene but lacked in structural change, and Mika did not feel safe to come out. After a school change, the last two years had been better. All three had heterosexual parents working in upper middleclass professions.

The larger study Rakel, Robin and Mika took part in was based on qualitative semi-structured in-depth interviews with 13 trans and nonbinary young people and young adults between the ages of 16 and 25, held 2017 to 2019. I got in touch with the participants via LGBTQI (youth) groups, community events, Facebook, and my university website. The invitation shows an image created by artist Adrian T. Malmgren of seven people, both Black, of Color and white, with variations of able-ness, body form, and gender expression and identity. I had been granted ethical approval by Lund University’s ethics board to meet with participants aged between 15 and 18 without parental consent (approval number 2016/1058).⁶ All provided oral and written consent, and their names were de-identified and replaced with pseudonyms.

The material is important in its heterogeneity of subject positions and experiences of gender nonconformity (nonbinary femme/feminine, girl, nonbinary trans man, nonbinary, agender boy, guy/man, trans guy). Participants came from rural, small-town, and urban settings. Three discussed experiences of a dis/ability, one spoke of experiences of racism, and one person mentioned experiences of hate against their religion. We met at cafés, libraries, or a room at a university, all over the southern and middle regions of Sweden, or through Skype.

Transfeminist knowledge on research ethics is central to this study, addressing the violence in research that prescribes how transness can be embodied, the homogenizing of trans experiences, or of using trans experiences to make a theoretical point about the social construction of gender (binaohan, 2014; Raun, 2014; Vincent, 2018). I also engage with knowledge production on the situatedness of research, on insider-outsider research positions and reflexivity of methodological violence (Haraway, 1988; Leavy & Harris, 2019, p. 112–119; Nicolazzo, 2016). While I share experiences of gender-queerness with some of the participants, our lives differ in important ways. From my experiences as queer and femme, and often cis-passing, as well as middle-aged, white, immigrated, affected by burn-out but mostly seen as functioning, and academic, I scrambled for accountability throughout the project to make this study relevant for the participants from the invitation to participate to the conversations and in the analysis.

This qualitative work is also founded on community knowledge (Vincent, 2018, p. 106). Trans, nonbinary, and intersex activists and colleagues have given crucial feedback; I participated in community events and Transgender Studies symposia, and coauthored opinion pieces. Still, I acknowledge the inherent power imbalances, and hope that centering participants’ knowledge is one way to offset the objectification and infantilization of gender nonconforming people in/as research (Gill-Peterson, 2018, p. 57; Travers, 2018, p. 9). In the interview situations, I aimed to co-create spaces for conversation that centered participants’ knowledge and experiences.

To make meaning of Rakel, Robin and Mika’s lived schooling experiences, I attended to Tobias Raun’s call for a trans analysis based on

ambivalent reading strategies that attempt to move beyond what I would call “dissecting” readings of personal trans narratives. I encourage readings where trans narratives/identities are not reduced to a matter of normative (re)production and/or subversive deconstruction. (Raun, 2014, p. 16)

In praxis, I analyzed the individual interviews through repeated close reading, coding, and categorizing the material for themes that either were remarkable in their singularity, highlighting the heterogeneity within the material, or that were relevant all across the material (Leavy & Harris, 2019, p. 155–159).

Analytical framework: Purity and cisnormativity

Epistemologically as well as methodologically, the study is informed by transfeminist knowledge production. To address the specific material in this text, the analysis is guided by Lugones’ discussion of the politics of purity as a tool of gendered oppression based in coloniality, and by the analysis of cisnormativity.

Lugones’ analysis of purity illuminates the ostensibly minor moments of social interaction as well as structural techniques of producing purity at work in negotiations of gendered subjectivities; moments that not always are clearly identifiable as relating to gender identity per se:

I think of the attempt at control exercised by those who possess both power and the categorical eye and who attempt to split everything impure, breaking it down into pure elements. (Lugones, 1994, p. 460)

When Lugones then argues that “fragmentation [is] a form of domination” and that it is through fragmentation that purity is produced or at least attempted (Lugones, 1994, p. 464), I take this as a suggestion to look for moments in the material when ambivalences or transgressions were punished. To understand the experiences of gender nonconforming young people in schools, it is necessary to analyze the logics of school that produce trans exclusion. The terminology of purity addresses this production, marking the intersectionality and the open-endedness of the negotiations of gender identity in this material. Lugones encourages us to keep looking for the openings in those moments when purity and fragmentation is attempted yet resisted, and multiplicity kept possible: “Otherwise one is only seeing the success of oppression, seeing with the lover of purity’s eyes” (Lugones, 1994, p. 463). With this, Lugones reminds readers not to return the disfavor of purity when formulating strategies of analysis and resistance.

Clearly, I am borrowing Lugones’ thoughts in another empirical context than her own. Recently, transfeminist scholars have engaged Lugones’ work, though not without criticism. Brooklyn Leo argues that Lugones’ analysis does not fully address the consequences of a binary understanding of gender, as it relies on the cis/trans division in order to re-produce the binary logics of woman/man and human/nonhuman (Leo, 2020, p. 456). Therefore, I read Lugones’ critique of purity in conjunction with the analytical vocabulary of cisnormativity to understand framings of intelligibility and structures of gendered subjection (Butler 1999 [1990]; Kennedy, 2022; Nord et al., 2016; Stryker, 1994). While the concept of cisnormativity has a tendency to mask not least race and class (Enke, 2013), the analysis of purity gains from the critique of cisnormativity in analyzing the binary workings of gender (Leo, 2020).

Cisnormativity turns the analytical lens toward normative productions of gendered otherness and the work needed (for people of all genders) to negotiate these norms (Butler, 1999 [1990]). It critiques the expected linearity of normative gender, “that a person’s genitals, general bodily materiality, legal sex, gender identity, gendered expression, sexual desire, ways of reproduction, parental status, kinship and death point in the same direction through a life course – along a straight line from birth to death” (Bremer, 2013, p. 336). The expected linearity of gender is embedded in racialized understandings of human-ness (Aizura et al., 2014).

Yet how can we understand the specific workings of cisnormative purity? I suggest that cisnormative purity works on different levels in the everyday of school. The analytical terminology of administrative violence (Spade, 2015 [2011]), of identity invalidation (Bettcher, 2014), and of strategies of disclosure and deferral (Kennedy, 2022), clarify how cisnormative purity works. Thus, this article also suggests a way of analytically working with the at times somewhat broad terminology of cisnormativity.

With administrative violence, legal scholar Dean Spade (2015 [2011]) analyses the material violent effects of techniques of governmentality; in the context of educational settings, this addresses for example gender-binary locker rooms or class lists. This is especially meaningful in the Swedish context where the gendered social security number has proven an obstacle for gender nonconforming people in many instances.

Normative relational and pedagogical strategies that invalidate a person’s nonnormative gender identity are another aspect of cisnormative purity. By engaging Lugones’ work, philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher (2014) frames “identity invalidation through reality enforcement” to analyze the overriding of self-determination through references to normative readings of a person’s body as signifying realness. A good example are pedagogies based on binary gendered groups.

Not least, gender nonconforming young people often have to manage if, how, and when to disclose. Education scholar Natacha Kennedy theorizes this need to manage coming-out as “discursive deferral,” entailing some control in a situation violently framed by cisnormative linearity and adultism (2022).⁷ For gender nonconforming young people, the need to manage others’ perception of them accentuates both the adultism in Swedish society, and the need for minoritized young people to step ahead of the linear gender timeline to navigate the enforcement of normative demands.

The negotiations discussed by the participants mark moments of transgression that met with attempts to reinstate cisnormative purity. Rakel, Robin, and Mika, as well as most of the other participants in the larger study, did various forms of deliberate activism in their schools to resist purity. At the same time, I read the transgressions in the specific situations discussed in this text as expressions of how existing structures of cisnormative purity produce students as transgressive in various ways, rather than alluding to an activist impetus. This is an important distinction, both analytically and politically, as in Sweden and elsewhere conservative voices consider gender nonconforming young people either problematically willful or misguided. Both implicit and deliberate transgressions are additional work that these students needed to perform.

In the following, I will analyze how logics of cisnormative purity work in the context of school.

Schools’ demands for purity

The broader material for the study shows how schools’ attempts to (re)produce cisnormative purity work on different levels. Schools as state institutions work through and reproduce structures and regulations that frame administration and content of education through legislation. These frameworks inform school cultures; schools with a culture of peer oppression or limited structures to work against violence will allow cisnormative violence, as well as other forms of violence, to continue. Not least, adults’ knowledge and training directly frame interactions with students (Schmitt, 2020). Participants spoke of the denial of a gender identity that did not fit normative understandings; some were required to have figured out their identity before asking for recognition in school. In the larger study, biology was referenced as a basis for pedagogical choices or the lack of support in finding stable locker room arrangements (Bettcher, 2014; Sørlie, 2020; Woolley, 2015).⁸ Adults and schools’ lack of knowledge pertaining to questions of gender identity academically and pedagogically meant they expected students to support them intellectually and emotionally when confronted with their own cisnormative biases. Classroom materials were lacking in both representation of gender nonconforming people, and in analysis of the production of cisnorms.

Participants also shared experiences of supportive adults who engaged cis-critical pedagogies and stood up for trans students. These experiences were important, yet throughout the material, they are not so regular that students could rely on them fully. The lack of reliable procedures often positioned trans and nonbinary students as an exception and anti-oppressive education as optional. The experiences of Rakel, Robin, and Mika reflect this larger material, as well as highlight specific mechanisms of producing cisnormative purity.

Being too much as a nonbinary person of Color: Rakel’s decolonial analysis

When we met, Rakel had recently finished upper secondary school (gymnasiet), and was glad to be able to put this time behind them. As a nonbinary person of Color, Rakel problematized how in (school) education Sweden is presented as unambiguously good at social justice and that schools did not engage students in a deeper conversation on equity beyond the mandatory policies. Already in the first minutes of our conversation, ze linked their experiences of gender norms to the colonial production of gender and to zir experiences of racism:

Rakel: But like, overall it was to be both trans person, to be nonbinary, which I think is harder for people to understand, [and] to be racialized. It is like too much. That teachers thought I was getting too difficult; that they could have taken on one thing but that they thought it was too much to keep up with. It was like that I was this difficult person who on the one hand corrected them when they used the wrong pronoun and on the other hand corrected when they, like, spoke about Sweden and the Nordic and I tried to point out that there is a bigger world […]. Then it was like “Now you have to let it go. You talk about LGBTQ; you cannot talk about this as well.”

Irina: Did they say that?

Rakel: No, but it was looks, or silences and like clearing throats. Such small things, so they didn’t think … they thought I was [being] difficult.

Rakel discussed how their school considered itself as being good at diversity, while adults willfully neglected the embodiment of gendered and raced difference (Ahmed, 2012; Enke, 2013, p. 237). Ze contributed with both LGBTQI + and decolonial knowledge, which met with teachers’ discomfort, who cast Rakel’s questions in the classroom as annoying. In asking Rakel to choose between these issues, teachers tried to produce cisnormative purity by fragmenting their intersectional questions on gender and race into mutually exclusive topics.

Rakel positioned the need to present an unambiguous gender in school in the context of Sweden as a post/colonial society in denial and discussed how teachers’ lack of knowledge in these areas led to problematic interactions.

So I think it’s like this: a postcolonial thing, that in many parts of the world before colonialism it wasn’t the binary gender system in the same way.

This, ze argued, should be knowledge that is shared in schools in Sweden. When asking for help from the student counselor, Rakel learned once more how being a nonbinary person of Color triggered adults’ desire to produce cisnormative purity and intelligibility:

Talking about adults who can’t. I went to the school counselor at my second school, who was a catastrophe. (Irina: Yeah) I said that […] I had a hard time with my parents for a while after I had come out. Now it is quite okay, but then it wasn’t, and I am sitting and talking like an hour about like, just “I have come out as nonbinary, it is not going so well, they don’t want to say this, and they think that.” And the counselor is sitting there and like nods and hmms and like she really is listening. After an hour, she says, “Yes, I understand that this is hard. You seem to be such a good girl.”

Rather than ignoring the counselor’s response as lack of knowledge, as some approaches to diversity in education would claim, I argue that she strategically invalidated Rakel’s gender identity because it was in excess of the difference she could integrate in her understanding of diversity (Bettcher, 2014). Thus, Rakel experienced the tension between the school’s self-understanding as being aware of diversity on the one hand and the everyday experiences of racist, colonial, binary understandings of gender on the other. This cisnormative identity invalidation, expressed as resistance to accepting more than one difference in Rakel, is a function of a cisnormative linear understanding of gender unmarked by race.

Rakel and other nonbinary people of Color are facing more aggressive demands to make themselves intelligible to people embodying whiteness and linearity of sex/gender. Importantly, while Rakel was the only participant who discussed experiences of racism in this study (not related to religion), zir lived experience and analysis of being both nonbinary and a person of Color highlights how intelligible gender is conceptualized through the “attempt at control” by “breaking it down into pure elements” (Lugones, 1994, p. 460).

In the following, Robin’s story materialized teachers’ attempts at another form of purity.

Adultism and lack of strategies of support: Robin’s forced coming-out

Robin was a 16-year old trans guy who had just finished primary school (grundskola) who described himself as “just an ordinary person.” He spoke about the paradoxical reactions of adults in his previous school. Early on in our conversation he discussed how he had confided in his mentor about being trans, and how another teacher then forced him to come out in front of the class:

Yes, I have a mentor who I trust very much, he is great, so he is really supportive. Hm, so I first told him and then he subtly spread, hm, the rumor, in the staff room. One teacher actually made me stand in front of the whole class and just “hi I am trans,” that made it very uncomfortable (Irina: well, yes!), hm, that was also the same teacher who, on the day I cut my hair, I had very long hair before and I cut it off to, yes, look more masculine, as you do. Hm, her first question to me was “why did you cut your hair? It was nicer when it was long, you don’t look so womanly now” and [unclear] “this is what I want” (Robin and Irina laugh). That is the point (Irina: precisely). Hm but, yes (Irina: oj), and it was also her who made me stand up, in front of the whole class, and like “Okay, now tell what you are now and who you were before and what has changed.” Well, she didn’t get at all that I am the same person.

Robin was unprepared for this incident, as the teacher had not talked with him about such a public coming out (Bartholomaeus & Riggs, 2017, pp. 364; Travers, 2018, pp. 66, 68). In Kennedy’s terms, while Robin’s friends knew, he had discursively deferred coming out for all of his class, a strategy that was curtailed by his teacher’s unilateral decision (Kennedy, 2022).

This incident shows the risks that gender nonconforming young people take when trusting adults and reflects the adultism inherent in schools. While Robin had confided in his mentor so that the mentor could spread the information among other teachers, his colleagues then adopted very different strategies. This shows the consequences of a lack of strategies or guidelines for supporting gender nonconforming pupils (Bartholomaeus & Riggs, 2017). The teacher who outed him had not collaborated with colleagues to find a coherent way to support Robin.

Robin also discussed how this incident happened in the context of a school culture where teachers generally did not react when harassment occurred among pupils. After Robin’s coming out, the head of school did not step in when other pupils ridiculed him, and refused to work out a strategy to find alternative locker-room arrangements. Though his friends stood up for Robin, this was a difficult time:

Robin: […] But I took it very hard in the beginning (Irina: I understand). And many of the teachers didn’t care at all.

Irina: So they went by even if there was something that –

Robin: Exactly.

Irina: Okay.

Robin: One teacher told me that I had like brought this on myself, “so stand up for yourself”; yes, this is my fault […]. Yes, I was thinking about that when I was forced to come out.

This teacher blamed Robin for the violence occurring in hallways, accentuating the administrative violence inherent in the lack of a collaborative strategy (Spade, 2015 [2011]). Robin had to negotiate with individual teachers who reacted from mostly hostile positions and read his identity as a (malicious) choice. This aggressive attachment of responsibility onto Robin reflects his unintelligibility in the cisnormative setting of the school and the forceful subjection that these teachers performed. Again, rather than seeing this as benign ignorance that can be salvaged with simple educational efforts as often is claimed in more liberal suggestions for change work, such moves are “stunningly trans-ignorant and willfully normative” (Enke, 2013, p. 237) and can be read as expressions of the agential relationship between normative structures and teachers’ behavior (Schmitt, 2020).

Also Mika’s narrative highlights problematic school cultures.

Harsh school cultures and implicit cisnormativity: Mika’s demands for other forms of knowledge in schools

16-year old Mika’s experiences in school show how violent school cultures and an education that lacks in social learning can interact to make it difficult for students to come out or confide in a teacher. She critiqued approaches that solely focus on individual support for gender nonnormative students, concurring with scholarship that argues that schools “typically do not adopt measures for trans inclusion until a visible transgender kid shows up” (Travers, 2018, p. 76).

In her narrative, Mika stated early on that her school had been a “horror of mobbing” as well as, later on, a place where she could grow. She discussed a school culture at a previous school where violence was a regular occurrence:

Many were bullied, many felt terrible.

Teachers tried to intervene, but change was not always lasting. Other pupils harassed Mika with body-phobic slurs:

So it wasn’t directly super-active – no one shouted at me – but it was the odd comment: “you are ugly, you are fat”; and that is not quite homophobia, that they didn’t know about that or something.

In this context, Mika did not feel safe to come out or to ask for support, so her strategy vis-à-vis the violent school culture was discursive deferral (Kennedy, 2022).

In this short moment in the conversation, three issues are apparent. First, Mika down-played the intensity and recurrence of the harassment. Similar references were made by other participants, with a comparative note that others had it worse. Trans guys/men could mention that trans girls/women experienced more resistance, or that nonbinary co-students had a harder time making themselves understood. This experience is discussed in scholarship as a direct effect of cisnormative notions of gender (Meadow, 2018, p. 47). The horror of the ongoing murders of trans women of Color and Black transwomen, not least in the Americas, was mentioned as a point of reference, creating anxiety and making less physically harmful experiences seem less important. Participants’ experiences were seen as less hurtful against this backdrop of murderous discourses of trans (a problematic move discussed by Snorton & Haritaworn, 2013).

Second, this shows that emotional and relational violence often are taken less seriously in schools than physical violence, and that cisnormativity is so ubiquitous that it can be hard to grasp. When I asked, later in the conversation, if she thought about her experiences as discrimination, Mika discussed the lack of knowledge and support rather than concrete acts of violence. For Mika, the everyday cisnormativity of teaching materials was as problematic as the lack of care given to students who suffer.

A third aspect of Mika’s story is of how fat-shaming intersects with cisnormativity (Murray, 2005, p. 157), materializing the violent pathologization of fatness, especially in children. Mika was punished by other students through fat-phobic harassment for being different in a way they could not fully understand, that did not fit cisnormative purity. Her narrative accentuates how oppressive mechanisms toward bodies and identities work intersectionally. In that context of harassment and fat-shaming, Mika for a long time did not feel comfortable to come out, either as queer or trans. Arguing for the responsibility of schools to create safer school cultures, she suggested a systemic critique of what is considered relevant knowledge:

Well, I feel a bit that people know how photosynthesis works, but not how your – why some in your class feel like shit.

Mika discussed how learning about social interactions and wellbeing was deprioritized. Trans-specific knowledge was only given between the lines: a textbook mentioned the terms “transvestite” and “transsexual,” but they were not contextualized or explained; a sexualities education film did not gender the characters in it, but the teacher missed the opportunity to discuss gender identities.

Mika’s analysis echoes demands formulated in queer educational justice work to integrate social justice and academic learning (Schmitt, 2020). For Mika, both social learning and trans-specific knowledge need to be given more space in schools. She also offered a policy analysis that offset the (in itself problematic) zero tolerance approach which she found in schools’ equity working plans with experiences of teachers’ uncertainty about or refusal to use proper pronouns (Walton, 2011).

Similar to Robin’s experience, administrative violence was manifest for Mika at a later stage when the head of school did not react to her written request to inform all the teachers about her name and pronoun, and Mika had to contact all teachers individually. Like many of the participants in this study, Mika had (to) become an activist, and offered her knowledge in order to make the school less formed by hetero- and cisnorms.

Discussion and conclusion: Transgressing cisnormative purity

I have shown that “trans issues” in schools are not restricted to transphobic comments. Normative whiteness and fat-phobia, as well as adultism and schools’ problems in translating nondiscrimination regulations into reliable practice violently affect gender nonconforming young people as much as a lack of rudimentary knowledge pertaining to gender identity. Clearly, the transgression of cisnormative purity needs to be understood as intersectional.

Schools’ response to these intersectional transgressions of cisnormativity in Rakel, Robin, and Mika’s narratives was to demand the production of purity, and with that intelligibility, in different ways: by demanding the fragmentation of intersectional questions on gender and race, by forcefully outing a student or by refraining from supporting students. In order to understand the specific ways in which trans and nonbinary young people experience and negotiate school and to unpack structures and situations that enforce cisnormative purity, the analysis of administrative violence, identity invalidation and the need to negotiate disclosure are helpful.

Participants in this study discussed how hostile and affirming structures and pedagogies could coexist in the same school (Schmitt, 2022a). There lies reason for cautious hope: Thanks to decades of activism, it is possible to negotiate cisnormative frameworks in school in Sweden where the older participants did not have access to a language for such claims. The adults’ reactions to Rakel, Robin, and Mika’s embodied transgressions of purity are powerful moments of negotiation. I read these negotiations of expectations of cisnormative purity not as anachronistic left-overs (“it gets better”), but as a sign of a transgressive moment in the Swedish context, marked by the simultaneousness of conflicting societal and political processes, the concurrence of trans “arrival” and of ongoing oppression (Nicolazzo, 2017). Therefore, in analyzing trans and nonbinary young people’s experiences in school, it is important to keep in mind the simultaneousness of control and liberation, of imposed cisnormative purity and concurrent negotiation. While epistemic, pedagogical or relational violence is hurtful and destructive, the participants in this study witness how violence not only highlights unintentional transgression but also can bring about deliberate resistance.

Not least, Rakel, Robin and Mika’s analyses give educators valuable keys: To make schools safer and more reliable for gender nonconforming young people, both trans-specific strategies and knowledge and a stronger engagement with anti-oppressive educational perspectives throughout the school sector are key, and all adults in school need to carry this work (Schmitt et al., 2022b). This hopeful transgressive work continues.

Acknowledgments

This work could not have been undertaken without the generosity of the participants, and of the activists and colleagues, who formed it through their comments. Thank you all! Warmest thanks especially to J. Seipel, Signe Bremer-Gagnesjö, Diana Mulinari, Natacha Kennedy and Annette Bromdal, and to the most generous reviewers, for their much-appreciated comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This stu

dy is funded by the Swedish Research Council, Grant No. 2013-02387_VR.

Notes on contributors

Irina Schmitt

Irina Schmitt is senior lecturer in Gender Studies at Lund University, Sweden. Irina’s work focuses on power relations and experiences in the intersections of gender, sex and sexuality, with understandings of national ascriptions and belongings, especially in educational settings.

Notes

1 Transcriptions by research assistant Shifte Mosalli; translation of interview passages by the author.

2 Following common usage in Sweden, I write “trans” without the asterisk*. During the time of the study, terminology has shifted: “nonbinary” is mentioned alongside “trans” as well as under the trans umbrella. Neither the participants nor I use “trans” and “nonbinary” as mutually exclusive; some participants also use “queer” as a qualifier to underline their non-normative, gender-creative position. These discussions of language are political and ever ongoing (Meadow, 2018, pp. 225-226; Pearce et al., 2019; Roen, 2002, p. 227).

3 So-called “free” schools are publicly funded, often run by private companies; few private schools exist. This qualitative study does not allow for a comparison between school forms. Some of the participants chose a humanist, social science or arts program for upper secondary school as a way to access a less cisnormative context.

4 The same welfare state that provides anti-discrimination legislation and covers gender-affirming care even for nonbinary people required forced sterilization/castration of those applying for a change of legal sex until 2013. Forced sterilization upon e.g. Sami, Roma, and people with non-normative abilities was outlawed in 1976. Corrective surgery on intersex infants is still legal (Alm, 2018).

5 In Swedish, and in this study, four pronouns are used: “she/her,” “he/his,” the Swedish third pronoun “hen” (official since 2015), which I translate as “ze/zir,” and the less-official pronoun “den,” which I translate as “they/them.”

6 The study also addressed students with intersex variations, but none of the participants identified being born with an intersex variation. This reflects a lack in my engagement and the level of invisibility of intersex experiences in Sweden (Alm, 2018). For research engaging the educational experiences of people born with intersex variations, see e.g. Enzendorfer and Haller (2020).

7 Kennedy argues for a chronology: feeling different (“tacit deferral”), epiphany, discursive deferral, and coming out. The material in this study suggests somewhat blurred lines between these moments. LGBTIQ + youth groups sometimes were spaces of exploration less strictly formed by cis-hetero-normativities (Kjaran & Kristinsdóttir, 2015) that could open up the linearity of deferral that can displace transness into a “future by design not meant to arrive” (Gill-Peterson, 2018, p. 196; Muñoz, 2007).

8 In 2019, the Stockholm District Court decided in favor of a school that denied a trans girl access to the girls’ locker room.