Abstract
Postsecondary institutions of education, similar to the broader society in which they are embedded, are steeped in and further trans* oppression. In addition, the knowledge produced at these institutions is inflected with trans* oppression, and continues to reify the notion that trans* lives and experiences are abject, abnormal, unintelligible, and otherwise impossible. In this article, I build from the work of Patton, Brayboy, Delgado Bernal, and Spade to propose a trans* epistemology. In doing so, I discuss how this new epistemological stance helps educators unlearn the gender binary illogic in which they collude, thereby (re)shaping education as liberatory.
We share, perhaps, a certain delight and trepidation in the awareness that gender is trouble: Gender may trouble every imaginable social relation and fuel every imaginable social hierarchy; it may also threaten to undo itself and us with it, even as gender scholars simultaneously practice, undo, and reinvest in gender.
In the fall of 2015, I taught an advanced student development theory class at my home institution of Northern Illinois University. In this class, students and I utilized critical theoretical frameworks as lenses through which to understand and implement developmental theories with college students. Many of these theories were originally developed through modernist paradigms, meaning they were conceptualized as providing stable notions of who college students are and will become. Certainly there has been a shift toward fluid constructions of identity in higher education scholarship (e.g., Abes & Kasch, 2007; Catalano, 2017; Denton, 2014), but even as this is occurring, there is a prevailing notion that one can use developmental theory as a method to grasp onto “where students are at” as a means to creating “developmentally appropriate” programmatic interventions. Although some scholars have stated that developmental theories need to be used prudently to not further this false sense of fixity (Evans, Forney, Guido, Patton, & Renn, 2010), and that the notion of fixity is a problem of how theories are used rather than how they were conceptualized and developed, I assert that the theories themselves, as well as the environment in which these theories are created/used, remain heavily steeped in modernist, positivist, and conservatist assumptions of truth, knowledge, reality, and organization. In this sense, far from placing any “blame” for a lack of fluidity on either educators or theorists, I believe both parties share responsibility in de/re/constructing theories and epistemologies that recognize identities as fluid and malleable.
A current trend in higher education and student affairs theoretical literature has been a turn toward the use of critical and postmodern theories such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), Intersectionality, and Queer Theory (Jones & Abes, 2013; Mitchell, Simmons, & Greyerbiehl, 2014). In addition, a proliferation of critical theories focused on specific marginalized populations has emerged, such as LatCrit (Delgado Bernal, 2002), TribalCrit (Brayboy, 2005), DisCrit (Erevelles, 2011), and Critical Trans Politics (Spade, 2015). Most recently, Patton’s (2016) article published in this very journal has continued a necessary conversation uncovering the insidious operations of anti-Black racism in postsecondary spaces. Her article, which traces the genealogy of how postsecondary education was built on, and continues to profit from, the very Black people it denies and disavows provides a powerful counter-story undermining the illogical assumptions of our living in a “post-racial” utopia (Cabrera, 2014).
Although not all are grounded in educational literature, the critical theoretical frameworks and epistemologies referenced above are all highly transferrable to educational contexts. Furthermore, several are rooted in population-specific epistemological assumptions. For example, Brayboy’s (2005) elucidation of TribalCrit is grounded in an understanding of the varied ways that Indigenous peoples come to truth, knowledge, power, and culture as unique and different from the dominant White culture of the United States. As a result, rather than just seeing identities and subjectivities as fluid and contextual, TribalCrit also calls into question the supposed stability of discourses of truth, power, knowledge, and reality. In other words, critical scholars such as Delgado Bernal (2002), Brayboy (2005), and Patton (2016) are elucidating how White supremacy, colonization, racism, and sexism operate to erase—figuratively and literally—people and experiences from our shared past/present/future. By doing so, those of us with marginalized identities are imagined to have had no past, are deemed remarkable when we are recognized in the present moment, and our future—as I will discuss later—is always already positioned as being impossible.
Making the Case for a Trans* Epistemology
My imagining of a trans* epistemology that I elucidate in this article provides a necessary intervention to uncover and counteract the myriad ways in which trans* oppression (Catalano & Griffin, 2016) pervades postsecondary educational spaces. As Delgado Bernal (2002) stated,
Critical raced-gendered epistemologies also push us [educators] to consider pedagogies of the home, which offer culturally specific ways of teaching and learning and embracing ways of knowing that extend beyond the public realm of formal schooling. (Delgado Bernal, 2001, pp. 109-110)
It is Delgado Bernal’s assertion that raced-gendered epistemologies proliferate possibilities for who can (re)produce knowledge and how one can come to such knowledge. Delgado Bernal (2002) also reminded educators of the ways systemic discourses regarding racialization and gender operate to foreclose certain possibilities, thus requiring counter-stories that (re)center those who are marginalized due to their racialization and genders. My aim in this piece is to extend this important discussion, asking questions for what the possibilities are when trans* people imagine an epistemological standpoint of our own, and how that standpoint may (re)frame educational praxis.
Currently, the social imaginary has been flooded with stories of the lives and livelihoods of trans* peoples and communities. Certainly, we as trans* people have existed previous to this recent spat of visibility and recognition, and will continue to exist when the spotlight moves away from us. However, what has become painfully clear to me is that how we are understood socially, and the way we have been focused on throughout much of the current public discourse, has been from the perspective of the gazing cisgender eye. The near constant social panic around trans* peoples’ use of public restrooms—including the decision by 11 state governments to sue the federal government for the right to determine which restrooms trans* people will (not) have the ability to use (Farrington, 2016), as well as the recent decision by the current administration to work to actively roll back federal protections for trans* youth in schools—the ongoing tensions regarding trans*-inclusive housing on college and university campuses, the (lack of) access to trans*-inclusive health care, and how trans* people become socially visible—a experience most notably present in high-profile trans* people like Laverne Cox, Carmen Carrera, Chelsea Manning, Janet Mock, and Caitlyn Jenner—are all instances in which the cisgender public largely controls (and oftentimes distorts) who we are as trans* people, how trans*ness becomes problematically affixed to our bodies in ways that regulate who is “trans* enough” (Catalano, 2015b), and, as a result, how trans*ness is understood as a sociocultural phenomenon.
Because of the way the cisgender public continues to dominate the shaping of the discourse on trans* people, there has been a lack of conversation about a truly transgender epistemology that is for us and by us (Dunn, 1999; Richards, 2016). An exemplar of a trans* scholar who has been pivotal in shaping discourse about trans* lives is Dean Spade (2015). However, Spade’s (2015) development of Critical Trans Politics is more of a way of (re)positioning trans* people at the nexus of systemic racism, classism, trans* oppression, and sexism that continues to diminish our life chances rather than proposing a trans*-centric epistemological framework. What Spade’s work does is necessary, but it does not address how we as a people come to know, and how our unique approach to creating truth and knowledge is itself a reflection of the very historical, political, and social legacies Spade traced. In other words, Spade’s work sets the stage for, but does not address fully, the extent to which we can arrive at a trans* epistemology. Moreover, such an epistemological framework is particularly absent in the discipline of higher education and student affairs, which remains far behind other disciplines in acknowledging the full humanity and dignity of the trans* students, faculty, and staff that have given our/their labor in service to the neoliberal academy for years (Nicolazzo, Marine, & Galarte, 2015).
To counteract this dismissal, I propose that we trans* people have our own epistemology; an epistemology from which we come to know ourselves, each other, and, as a result, can transform the narratives that have been written about us by cisgender others. Admittedly, the creation of a trans* epistemology is a bold and always already problematic process. I cannot, nor do I claim to, speak for all trans* people. For example, as several of my trans* kin have pointed out, even my use of the asterisk in the word trans* has been understood as damaging and marginalizing by some of our community members. 1 To this end, I do not claim that what follows should be understood as a singular, unified trans* epistemology for all trans* communities. In fact, I am not sure something like this is even possible for a population whose home resides in not always/ever having a home. Put another way, for a population whose name begins with the Latin prefix meaning across (trans-), I remain unconvinced that, try as I might, I can ever develop (or should ever try to develop) an all-encompassing trans* epistemology. However, what I can do, and what I attempt in the pages that follow, is to engage in a dialogic and community-based project by which we as trans* people, scholars, educators, and activists can develop an understanding of how we come to know and create truth as an ongoing and revolving process. Thus, while what I lay out is one way to imagine a trans* epistemology, I do not suppose it is the only way to do so. I also am sharing this in the hopes that it can be re/worked into a format that will reflect the diversity of experiences and approaches to knowledge that honor the continually expanding array of positionalities and subjectivities of the trans* community.
Framing the imagining of a trans* epistemology in this way is consistent with Spade’s (2015) Critical Trans Politics in two important ways. First, by positioning the imagining as a group project, and by inviting future changing, challenging, and amending, I am recognizing the importance of polyvocality, or the centering of our many voices as a vast and varied conglomerate of trans* communities. A reliance on polyvocality also is the main rationale for my focusing on voices, narratives, and stories throughout the following imaginings. Trans* people are still highly unexpected in higher education (Jourian, Simmons, & Devaney, 2015). As such, we have yet to develop a deep reservoir of literature from which to draw. However, in the critical tradition of counter-storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), I openly resist White, Western, and conservatist discourses of “truth,” “objectivity,” and “data” by using our stories, experiences, and activism as trans* people to ground this article.
Second, I am resisting the normative desire to reach a “final conclusion,” and focusing more on the process by which we as trans* people come to know and what that means for how we are (not) able to move in and through educational spaces. As Spade (2015) stated, “We [trans* people] need a critical trans politics that is about practice and process rather than a singular point of ‘liberation’” (p. 2). As such, I suggest this imagining of a trans* epistemology is a part of a genealogy through which trans* people have—and continue to—come to know ourselves, each other, and our social worlds, as well as how our knowledge mediates our day-to-day experiences in social institutions such as higher education.
Connections Between Trans* Epistemology and Urban Education
As Blackburn and McCready (2014) stated, a paradox exists throughout urban education scholarship in relation to trans* people. Specifically, Blackburn and McCready explained that while “LGBTQQ people and issues are taken up more in urban education than in any other education context . . . even in these contexts, homophobia and transphobia exist significantly to impact negatively LGBTQQ students’ academic achievement” (p. 142). Moreover, urban education literature parallels the critique Renn (2010) made of higher education discourse in its complicity of conflating gender and sexuality through research and practice. For example, although several recent studies have been published in Urban Education that relate to transgender youth (e.g., Brockenbrough, 2016; Henry, Fowler, & West, 2011; Venzant Chambers & McCready, 2011), there have yet to be any conceptual or empirical scholarship focusing specifically on trans* and gender nonconforming youth. This presents a challenge, as LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) populations are posited as uniform, suggesting our lives, experiences, and subjectivities—and, thus, our needs—are the same. This dangerous assumption often negates trans* and gender nonconforming experiences and lives, a phenomenon I termed compulsory heterogenderism (Nicolazzo, 2016, 2017), or the process by which trans* subjectivities and experiences are erased and instead misunderstood as sexualities. Finally, as Lipman (2011) elucidated, the neoliberal turn in urban education discourse may very well usurp trans* narratives and experiences for the benefit of educational institutions. In other words, institutions of education consume our identities as trans* people, lauding us as “success stories,” positioning themselves as responsive to trans* peoples’ perspectives and needs, but not working to deconstruct the omnipresence of structural trans* oppression.
Despite the current oversight of trans*-specific scholarship throughout the field of urban education, there exist distinct possibilities for proliferating conceptualizations of gender. For example, Blackburn and McCready (2014) rightly pointed to the work of young urban LGBTQQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning) youth who continue to “lead the way in efforts to make change outside of schools” (p. 142). Furthermore, multiple scholars (Brockenbrough, 2016; Cruz, 2011; Venzant Chambers & McCready, 2011) point to the ways queer youth of color are disrupting, talking back to, and (re)claiming space through the public sphere. Cruz’s (2011) articulation of queer youth of color’s resistance in tight spaces and Venzant Chambers and McCready’s (2011) notion of making space are powerful lenses through which urban educators must continue to recognize the agency, resilience, and resistance strategies already in use by queer and trans* youth in urban educational contexts. Moreover, as queer youth of color’s resistance continues to lead efforts to change outside of schools, the imperative to make space for a trans* epistemology becomes all the more present. Just as trans* people need physical space to be themselves, we also need epistemological spaces of our own to learn how we come to know ourselves and our worlds through gendered perspectives. Similar to how Muñoz (1999) proposed the concept of disidentification as a way to rework dominant racial and sexuality-based ideologies, the imagination of a trans* epistemology resists and reworks the trans* oppression throughout (urban) educational contexts, while also recognizing the work that has already been—and continues to be—done in urban contexts, most often by trans* and gender nonconforming people of color. In other words, it is through the (possibility of) work being done in urban educational contexts that a trans* epistemology can even begin to be imagined.
Provisional Tenets of an Imagined Trans* Epistemology
Now that I have elucidated the need for a trans* epistemology and its relevance to urban education, I move to a discussion of what I imagine to be the six tenets of such an epistemology. As I stated previously, these are not meant to be an exhaustive or definitive list of tenets. Instead, I embrace Spade’s (2015) emphasis on process over content and propose the following tenets as provisional and open to critique and further development. I have also come to the following tenets through living, working, and learning alongside trans* kin. Therefore, while I am the sole author of this article, these tenets should be understood as always already a result of community-based praxis and living.
The following are the tenets through which I begin to imagine a trans* epistemology:
Trans* people may be from oppression, but we ourselves are not of oppression.
We all experience our trans*ness differently as a result of our varied, intersecting identities.
In and through community with each other, we have the power to heal and remake ourselves as trans* people.
Our continued de/re/construction of our trans* subjectivities spans material and virtual environments.
“Trickle up activism” and grassroots coalition-building are, and will remain to be, orientations for our community.
In/visibility and its varied meanings are central to our senses of self, community, and kinship.
In what follows, I explore each of these six tenets of this newly imagined trans* epistemology fully. After doing so, I will then raise questions about what these assumptions mean in relation to postsecondary education spaces and educational praxis.
Trans* People May Be From Oppression, But We Ourselves Are Not of Oppression
Chyna Gibson. Ciara McElveen. Mesha Caldwell. Jamie Lee Wounded Arrow. JoJo Striker. Keke Collier. Papi Edwards. Lamia Beard. Ty Underwood. Yasmin Vash Payne. Taja Gabrielle DeJesus. Bri Golec. Kristina Grant Infiniti. Sumaya Ysl. Keyshia Blige. Vanessa Santillan. Mya Hall. London Chanel. Mercedes Williamson. Aston O’Hara. Amber Moore. India Clarke. K. C. Haggard. Shade Schuler. Kandis Capri. Elisha Walker. Tamara Dominguez. Jasmine Collins. Blake Brockington. Skylar Lee. Leelah Alcorn. Kiesha Jenkins. Ashley Hallstrom. Penny Proud.
These are our names. These are some of the members of our community 2 who are no longer living due to the violent nature of trans* oppression in the United States. And although 2015 was widely been heralded as the most violent year for trans* people on record (Gossett, 2015; Grant, 2016), the reality is this may just be a fraction of the names of those trans* people whose lives have been ended far too soon. We will likely never know all the names of trans* people who continue to be killed or who take their own lives, and this erasure—an erasure that does not even allow us as a community to mourn our own—is a further manifestation of trans* oppression. When we do not even know who our people are, we become disconnected and cannot adequately pay homage to the lives and livelihoods of our own people. They are taken from us through violence, either by the hands of their cisgender murderers or by committing suicide due to the intractable nature of systemic trans* oppression that makes their lives unlivable. In addition, there are many more of us who, on a daily basis, face explicit and covert forms of violence and indignity; threats, harassment, harm, microaggressions, and ostracism, borne from the irrational fear in which trans* oppression is rooted. And the violence that is enacted on our bodies shows no signs of slowing down.
We as a trans* people (continue to) experience loss in many ways beyond just the loss of physical lives, too. For example, I have written elsewhere about the many personal losses I have faced as a trans* person and scholar (Nicolazzo, 2014). Specifically, I wrote,
I have lost mentors, publication opportunities, relationships with people whom I make uncomfortable with the stares and looks I garner, deeper connections with people who do not see me as I want to be seen. I have lost places I want to return to, but cannot, unless I choose to cover (Yoshino, 2006), or hide my transness [sic], both personally as well as through my own research and scholarship, so others might “accept” me. (p. 210)
Although there are extreme differences in the material effects of the personal loss I—and I suspect many other trans* people—face in this regard, it is a further acknowledgment of how we are from oppression. In other words, how we come to first know of ourselves—and, I would argue, how cisgender others come to know about us as trans* people—is deeply connected to notions of loss, fear, threat, harm, violence, and oppression. It is for this reason that I suggest that an essential component to imagining a trans* epistemology is the recognition that we as trans* people are, in many respects, from oppression.
However, although we may be from oppression, we are not of oppression. What I mean by this is that we trans* people are not solely an oppressed people. We supersede our oppression, and many of us—most of us, even—continue to thrive in many ways. Although much of the research and social media about trans* people focuses on harassment, harm, and transphobic legal and political battles, we also succeed in various ways that belie both the oppression surrounding our lives and communities and the persistent trans-as-tragic narrative (Halberstam, 2005; Serrano, 2007). We are artists, poets, teachers, activists, and scholars. We are partners and parents. We are children and elders. We are engineers, we are knowledge producers, and we are travelers. While we all share a common history of violence and threat, a common history of being forged from oppression, we are not defined solely by that oppression. We ourselves are not solely of oppression.
And so to the people who come up to me and say, “You inspire me,” or “You are so brave for living authentically; I just don’t know how you do it,” I say, you just do not get us as a people. You do not understand that we are more than our oppression. You are incapable of recognizing that we are like you in our ability to live often mundane lives, of having feelings, of checking things off of our “to do” lists, which likely have many of the same tasks you check off of yours: go grocery shopping; take the dog for a walk; Netflix and chill. To these people I say that your suggestion of focusing on my “bravery” or my being an “inspiration” is nothing short of a further enactment of systemic trans* oppression, as it suggests that we trans* people are incapable of being anything but a tragic footnote in an otherwise gender dichotomous world; that we were never meant to survive because we are nothing more than our oppression; that if trans* women of color make it past the age of 35, they are anomalies to a world that never wanted to acknowledge our existence in the first place (Vincent, 2015).
This sort of inspiration porn is damaging, and serves as a further barrier to dismantling the systems of racism, sexism, classism, and compulsory able-bodiedness that intersect with trans* oppression to make our existences as trans* people full of fear and threat. And although this is the reality that we as trans* people wake up to on a daily basis, although each and every day I am greeted to the reality that today will be yet another day I face injustices based on my gender, I am also intensely aware of our ability to be more than just a reflection of that oppression. While we mourn those in our community who have died, and while we mourn the fact that we may never know all of the names of our people whose lives have been stripped from us, we also are a vibrant community of people who continue to push, resist, agitate, and practice resilience in beautiful and creative ways. We may very well be from oppression, but we are not—nor will we ever be, nor should we ever be—flattened to our oppression. We ourselves are not of oppression.
We All Experience Our Trans*ness Differently as a Result of Our Varied, Intersecting Identities
It is imperative to recognize that our movement and our community as trans* people in the United States has continued to be made possible largely due to the work of those among us who continue to be most marginalized: trans* women of color. Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major, Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson, CeCe McDonald, Janet Mock, Monica James, Raquel Willis, Jennicet Gutiérrez, Angelica Ross, and Laverne Cox (to name just a few) have cemented—and continue to create—a legacy through which trans* women of color risk their lives for our community to embody our genders in radical and transformative ways. Reflecting on this legacy, it becomes imperative to honor that, while we are all trans* enough, we all experience our trans*ness differently. Specifically, our various, intersecting identities alter how we experience and are able to navigate our various contexts. For example, although there is no doubt that I am trans*, my Whiteness acts as a buffer protecting me from the overt forms of violence and threat enacted on Black and brown trans* bodies. Therefore, while 2015 was one of the most violent on record in relation to trans* people who were murdered as a result of their gender identity and/or in relation to trans* people who have taken their own lives due to cisgender people’s denial of their trans* identities, I can be well assured this will not be my experience. My Whiteness, along with my socioeconomic status (itself correlated, but not caused by, my racial identity as White), acts as a protective factor for how I experience my trans*ness in a significantly less violent manner.
This is not to say that all White trans* people will never experience threat, harm, or violence. Similar to the concept of intersectionality, not only do historical, political, and social constructs sediment over time to influence how we all can(not) navigate our shifting contexts, but how our identities are constructed by ourselves and others may have remarkably profound influences on our experiences of safety and vulnerability. For example, my status as a trans*femme nonbinary person “shows up” and is “read” differently depending on my context and the other people with whom I interact on any given day. For example, in some spaces, and at some moments, I am misread as an effeminate cisgender man. Although this misreading is itself a manifestation of trans* oppression being mapped onto my body—suggesting I am “not trans* enough” to be anything other than an effeminate cisgender man—I still benefit from masculine privilege in these moments where I am misgendered in ways that, when I am read as not-cisgender, I can rest assured that I may likely face increasing levels of vulnerability and threat.
Therefore, while my racial identity remains consistent, I (and all trans* people) experience differential levels of safety and/or vulnerability due to the contexts in which I/we exist as well as the ways in which I/we embody and/or am/are read as trans*. Again mirroring the intersectional framework from which this tenet emanates, the sands upon which safety and vulnerability can be understood are constantly shifting. However, what is clear is the way we make sense of ourselves, and the way other people make sense of our embodiments/expressions of our trans*ness, mediates our (in)ability to navigate our social contexts. In addition, it is imperative to understand our lives as being made possible through the continued efforts of those trans* women of color who remain the most marginalized members of our community. We are a (trans*)matriarchal community, one built from and nurtured by the trans* women of color who have continued to give their lives—both figuratively and literally—for our survival.
In and Through Community With Each Other, We Have the Power to Heal and Remake Ourselves as Trans* People
As a trans* brista 3 of mine once conveyed to me, “We better love ourselves, because we cannot—nor should we—wait around for others to love us.” Far from being a signal of tragedy, this statement is one that (re)calls us back to ourselves and our people. It is in, through, and with trans* community that we have the ability to heal and remake ourselves as whole people. It is alongside one another that we are seen as who we are, regardless of how our trans*ness shows up—and oftentimes does not show up—on our bodies. It is by each other’s sides that we can commune and create a world in which possibilities for our gendered pasts/presents/futures are proliferated rather than stiffled.
In several of the studies, writing circles, and activist groups in which I have been a member, the notion of trans* kinship has continued to surface as a salient factor in our ability to heal and realize the futures we desire. Although some have termed this sort of connection “fictive kinship” (e.g., Harris-Perry, 2011), I refuse to believe there is anything fictitious about the connections we create, develop, and maintain. This kinship is deep, meaningful, and real. It is the very stuff of healing, and is the foundation upon which we can continue to live our lives in a world that refuses to accept, see, hear, or feel us as trans*. It is the bedrock upon which we find and come into our own trans*ness.
At the times when I am at my lowest, when I begin to believe the illogic surrounding me that tells me I am not “trans* enough,” or that my trans*ness situates me as not-quite-human or nonhuman (Weheliye, 2014), I go back to my trans* community to remake myself, to heal from the continued pain of living as trans* in a largely cisgender world. It is with and among my trans* community that I am reborn and recognized again as who I am, whoever that is from moment to moment, space to space, and context to context. As one of my dear trans* friends once wrote to me, “I felt such a strong kinship with you when we met . . . It is a connection that has always felt rare and special.”
Our Continued De/Re/Construction of Our Trans* Subjectivities Spans Material and Virtual Environments
Prior to 2011, much of my interactions with my trans* community happened through reading literature. This happened for several reasons, the first of which related to my coming into my own trans*ness in Arizona during the xenophobic, jingoist, racism, sexist, and trans* oppressive time that saw the ushering in of legislation like SB 1070, HB 2281, Proposition 107, and similarly exclusive and repressive politics. Not only that, but I worked in—and, as a result, colluded with—an office that further reified the nefarious gender binary discourse present throughout educational contexts (Nicolazzo, 2016, 2017). When I came into my own trans* identity, I panicked. I did not know to whom I could turn or how I could explore my burgeoning awareness of my identity. I remember speaking in hushed tones on the phone to several close friends, feeling watched as my eyes darted side to side, wondering if anyone overheard me say the words: I am trans*. What do I do now?
The first person I opened up to about being trans* suggested I read trans* memoirs and literature as a way to develop community and a sense of self. I began to acquire and consume literature at a rapid pace. I built community with Susan Stryker, Julia Serano, Dean Spade, Kate Bornstein, S. Bear Bergman, and Leslie Feinberg. I kept looking for myself in those pages, and stumbled into Sycamore’s (2008) edited anthology, Nobody Passes, finally finding a closer representation of who I was. I would come home from work and lose myself in books, finding myself and my people in the pages. After moving to Ohio to pursue my doctoral studies, I followed a similar path. I was one of The Only Ones in my area, or at least that was how it felt. So I read, and I wrote, and I wondered when I would build the vibrant in-person trans* community I read about in those pages of text.
In the spring of 2013, I attended a trans* conference, and I remember walking into the first plenary session and feeling an overwhelming sense of relief. I saw gender diversity all around me, and finally realized I was home. I had arrived in a space where I was surrounded by other people who, even if they did not embody their trans*ness as I did, were like me. They, too, had been nomadic, and our wanderings had led us to each other in that moment. I also realized I had a lot to learn, and that my learning about our community was so very different than other peoples’ learning. Specifically, I came to realize that many trans* people, particularly trans* youth, were using virtual platforms to learn about themselves and develop community. I recall one presenter saying, “Every trans* person I know is either interested in the Internet or science fiction . . . or both!” I did not fully understand what that meant until I began my dissertation study alongside trans* collegians.
During an 18-month ethnographic study I did alongside nine trans* collegians (see Nicolazzo, 2016, 2017), these youth shared many stories about how they sought community online. Incredulously, I remember asking one participant, Kade, if he learned about trans* people by reading books, to which he answered, “I wouldn’t know where to go in terms of print publications. I researched through the Internet.” Other participants described the Internet as “basically my hometown” (Jackson) and the place that “is the most comforting place, second to meeting trans people in person” (Raegan Darling). I heard stories about how Megan, a trans* woman, actualized her trans* identity by playing women video game characters. I, too, learned to find ways to connect with other trans* people over the Internet, and found it to be a generative space for re/de/constructing my own thinking, being, and doing of my trans*ness.
Participants’ reflections on leveraging virtual spaces and platforms to find, build, and maintain community is consistent with emerging literature. Queer and trans* communities are certainly familiar with building community through virtual platforms. For example, Horak (2014) has written about trans* intimacy and visibility on YouTube, and Gieseking (American Educational Research Association, 2015) has spoken about the ways trans* people connect to one another through Twitter. Mirroring the way Kade, Jackson, Raegan Darling, and Megan spoke about the importance of digital spaces, new scholarship by Miller (2017) suggests this is a consistent phenomenon for queer and disabled youth as well. As such, there may be connections for how various marginalized populations use digital platforms to create community as a way to resist multiple, interlocking iterations of normativity.
Through mediums like Twitter, blogging, Facebook, podcasts, gaming, and other virtual spaces, I have begun to understand how the possibilities of the digital spaces reflect back to us the possibilities of how we can be, exist, and take up space as trans* people. These spaces also allow us to re/de/construct our trans*ness in ways that may be otherwise invisible. In other words, virtual platforms provide many trans* people a way to connect outside of the normative and threatening environment of material spaces. Digital spaces, through their anonymity, provide a level of invisibility in which trans* people may feel more comfortable existing. In a way, then, the invisibility and anonymity of digital environments may allow trans* people to be more visible and expressive of their trans* self/selves than they may feel in material spaces.
It must be said that trans* people are not the only group to use virtual platforms and spaces as a means to become more visible and/or explore our identities on our own terms. However, there seems to be a common thread among trans* people in using digital spaces as a tool to explore and proliferate the multiple ways in which we can exist in various ways across material and virtual platforms. Undoubtedly, virtual spaces as a medium to explore identity were likely largely promoted by the youth who grew up with this technology. I, myself, was a teenager when I recall getting the Internet at my house for the first time, and as such, was just a bit older than the people who have made the Internet a way of life. Despite this, though, digital frontiers continue to hold rich promise for how trans* people across the life span can collaborate, commune, and develop rich kinship networks, a term participants and I developed through the dissertation work in which we engaged (Nicolazzo, 2016, 2017).
“Trickle Up Activism” and Grassroots Coalition-Building Are, and Will Remain to be, Orientations for Our Community
Twisting the illogic of trickle down economics, Spade (2015) suggested a form of activism called “trickle up activism.” In this model, Spade stated that activists and grassroots organizers should be concerned primarily with agitating for the rights of those who are most on the margins. As a result, Spade (2015) articulated that any rights won would invariably “trickle up” to those populations and peoples who have greater access, have more privilege, are less vulnerable, and face lesser amounts of threat and violence. In advocating for trickle up activism, Spade (2015) suggested trans* communities needed to work alongside various other marginalized populations, especially given the fact that many of our interests dovetail and align with each other.
In addition, we are not only comprised of, nor can we be reduced to, singular identities. In other words, we are not Black or trans* or disabled, but Black and trans* and disabled. We are not older adults or trans*, we are older trans* adults. We are not crip or queer or trans*, we are crip, queer, and trans*. Because we are ourselves more than one identity at a time, we must be a part of movement-building that recognizes and honors our multiple converging identities, along with how these identities influence our (in)ability to navigate our worlds with varying degrees of success. As Audre Lorde (2007) stated, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives” (p. 138). Given the reality of our personal experiences with our own overlapping, intersecting social identities, to not reflect this in our movement-building would be to deny who we are. Focusing on single-issue struggles would require flattening us to just one identity, further denying the ways that various individual experiences of marginalization/domination, as well as ongoing manifestations of systemic marginalization/domination, influence the livability of our lives. To deny the complexity of our own lives, and the web of historical, political, and social systems of marginalization/domination in which we live, would be to deny our own humanity.
This is not to say that identities should cease to matter. Indeed, to not focus on identities, or to actively erase them (as has been the case with the #AllLivesMatter pushback to the current revolutionary activism regarding race, racism, anti-Blackness, and White supremacy in the United States), again serves to uphold and support normative illogics of power and privilege. Conversely, then, the way forward is to create broad-based coalitional movements that seek justice for all by centering on those among us who are the most marginalized (Spade, 2015). In this way, any rights we are able to secure will invariably “trickle up” to others who are involved in our movement.
Meanwhile, the omnipresence of systemic oppression, such as White supremacy and compulsory able-bodiedness, means that to talk about “trans* people” or “the trans* community” as a monolithic, and without attending to and naming the various identities we have invariably recenters dominant narratives regarding identities (e.g., Whiteness, able-bodiedness) in problematic and oppressive ways (Clare, 2015). This, then, serves to occlude our past as a community built largely through the resistance and activism of the most marginalized people within trans* communities, including, as I mentioned above, trans* women of color. The trans* movement has never been, nor will it ever be, about just trans* people. Disability rights activists, trans* activists, movements centering Black people and people of color, the movement for prison abolition—all of these movements overlap and affect our various communities in deep and meaningful ways, inviting us to work together in broad-based, coalitional ways. Similarly, activists and scholars in seemingly disparate movements and disciplines (e.g., Disability Studies, prison abolition, racial justice) are now beginning to recognize the overlaps in needs and agendas, and are now pushing for coalitional movements that honor these overlaps.
For example, as a White trans* person with a recently diagnosed disability, I need to invest in agitating for the rights of trans* people of color with disabilities. As someone who is not incarcerated, I need to be committed to ending the carceral state, which continues to lock up and torture people of color, trans* women, and people with disabilities at alarming rates (often using these people’s very identities as the rationale for their being imprisoned in the first place). Similarly, I need to be committed to interrogating my own investments in, and collusion with, White supremacy, compulsory able-bodiedness, anti-Blackness, and usages of the term safety in ways that reify the bedrock upon which the prison industrial complex is founded. I need to continually question my reasons for being involved and invested as well, and not do this out of a desire to be the “good White person” in the movement, but because these systems of domination hurt me, too, albeit in qualitatively different ways. I need to be committed to the liberation of me and my people, because our liberation, like our struggle, is always already shared. This legacy has always been a part of trans* resistance, and will continue to be the case. It is in our bones, and as such, in the very way that we have come to know and be known.
In/Visibility and Its Varied Meanings Are Central to Our Senses of Self, Community, and Kinship
Every year, I continue to have increasingly ambivalent feelings about the celebration of coming out. Events such as National Coming Out Day, or phrases like out and proud belie the many ways that safety, vulnerability, and threat are not consistent across identities and experiences of trans* people. To suggest that one should be “out and proud” denies that, for those most on the margins, coming out may be a scary, dangerous, and/or undesirable state of being. Indeed, coming out may not be a good choice for many depending on identities and contexts, which says less about our pride in our trans* identities, and more about the current state of systemic oppression in which we are embedded as a people. For example, my ability and comfort in coming out as trans* is made easier due to my Whiteness as well as my statuses as educationally and economically privileged.
In addition, to be visible as a trans* person means to be increasingly watched, scrutinized, and surveilled. In a sense, we are opting into the panopticon of surveillance in a way that remaining invisible, or using virtual back channels to develop and maintain trans* community, may not invite into our lives. Simply put, visibility is neither a wholly rewarding nor a completely desirous state for all trans* people. However, due to the prevailing hegemony of visibility within the “LGBTQ community,” and the recent legal wins for the “LGBTQ community,” the notion that one could not be out, yet still develop a strong sense of self, community, and/or kinship seems antithetical at best, and like an enactment of self-hatred and internalized transphobia at worst. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
The complex lens through which we as trans* people think about our in/visibility, and the reality that we are both visible and invisible in many ways and across various contexts, serves as an important axiom on which we come to know ourselves and others in our community. Far from being just an internal struggle, in/visibility presses on us externally as well. For example, we hear from others that we should be “out and proud,” but in 2015, a year that was often heralded as the year when trans* people “came out” in a big way in the social milieu, was also the year that was marked by increased amounts of trans* death and murder. This is no coincidence. Many in our community have discussed how increased visibility has, in some respects, led to increased threat, which means that in some ways, and in relation to some intersecting systems of oppression and individual social identities, trans* visibility may very well likely lead to trans* death. This does not mean we should—or have to—choose between being “in” or “out,” but that we may be both “in” and “out” at the same time. Furthermore, the hegemony of visibility forces us as trans* people to seriously consider Titchkosky’s (2011) suggestion that “if we are half out then we are also half in and if we are half in we need to ask what we are ‘in for’” (p. 27).
What Does a Trans* Epistemology Mean for Postsecondary Education?
As I have imagined it, a trans* epistemology is one that supersedes (postsecondary) education. In fact, the provisional tenets uncover trans* oppression as a regulating discourse across many social institutions, including, but not limited to, education. However, because education is itself a part of—and therefore is implicated by—the larger society in which it is embedded, the uncovering of societal trans* oppression leaks onto collegiate campuses and into collegiate contexts. In other words, trans* oppression does not stop at the gates of the university. In fact, as has been discussed by several trans* scholars, there exists a deeply entrenched gender binary discourse (Nicolazzo, 2016, 2017) on college campuses, which means that trans* students continue to confront environments that were/are not constructed with them in mind (Catalano, 2015a; Nicolazzo, 2017). Institutions of postsecondary education also collude with other state-sanctioned surveillance operations to police trans* people and experiences. For example, colleagues and I have discussed how Monica Jones, a Black trans* woman activist, “Was arrested for the vague charge of ‘manifesting prostitution,’ which trans* people and their allies translate as ‘walking while trans*’” (Nicolazzo, Marine, & Galarte, 2015, p. 369). Jones was arrested while protesting Project ROSE, a collaborative initiative between the Arizona State University School of Social Work, Phoenix Police Department, and Catholic Charities. This example underscores the extent to which institutions of postsecondary education are enmeshed with the carceral state in extending gender enforcement and regulation, even beyond campus boundaries.
As Patton (2016) noted, “Higher education institutions are heralded as the spaces in which knowledge for the consumption and benefit of the larger society is centrally produced” (p. 321). Patton went on to state a form of “epistemological racism” occurred through the continuation of anti-Black racism upon which institutions of higher education were founded. Similarly, due to the instantiation and perpetuation of the gender binary discourse (Nicolazzo, 2016, 2017), as well as its collusion with state systems of gender violence, I argue that postsecondary education is also complicit in epistemological trans* oppression. I state this not to replace one oppression for another, providing the false suggestion that racism is “just like” trans* oppression. Instead, I draw from Patton’s discussion of epistemological racism to show that the very same institutional forces that continue to violently enforce anti-Black racism also intersect with those that occlude and deny the proliferation of possible gendered identities, experiences, and futurities. Stating this means that not only do trans* people and Black people face epistemological erasure in postsecondary education—and as a result, in society at large—but Black trans* people encounter a complex and increasingly vulnerable position, both in and outside of educational contexts (Gossett, 2015; Grant, 2016; Nicolazzo, 2016, 2017; Nicolazzo et al., 2015).
If postsecondary institutions of education are complicit in the maintenance and continued enforcement of trans* oppression, then they must also be contexts in which educators seek to actively confront and redress such oppression. Furthermore, because the foundations and concomitant effects of trans* oppression are complex, simple solutions are not only untenable, but are overly sanguine and, I would argue, unethical. In other words, suggesting that a list of “best practices” can ever dismantle systemic oppression is not only overly optimistic, it is, in and of itself, a continuation of that oppression through its suggesting solutions are only as deep as creating individual policies and/or practices (Ahmed, 2012; Marine & Nicolazzo, 2014; Nicolazzo, 2016, 2017; Nicolazzo & Marine, 2015). Instead, it is incumbent upon educators to center those who are most marginalized throughout their thinking and praxis in educational contexts. Simply put, one must unlearn the gender binary assumptions on which one’s praxis may very well be based. This means radically reshifting one’s mind to who education is for, how education is constructed to keep certain bodies and experiences out of the (co-)curriculum, and how unnecessary the ubiquity of gender’s dispersal and enforcement is across postsecondary educational contexts.
Furthermore, if postsecondary institutions of education are the social locust at which knowledge is produced, and if these institutions are replete in trans* oppression, it follows that the knowledge produced at such institutions will be inflected with such illogic. Imagining a trans* epistemology calls attention to the ways that we as trans* people have already produced—and will always continue to produce—our own knowledge, and that such knowledge is rooted in the same liberatory and confrontational politics from which other critical theories and traditions sprouted. In this sense, imagining a trans* epistemology moves one beyond just the mere recognition of trans* bodies, but embraces a trans*-centered ethic of approaching knowledge creation and the world in which that knowledge is used to transform society toward liberatory ends.
Dis/embodying Trans*ness
The burgeoning field of Transgender Studies has, for years, been exploring disembodiment. Specifically, conversations of the efficacy of trans* as a concept separated from the body have consumed the corpus of various theorists’ intellectual energies. For a prefix that has affixed itself so firmly to the body, a prefix that has for so long been a barnacle on the skin of trans* bodies, this move toward trans* as disembodied feels potentially threatening, especially within the applied field of higher education and student affairs. If we do not, as educators, need the bodies of trans* people, then what good is the term to begin with? If bodies are no longer necessary, what does that mean for the purpose of services, programs, and institutional(ized) responses to trans* people? Indeed, Hale’s (1998) worry about (dis)remembering our dead echoes in my mind; what are the hauntingly real possibilities of deeming trans* bodies unnecessary?
The aforementioned concerns, however, are far from the truth of the matter were we as educational scholars to recognize and harness the power of a disembodied trans* subjectivity. In fact, the prefix that signals our very existence (i.e., trans-) reminds us that such dichotomies (e.g., between the bodily and the ethereal) are, and have been, always already false. We are neither one nor the other. We are both/and. We transcend, transgress, and transmute the fallacious grounds upon which such dangerous dichotomies persist. In this sense, then, the disembodying of trans*ness is a realization that we can trans* our very bodies, that we can move across various forms of embodiment, including the absence of having a body, and that such a supposition holds multiple possibilities.
As Salamon (2014) and Gerdes (2014) suggested, the question is not just about being trans*, but about the affective, performative, and discursive aspects of trans*ness. In this sense, one can envision a dis/embodied trans* state, where the solidus allows for the fluid movement back and forth between the two terms (disembodied and embodied) in a way that recognizes them as mutually constitutive as well as, at times, mutually exclusive (Palumbo-Liu, 1999). Quoted at length, Gerdes wrote,
Through the rich yield of lived experience, transgender studies must pursue the question of performativity beyond representation. Transgender studies is positioned, at the intersection of gender’s subjectivity and its malleability, to open vital questions about the (re)formation of gender, subjectivity, bodies, and the body. These questions demand a performative theory that can also account for the unrepresentable experience of gender, of being addressed by gender, and so being tossed into a rhetorical relation with it. Performativity is the connection between gendered embodiment, gendered experience, and gender’s discursive forces. (p. 149, emphasis in original)
Thus, it is Butler’s (2006) notion of performativity that unlocks the door for a dis/embodied trans-ing of trans* experiences, allowing for our ability as trans* scholars to ask, as Garner (2014) hinted at: What is the possibility of a trans* becoming that is not attached, like a barnacle, to trans* bodies?
So it is not that trans* bodies do not matter. It is not that trans* embodiment serves little purpose on college campuses, or that making room for trans* bodies—quite literally, when it comes to questions of restrooms, residence halls, and trans*-inclusive spaces—is a futile act. Indeed, these are necessary, life-affirming practices in which educators must engage. However, the current inquiry suggests these conversations may be insufficient; that one must not stop at discussions of trans* bodies, but must press forward into the potential generative nature of dis/embodying trans*ness. In other words, as I have wondered through this article, what is possible when we as educators ask what can be un/learned about truth, power, knowledge, and reality when we center trans*ness? What happens when we take for our center an opening up, a proliferation of possibilities, an acrossness from which the term itself germinated? What happens when we think trans* rather than just when we are trans*? Furthermore, how could such a thinking expand new possibilities for how we are trans*, just as our being trans* has clearly influenced how we think trans*? Again, these two categories, the ontological-existential nature of our being trans* and the epistemological nature of our thinking trans*, are not mutually exclusive, but interdependent. How we think and who we are is intertwined in a way that makes this very article, this very discussion, one of performative becoming, one that is always already in process in provocative and generative ways. And so while this is a beginning to an imagined trans* epistemology, it is clearly not—nor should it even be seen as—an ending point.
Conclusion: An Ending Full of Beginnings
As previously stated, Spade (2015) wrote, “We [trans* people] need a critical trans politics that is about practice and process rather than arrival at a singular point of ‘liberation’” (p. 2). It is this practice and process that the previous imaginings hope to unlock and encourage. It is this thinking beyond and across bodies, positionalities, subjectivities, and affects that we as educators of all genders can begin to harness the very real power of what knowledge can mean when we center trans*ness in all its possibilities; when trans* people are no longer marginal; and perhaps when we are no longer central, but when we are all that exists, all that there is; when we turn toward each other and embrace the full potential of what CeCe McDonald once proclaimed in a speech at the University of Chicago: “Love yourself; fuck everybody else” (UChicago LGBTQ Student Life, 2014). It is in this space, this dis/embodied potentiality, where we can begin the practice and process of imagining a new way of thinking; where we can begin to grapple with the aforementioned questions and imagine a new trans* epistemology with all of its related possibilities.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.