Abstract
Across the country, there has been an increase in anti-trans legislation seeking to limit the visibility, accessibility, and participation of transgender and nonbinary (TNB) students in K-12 and higher education. As educators, we began to wonder: what does it mean to truly invest in trans lives through our work? From our vision and commitment to investing in trans lives emerged the Trans Studies in Education (TSiE) Speaker Series at the University of Arizona (UA). TSiE amplifies TNB perspectives throughout the institution, moving beyond a normative “guest speaker” practice often positioned as time-contained, uncompensated, and undertheorized. TSiE also intentionally centers and shares those TNB perspectives that provide community and collective movement toward transinclusive education across campus. Specifically, TSiE invites trans educators, artists, community organizers, and scholars to share their experiences, insights, and wisdom with participants at and beyond UA. In so doing, TSiE speakers advance conversations about how trans pedagogy can benefit modes of learning and teaching, all while deconstructing boundaries of who should be able to access such information. TSiE also intentionally centers and shares those TNB perspectives that provide community and collective movement towards trans-inclusive education across campus.
While it may be the case that TNB experiences in education have received increasing attention in research and scholarship (e.g., Duran, Jackson & Lange, 2020; Renn, 2010), there continues to be a lack of institutional and departmental initiatives focused on TNB individuals in education. In other words, there may be an increase in TNB-related scholarship, but there remains a need to move that scholarship into praxis. Even where these programs and initiatives may exist, the visibility of departmental actions on centering and supporting TNB students, staff, and faculty is left wanting. For example, as Marine and Nicolazzo (2014) pointed out, LGBTQ centers often created educational programming about trans people, rather than for trans people, underscoring a central tension in trans peoples’ needs remaining unmet. This absence is part of a larger picture where trans people are either invisibilized or demonized in education (e.g., Jaekel & Nicolazzo, 2017; Malatino, 2015; Nicolazzo, 2017; Pitcher, 2018).
The creation and implementation of TSiE serves as an intervention in response to the absence of trans voices in education; one created by and for the TNB community. By utilizing TSiE as a model for investing in trans lives, this article provides considerations for educators who seek to implement trans-inclusive practices and interventions through guest speakers and speaker series. We first explore the problem of “guest speakers” before moving toward a description of how TSiE came to be. By explaining the tensions of guest speaker models and the reality of implementing TSiE, we both call attention to the potential limitations of speaker series while emphasizing the passion and care we bring to TSiE. We hope this roadmap can serve as a spark for educators to invest in trans lives in ways that highlight the invaluable work of TNB scholars, activists, and artists.
The Trouble With Guest Speakers
Inviting guest speakers is a pedagogical strategy often utilized by educators to enhance narratives that are either absent from scholarship or representation in the standard curriculum. Studies have shown the positive impact guest speakers have on aspects of student development (Zorek, Katz, & Popovic, 2011). These special guest speakers typically occupy marginalized subject positions and are meant to add to the course without compromising its overall framing (Beauchamp & D’Harlingue, 2012). This practice is especially common with “bringing in trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming folk to represent and authenticate trans experiences, perspectives and political engagements” (Malatino, 2015, p. 395), in part due to the ongoing presence of institutional trans oppression and transmisogyny (Nicolazzo, 2017, 2022). Inviting guest speakers is a pedagogical strategy often utilized by educators to enhance narratives that are either absent from scholarship or representation in the standard curriculum.
For TNB guest speakers in particular, this invitation is meant to highlight trans oppression alongside a well-crafted and enticing narrative of pride or that “it gets better” (Malatino, 2015). However, “a troubling contradiction shapes this practice: it centers attention on trans and gender-nonconforming individuals in an effort to highlight the discrimination we encounter, while simultaneously being shaped by a dynamic that risks further harming us” (p. 397). This approach either minimizes or overlooks the psychic cost that occurs when TNB individuals are expected to justify their existence through personal narratives (Beauchamp & D’Harlingue, 2012; Malatino, 2015). In part, this strategy is popular because it is inherently digestible to the largely nontrans audiences in attendance. However, it often results in audiences adopting sympathetic attitudes rather than engaging the topic with critical self-reflexivity (Agid & Rand, 2012; Malatino, 2015).
The “guest speaker” approach also perpetuates a notion of TNB people and experiences as an additive to conversations on gender. This approach reifies discrete categories of gender by creating rigid demarcations around cis and trans which are often used to claim, for example, transgender women are “not really women” (Beauchamp & D’Harlingue, 2012). It is also implicated in a larger social structure that relies on the gender binary as an organizing principle (Spade, 2015). This is why Malatino (2015) argued that the guest speaker approach is an example of “neoliberal management” and symbolic inclusion that glosses over the realities of TNB individuals in the academy. An invitation for a guest speaker on its own, while providing a possibility model (Mock, 2014) for TNB individuals, may not necessarily engender institutional change.
These concerns about the “guest speaker” approach are couched in a higher education context where there is a distinct lack of TNB voices, much less TNB voices from further underrepresented and marginalized groups (Nicolazzo, 2017; Stryker, 2020). Therefore, it is important to consider that TNB experiences can provide “a lens through which we can better make visible important relationships of power, difference, access, and control” (Agid & Rand, 2012, p. 8). The guest speaker model at the institutional level has substantial potential and value for both learners and TNB students, staff, and faculty when it challenges these concerns and is utilized in intentional, trans-led/centered, and long-lasting ways. The UA TSiE Speaker Series provides a model of what it means to reckon with the “trouble of guest speakers” through its infrastructure, reciprocity, intentionality, and impact.
TSiE Speaker Series: Past, Present, and Future
While trans speaker series in education are rare, there have been other examples at institutions including Mills College and UMass Amherst. The UA TSiE Speaker Series works in a parallel fashion with these examples. Its lineage starts with the Trans Studies faculty cluster hire at UA. In 2013, under the leadership of eminent scholar Dr. Susan Stryker, four faculty lines were instituted at UA in an effort to advance trans studies. The College of Education (CoE), specifically the Center for the Student of Higher Education (CSHE), expressed interest in a faculty line and hired Dr. Z Nicolazzo in 2018 (Stryker, 2020). Since then, CSHE embarked on intentional conversations on how to support the increased matriculation of queer and trans students throughout its academic programs. Originating through a proposal by Nicolazzo, the TSiE Speaker Series was granted two years of funding with a focus on intervening in how educators think through transness as a way to imagine education differently. In this manner, TSiE serves not only to amplify trans voices and expertise but also as an opportunity to do, think, and feel education in fundamentally transformative ways. Additionally, TSiE is unique in that it provides funding for a graduate assistant who is connected to the TNB community in helping to plan and execute the program. Roman Christiaens, a first-year doctoral student in the Higher Education program, served in this inaugural role. TSiE serves not only to amplify trans voices and expertise but also as an opportunity to do, think, and feel education in fundamentally transformative ways.
For the 2021–2022 academic year, the theme of the speaker series was Trans As/In Community. Invited speakers spoke about how community organizing within and across trans communities should inform education and advocacy on trans rights and trans lives. As the organizers of the speaker series, we (Roman and Z) were intentional in choosing trans women of color speakers who work outside of the academy. The two speakers for the first year were Jennicet Gutiérrez and Monica Jones, who are active on national and local levels, and who are aligned with community organizations centering on the lives of trans women of color. This decision helped to ensure funding was redirected to trans individuals who were part of communities with the highest need. By inviting speakers who were not in formal academic roles or positions, the series also sent a specific message that trans pedagogy should and must come from those who may not have access to the academy and who are directly impacted by the interlocking forces of transmisogyny, racism, classism, and other forms of oppression.
The speaker invitations were crafted in a way to contend with its implicit transactional nature by giving full reign to each speaker in choosing how to engage. This helped to mitigate the tendency for speaker invitations to capitalize off of the personal narratives and potential trauma of the speakers. Each speaker delivered a main campus talk, a student-focused and practice-oriented session, and a short interview. We capitalized on the benefits of online participation by ensuring each conversation was live-streamed or delivered in a hybrid format in order to bring in individuals outside of the institution who may not have otherwise had access. In addition to the speaking engagements, we launched a webpage that housed the recorded talks and information on each speaker. The website served as a medium to ensure the content and messages of TSiE remained present while encouraging others to repeatedly engage with the talks for continual learning.
Implications for Educators Invested in Trans Lives
On its face, the TSiE Speaker Series at the UA perpetuates the limitations of a guest speaker model. However, TSiE has important symbolic implications for the institution by prioritizing what it truly means to center and invest in trans lives in education. Additionally, the process for planning and implementing TSiE included intentional decisions to acknowledge these contradictions inherent in a speaker series while also intervening and mitigating the tensions. We offer the following implications and considerations for educators interested in bringing a similar model to their institution as one mode for transinclusive pedagogy.
Our first recommendation is to consider who qualifies as a “trans expert.” Frequently, TNB individuals with academic credentials are invited to college campuses as guest speakers because of their alignment with neoliberal notions of expertise and their palatability to higher education audiences. This trend circulates resources within spaces and communities that already have access without paying attention to the experiences of multiple marginalized TNB people. Organizers of speaker series should disrupt academic credentialing by inviting TNB individuals who may not have what some consider the “proper” academic credentials. As such, we would invite readers to consider who you are inviting for speaking events, what communities and experiences they represent, and how you can remove barriers to bringing “nonacademic” speakers to campus. For example, in organizing the TSiE, we were insistent on having trans women of color, who are often framed out of education, be central to the series. We were especially dedicated to having trans women of color who were not highly academically credentialed, too, which helped break down barriers of how knowledge is often erroneously equated with academic degrees and educational prestige. Doing this meant the TSiE highlighted people who may not be “household names” for nontrans people (or even many white trans people), but it was the best way for us to live our values regarding investing in trans lives. TSiE has important symbolic implications for the institution by prioritizing what it truly means to center and invest in trans lives in education.
Secondly, organizers of speaker series need to explore what it would mean to engender generative practices beyond the traditional, “one-off” format of a speaker series. Above all, we wanted the TSiE to be as community-focused as possible, which meant providing an ongoing resource to people beyond the academy. By integrating multiple components into the speaker invitation, TSiE created a reciprocal relationship with the invited speakers and provided a wide reach, even moving beyond campus and the local community. Because the speaking engagements were recorded in virtual or hybrid format, organizers encouraged faculty at the institution to utilize the talks in their classrooms. The recorded talks were then integrated into a larger Gender and Racial Equity toolkit the second author constructed for CoE. As explored above, the speaker model is limited in its ability to translate to material change but when it is planned by community, for community, possibilities come forth at the institutional level with direct benefits for TNB students, staff, and faculty. The speaker model is limited in its ability to translate to material change but when it is planned by community, for community, possibilities come forth at the institutional level with direct benefits for TNB students, staff and faculty.
Third, organizers should leverage the captive audiences brought in by speaker series and funnel that energy and potential resource into TNB-led organizing and organizations. Because the theme of TSiE's inaugural year was focused on community organizing, we were able to highlight the organizations founded and led by Jennicet (Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement) and Monica (The Outlaw Project). We utilized the listserv of 500 registrants to spotlight current organizing efforts as well as encourage those with resources to contribute their time and funds to support these organizations. In this way, TSiE served as a platform for sustained engagement to promote trans futures, as well as ongoing trans-led/centered organizing efforts. For example, in the summer of 2022, TSiE was linked to Trans Freedom Summer School, which was an international effort co-led by Texas Trans Futures, Dr. Harper Keenan at the University of British Columbia, and the second author to create material changes in the lives of trans youth at a time of intense, ongoing, and unrelenting trans oppression. To be clear, both the TSiE and Trans Freedom Summer School initiatives are not supported by secure, ongoing institutional funding. However, they provide a(nother) realization of trans-led organizing, especially in recognizing the importance of not waiting for institutions—educational or otherwise—to deem projects “worthy” of funding before doing the vital work of cocreating liberatory visions of trans futures in and beyond education.
The UA TSiE Speaker Series is an example of a speaker series model that truly serves as an investment in trans lives. TSiE embraces the tensions of the guest speaker model while appropriately contesting it by inviting trans individuals into academic spaces “to challenge the limits of binary gendered power systems and increase its capacities for pleasure and, even, liberation” (Agid & Rand, 2012, p. 9). As a model, TSiE demonstrates important implications for educators who are interested in bringing a speaker series on trans lives to their campus communities. The TSiE Speaker Series substantiates, in the end, that change is indeed possible when TNB people and experiences are placed at the forefront of education efforts.
