The author of this post is a transgender person conducting research on higher education in the United States. Here, in Part One, they discuss the erasure of transgender and gender nonconforming people in gender scholarship, and next week, in Part Two, they provide insights on ways cisgender scholars may do gender expansive research.
You know that feeling you get when you are pretty sure something is true, but you really hope you are wrong? That twinge of remorse wrapped in hopeful misremembering was exactly what I was feeling when I decided to review two edited volumes about “gender” in higher education for what they said about trans* collegians. I’m guessing my writing “gender” in quotations spells out what I thought I knew and feared, but if not, let me be clear: I figured there was almost no mention of trans* people in these two volumes that purported to discuss “gender” in higher education. And, lest I be accused of burying the lead, I was right. Out of 1,000+ pages, there were only two pages that had any form of substantive content about transgender people in college…and both were in one of the two books. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here; let me back up a bit.
When I saw the Write Where It Hurts call for blogposts about Trans Peer Review, I knew I wanted to review Drs. Harper and Harris III’s (2010) edited volume, College Men and Masculinities: Theory, Research, and Implications for Practice. Prior to coming into my own trans*ness, and doing trans* research, I had been interested in “masculinities work,” particularly work that engaged with what at the time was referred to as “alternative masculinities” (it had such a grunge rock feel to it that, as a child of the 90’s, I appreciated on multiple levels). However, as I got more invested in research, my own educational praxis, and understanding my own gender, I got more and more upset at the field of “masculinities.” Simply put, there was seemingly no room for trans* people in the scholarship of college “men” and “masculinities.” Like, none. Nada. Zippo. Zilch. Harper and Harris III’s edited volume is a reminder of that apparent lack of space.
In an effort to be precise, yet brief, let me offer a few of the ways trans* people are erased in a book supposedly about gender…
(1) In the Preface, Harper and Harris III (2010) wrote, “The terms ‘male’ and man’ are used interchangeably throughout this volume. However, we acknowledge that male is a biological concept, whereas man encompasses the social meanings that are culturally defined as masculine and associated with traditionally male sex roles” (p. xvii).
Okay, let me just say this right now: Nope. Not okay. Even if sex were biological (which reading Butler would at least have you question deeply, if not reject outright), the simple fact is that no educational scholars are doing chromosomal testing on their participants. In reviewing every single study in the edited volume, there is no mention of hormonal or chromosomal testing, anyway. Which makes me wonder: how can the authors and editors use these two terms as interchangeable, despite their seemingly distinct differences?
(2) Harper and Harris III (2010) go on to write, “Also understood is that sex is determined biologically and gender is socially constructed” (p. xvii, emphasis added).
Now this sentence is basic on multiple levels. First, there is nothing about sex that is “determined biologically.” In fact, sex is only “determined” insofar as we as a society determine it. In fact, our “determination” of sex-as-biology is rooted in phallocentrism and patriarchy, to say nothing of the anti-Black racism in which science was originally vaulted as the marker of Truth in the United States. Moreover, Harper and Harris III don’t discuss what “social construction” means for them. As a result, the sentence reads as a glib throwaway, something the editors don’t really mean, nor do they really seem to care about. Of course, as two cis researchers, there is seemingly little in it for them to really care about, and they can seemingly get away with such glibness. The same (gratuitous) leeway is not afforded to myself and other trans* scholars, who must define every. Single. Gender. Word. We. Use. Ever.
(3) Surprisingly, the edited volume had an advisory board. Unsurprisingly, none of the advisory board members listed were trans*.
This one should be a gimme. Like, really? You didn’t need to create an advisory board to create an edited volume (there is literally no explanation of what the advisory board did, which makes the list so odd), but if you did, why wouldn’t you want to have people of all genders? Oh right, I forgot – trans* erasure is why.
Lest I be critiqued for just dragging one edited volume, I also took a peek at Bank’s (2011) Gender & Higher Education. This text was marginally better…which is both (a) generous of me to say, and (b) accurate in many senses, because literally any mention of trans* people would be better from the complete and utter erasure of us in Harper and Harris III’s volume on “men and masculinities.” And when I say “marginally better,” what I mean is there were two pages where trans* student identity development were discussed specifically. Beyond that, the acronyms “LGBT,” LGBTQIA,” and “LGBTQ” were used to conflate gender and sexuality. This move is not only deeply problematic, but as Nicolazzo (2017) discussed in her text Trans* In College: Transgender Students’ Strategies for Navigating Campus Life and the Institutional Politics of Inclusion, it is also an example of compulsory heterogenderism, or the conflation and subsequent erasure of one’s trans* identity based on sexuality-based stereotypes.
In fact, in many of the places where “queerness” was discussed in both volumes, there may have seemed to be a glimmer of hope for an understanding of gender beyond a binary discourse. However, that “queerness” was connected to—and as a result conflated with—sexuality (most notably, one’s being gay), and thus, was just another example of heterogenderism.
Now, I have often been (correctly) accused of being quite the trans* killjoy. While I do adore being in the company of a lineage of similarly angry womxn, a collection of people led by our Queen Mother Killjoy Sara Ahmed, I am also wanting to offer a bit of critical hope here. Specifically, in Part Two of this post, I want to discuss and amplify the work of two cis scholars who do gender-based research and scholarship exceedingly right. I feel the desire to do this not to forward a “Not All Cis People” argument, because eff that noise. However, I do want to reflect on the fact that it really isn’t that hard, nor should it be seen as overly taxing, to do gender-expansive research, scholarship, and practice. Like, it really isn’t. And yet…so many people who do “gender” work just completely muck it up. And, in a moment when trans* erasure, violence, threat, harm, and antagonism is all the more real with each passing day, the last thing we need to do is promote this sort of bogus “gender” research in practice in any academic or social sphere.
