Teaching Trans Students, Teaching Trans Studies

As trans studies becomes more deeply institutionalized as a field and trans visibility spikes in popular culture, more students come into our women's and gender studies (WGS) classrooms identifying as trans, genderqueer, or nonbinary, and they hope that our classrooms will be responsive to their experiences. At minimum, this requires that WGS instructors inquire about students' preferred names and pronouns and then use them properly (Spade, "Some Very Basic Tips"; Wentling). More broadly, trans students are also hoping to see themselves represented in course content, yet previous studies of the inclusion of trans material in WGS courses found trans-inclusion to be patchy at best, as I describe more fully below.

In part, WGS as a field seems to have positioned trans studies as a trendy new topic or subfield within feminist and queer scholarship. For example, there have been numerous ads for tenure-track jobs in WGS in the last two years that have included "trans or disability studies" among the specializations sought, pairing these fields as if they're interchangeable options for increasing the diversity of WGS curricular offerings. Instead of thinking of trans studies as a subset of feminist theory, I suggest that we instead think of trans, feminist, and queer studies as three angles of vision on a similar set of problems of gender and sexuality. There are significant overlaps in what we can see from each approach, yet each approach also illuminates something the others aren't able to see. Though each body of literature operates through a unique theoretical framework, their overlaps necessitate that they all be woven together throughout the WGS curriculum.

Additionally, conversations with some colleagues have left me with the impression that trans students and trans material are perceived to be taking up too much space in the WGS classroom and curriculum, displacing the needs of cis women students. Though I don't want to dismiss an intersectional critique of young trans men (and butches, for that matter) enacting male or masculine privilege in the WGS classroom, we also need to be attentive to the larger context of how trans students come into our classes. They bring an intensity to our classes because there aren't a lot of other spaces in their lives where they feel respected and understood. And, as I detail below, many of the frustrations WGS instructors are experiencing with queer and trans students can be understood with the help of theories that apply to undergraduate pedagogy across the curriculum. In other words, our queer and trans students are exhibiting similar resistance as our most normative students; they're just expressing it through different language.

Though trans students have many of the same problems grappling with material as do other students—an attachment to liberal individualism, ahistorical use of terms, a frequent lack of awareness of the limits of their own experience—my conversations with colleagues have left me with the impression that WGS instructors are, in some cases, more likely to project their reservations about trans identity more broadly onto trans students' expressions of these issues. In other words, cis feminist students attached to liberal individualism and lacking historical analysis are more likely to be seen as simply naïve and educable; they're allowed to make claims about their bodies and identities that WGS instructors interpret as the idiosyncrasies of individual experience.¹ Trans students' claims about their bodies and identities, however, are more likely to be interpreted as claims about gender in ways that mirror how trans identity and trans studies are thought by some to be eroding the foundations of WGS scholarship and teaching (namely, a focus on women). The examples I offer highlight the similarities between trans and cis students' needs in WGS classes.

My discussion of this subject draws upon many layers of experience. The foundation of my thinking comes from conversations and observations over three years of applying for WGS tenure-track jobs as well as my experiences as a trans guy teaching WGS courses at three different universities. This includes many sections of Introduction to WGS, three semesters of introductory LGBT History, two semesters of...