Tag: transgender

Our Students’ Vocations and the Gift of (Un)Gendered Language

This post emphasizes the importance of gender justice in higher education, particularly in language and pronoun use. It discusses the need for inclusive teaching methods that recognize diverse gender identities, while also critiquing traditional practices that may marginalize LGBTQIA+ students, including the compulsory sharing of pronouns. The author advocates for fostering supportive environments that promote vocational exploration for all students.

hands joined against progress pride flag
Photo by Lisett Kruusimäe on Pexels.com

Gender justice—both in and through language—is fundamental to my vocation. As an out queer faculty member, I center the power of language, narrative, and agency in my teaching and in my mentoring relationships. My courses span topics from French language to Francophone world cultures, and LGBTQIA+ literature to queer and feminist theories. Accordingly, gender and sexuality are embedded throughout them as forces that shape our day-to-day lives, the institutions we inhabit, and their linguistic norms. At the same time, my students and I grapple collectively with how we contribute to reinforcing or disrupting these concepts and how we might activate them to empower or to constrain.

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Teaching Trans Vocation

First and foremost, our trans students must experience our classrooms as hospitable spaces that integrate their entire selves, explicitly embracing their gender and sexual identities as meaningful sites of knowledge.

In the final chapter of Leslie Feinberg‘s 1993 novel, Stone Butch Blues, Jess Goldberg, the novel’s trans protagonist, attends a lesbian and gay political rally in New York City. As Jess listens to the speakers testify to the oppression they have experienced, she realizes, “This is what courage is. It’s not just living through the nightmare, it’s doing something with it afterward. It’s being brave enough to talk about it to other people. It’s trying to organize to change things.” This encounter sparks Jess’s queer calling, one that allows students who read the novel to see their gender and sexual identities as playing important roles in the discernment of their vocations.

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Our Call to Trans Flourishing

We must continue to transform our campuses and communities into more just and humane places so that our transgender students can flourish and lead magnanimous lives.

This past year saw a dehumanizing anti-LGBTQ+ legislative season in many states across the country, which has threatened our transgender students’ well-being and limited their vocational exploration. To support their vocational journeys, we as educators need be more fully responsive to the particular challenges that they face. As we accompany them, we must continue to transform our campuses and communities into more just and humane places so that our transgender students can flourish and lead magnanimous lives.

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