A transformative education for my trans students and me
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If you teach college students for a long time (I’ve been at it for more than 40 years at more than one institution), you get to see young people go through powerful changes. After all, most are leaving their teenage years behind and moving toward adulthood. For many, that means they are learning to think for themselves in the company of their peers and opening themselves to people and experiences they probably hadn’t even considered in high school. My wife, also a college professor, reminds me about her religious students from the South reading French existentialism for the first time. How will I talk to my parents about this, they asked her. Many of my students have asked me to speak directly to their parents about the philosophy they’ve been reading or the history they’ve been learning. It’s a lot for a young person; it’s supposed to be.
Some students go through profound changes in personal identity. They come to see themselves anew, and in a few instances that means they come to see themselves as belonging to a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth. I’ve enjoyed having these students in class. It’s exciting to teach someone who is really going through what we in higher ed often say (in a broader sense) we want for our students: a transformative experience.
As a trans person, I have avoided writing about sports because it only distracts from infinitely larger issues, such as access to healthcare, bodily autonomy and equal protection.
Some years ago, a young trans man asked if I’d do a tutorial with him on representations of trans people in popular culture. As a straight white guy of a certain age, I didn’t think I was the best choice for this, but I do teach in film studies and philosophy, and we decided to explore this topic together.
B. (not using full names here) and I would meet each week to talk about a film, a television show, a play. I wanted to look at older things, and he was eager to talk about the present. We compromised, and it was a productive class for both of us. Together we learned about different ways of making sense of identity and transformation.
I have to admit that at first I was afraid of saying the wrong thing, of inadvertently offending my student. He laughed at my worry and made clear he was still figuring things out, too. What does it mean to insist that one has always felt in the wrong body, and how did that compare with someone who quite suddenly found that they were able to have a new identity? What remained of the “same person” after the transformation, we asked ourselves. Was it ever complete? How would one know? These are canonical issues in philosophy, and we applied them to new areas.
Terms like “social transition” give parents inaccurate ideas that queer kids are being lured onto an irreversible pathway toward medical intervention.
That tutorial led us and some of my other students to think about how one publicly “performs” one’s identity. How much of one’s conception of self is produced by how others receive us, or refuse to receive us? Our discussions of recognition and acknowledgment were sometimes very serious, but at other times, quite funny. We talked about drag and burlesque, especially in the ways that excess could be liberating. The makeup would eventually come off, but one learned a lot when one had it on. Unpacking B.’s interpretations wasn’t like the usual discussions of nature, convention and authenticity in traditional political theory, and I was grateful for the new perspective.
I was grateful, too, when another student, E., screwed up their courage and offered a “trans reading” of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” a text I’ve taught often in Great Books courses. After hesitantly raising their hand, E. spoke of how the creature’s hybridity, its uncanny resistance to being put into any category, resonated with the experience of many trans people. They added that rejection by Dr. Frankenstein, the father figure, and the feeling of being an outcast from society, a figure of danger, was all too familiar to them. The class, at first surprised by this intervention, went on to build upon it — and acknowledged E.’s courage.
C., one of my students from years ago, seemed to take my course called “Virtue and Vice” under duress. From the get-go they were critical of the syllabus, especially my emphasis on major texts in the Western tradition: Aristotle and Aquinas, Machiavelli and Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and Austen. But C. kept finding themes that spoke to their own struggles toward eudaemonia, to use Aristotle’s term for flourishing. C. was intent on being radically queer, as they might have said, but that did not, we both came to see, obviate the need to cultivate character traits — virtues — that would allow them to thrive. I’m not sure I convinced C. to share my love for the Western canon, but they did come to see that these texts were richly responsive to their probing questions.
American law has been shaped by a long history of bias against gender nonconformity. Understanding this legal history can help us in the fight for trans equality.
My trans students have made me think hard about transformation and identity, about nature and convention, about character and performance.
When I consider how beleaguered my trans students, colleagues and friends are now that the White House is demonizing them, exposing them to hate and prejudice, I reflect back on the words of former Atty Gen. Loretta Lynch: “But no matter how isolated or scared you may feel today,” she declared in 2016, announcing a Justice Department action on behalf of trans rights, “[we want] you to know that we see you; we stand with you; and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.”
I first heard those words sitting next to my colleague, friend Jenny Boylan, a tear rolling down her cheek. Simple words of compassion from a government official to a vulnerable population, including Jenny. That seems so distant now. That government-level recognition and reassurance were so important then. It’s even more important that we stand with trans people today.
Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, is the author of “Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses” and “The Student: A Short History.”
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