I am a white,
middle-aged, intersex trans man. I teach sociology at a large
Midwestern state university, and sociologically speaking, gender
transitioning here has been fascinating. It's a story of prejudice
and of privilege.
On a personal
level, it's been weird.
I'm the first
professor to have transitioned at my university, despite its huge
size; while locals think of the university and surrounding area as
very liberal, from a national perspective, they're quite socially
conservative. It's a land of racial segregation, and of LGBT+
closeting. Many of the tenured white gay cis male professors
I know here, for example, are not out at work, and communicate about
sexual orientation in coded phrases straight out of the 1950s. (Having
moved here from the San Francisco Bay area, the level of closeting is
eye-popping.) As far as I can tell through my social networks, two
people proceeded me in gender transitioning at my university, both
trans* women staff members who soon left. In any case, my
administration had little experience in dealing with gender
transitions, and none with the issues raised by an instructor doing
so, when I announced that I had begun the process.
My university has
no official policies and procedures for dealing with gender
transitioners, though it does formally include a ban on
discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression in its
antidiscimination clause. Since it's a huge institution, the lack of
policies made transition a bureaucratic nightmare. I could write a
long and very tedious post just about that, but suffice it to say
that as I enter the fifth year of my transition, I am still finding
my old female name being given out by yet another independent
university software system. And I still have in my files, where I
regularly now ignore it, a memo to all individuals with offices in my
building stating which single male bathroom I will use on campus, so that they can avoid it if they wish.
(This very awkward
memo was the only notice given by my university about my transition
to others, and I was expressly forbidden to send emails myself to
people outside my department to let people know. The
administration's reasoning was that if they let me announce my gender
transition and name change, they'd have to let every woman who got
married and changed her name to send a broadcast email, clogging up
40,000 mailboxes. When I pointed out the difference between getting
married and gender transitioning, that was considered “political,”
and sending political email on work computers a violation of state
law. Thus, years into transition, I still find myself on committees
with people I've worked with before who now have no idea who I am,
and I have to come out endlessly. It's just as socially awkward for
stammering others as it is for me.)
The physical
process of my early transition was made especially awkward because I
got to go through it in front of my large introductory-level class of
350 Midwestern students. Most of them were 18 or 19 and on the tail
ends of their own awkward adolescences, and few of them were
aware of ever knowing a trans* person in real life. I did
explain to them that I had changed my legal name and the gender on my
ID, that I was beginning my medical transition, and what pronouns to
use in referring to me (despite explicit instruction from
administration not to discuss my transition, because it was my
“personal” and “political” business that I should not
“impose” on students). I had to give students some way to
understand and address their instructor. But many students couldn't
process the information and didn't know what to make of me. In
hindsight, it's sort of amusing, but at the time. . . ugh. My very
androgynous body made students anxious, and they stood much farther
away from me when speaking to me after class than students had in
prior years. Every time my voice cracked, a little ripple or shudder
moved across the lecture hall. I often caught students
inappropriately staring at my chest or my groin, and both they and I
would flush when I caught them.
That semester my
student evaluations, while still generally positive, were much less
enthusiastically so than in the past—and most were very awkwardly
worded to avoid any use of pronouns (“The professor seemed to know
what the professor was talking about.”). Of the modest number of
students who did use pronouns in writing their evaluations, more used
female pronouns than male (and none used gender-neutral pronouns).
My gender—and students' discomfort with my physical androgyny—were
front and center in everyone's classroom experience, both mine and
that of the students.
But after a couple
of years on testosterone I had grown a solid beard, and people by and
large “read” me as male, including in my classes. The majority
of my students called me “he” without hesitating, and the
chest-and-groin-checking was much reduced. My student evaluations
rebounded into the quite-positive zone. And my personal experience
rebounded further yet. I found that I now received male privilege.
Before my transition, students had regularly commented on my
appearance, dress or hairstyle—now none of them did so, as men are
judged by their minds much more than their bodies. Students now see
me as more authoritative than in the past. Most defer to me more,
challenge me less, and some even find me intimidating (at my mighty
5'2”).
And it's not just
male privilege that I now experience, but that most celebrated form,
white male privilege. I have become The Man. And while this
means that some students of color in my very racially-segregated
setting, while still respectful of me, also react to me with greater
distrust than students of color displayed before my transition,
amidst the white majority I am treated as a person of dignity,
trustworthiness, competence, and esteem. This happens in the
classroom, in administrative meetings, and when I'm driving a car or
visiting a store. As I've only experienced this for a few years out
of my almost 50, it's glaringly obvious to me, and I'm amazed that my
fellow white men who are cis gender seem so often to feel disrespected
and put-upon. Small reductions in deference to white male power prey
on their minds, but believe me—our privilege is still very
substantial.
I have to note how
much easier it is to transition to male, and to do so as a white
person. My wife is an intersex gender transitioner like myself, and
I see every day how much more difficult it is to be a trans* woman.
Transphobia directed at trans* women is much more virulent, and is
compounded by misogyny. Androgyny in trans* women is treated with
much more negative social sanction than androgyny in trans* men.
Trans* women of color are routinely treated by others as if they were
sex workers, and subjected to extraordinary levels of discrimination,
abuse, and violence. So I enjoy not only privilege as a white man,
but in comparison to others in the trans* community.
I wanted to lay all
of this out before raising a problem I face, relating to a modest
number of students who now complain about my teaching. I want to
make it clear that I recognize how privileged I now am as a white
male tenured professor to be able to have such a job issue to worry about at all. Still, as a trans gender man, I have issues to worry about
that my cis counterparts do not.
I teach hundreds of
students every year, and every year a small number of them who are
not doing well in my classes, perhaps a dozen, complain about my
teaching. It's rarely my teaching style that they object to; they
usually complain about one of two content areas. One of these I
don't worry about: they object to my teaching about global climate
change in my social problems class. Students who complain about this
are usually cis white guys with right-leaning politics who argue that
I am teaching “pseudoscience” concocted in a leftist conspiracy.
Whatever. The empirical evidence for global climate change is great,
and I am sure the political motivations of this group of students'
objections would be clear to my administration if the students were
to file formal complaints.
The other group of
students' complaints I worry about regularly, however. These involve
students who object to what I teach about intersex and trans gender
issues (basically, that forcing cosmetic genital surgery on
unconsenting infants is a bad social policy, and that transphobia is
a form of bias akin to sexism, racism, and homophobia). Unlike those
who object to my teaching about climate change, these students are
usually (cis) women who take my gender class. Some are white women from rural areas of the
state; some are African American women from urban locations; many of
them explicitly self-identify themselves to me as Christian. They believe that sex
must be binary, and that “corrective” surgery for intersex
“disorders” in infancy is a medical imperative. Further, they
believe that binary genitals (constructed or present at birth) must
determine gender, and that a desire to gender transition is both a
mental illness and immoral.
From my
perspective, this group of complaining students is exactly like the
first group: they hold to an ideology that is political in nature and
in conflict with the literature in my field. As I point out at the
start of my classes, there are many different perspectives that can
be taken on any given issue—biological, psychological, religious,
political, etc.--but that they are taking a sociology class, and in
this class, are expected to learn and employ the sociological
position in assignments and exams. I have no desire to be the
thought police, and I tell them I support their right to use other
perspectives in other contexts. But it is my job as a professor to
teach them the subject matter they have signed up to learn. Most
students have no problem with this—but there are some who are very
resistant.
So, the two groups
of complaining students may be analogous in being resistant to
learning class content—but the students who object to the intersex
and trans gender components of my classes pose much more of a problem
for me.
One problem they
present for me is that they often persistently misgender me. Now, I
teach my Sociology of Sex and Gender course as an online summer
class. This means that students don't see me in front of them—instead I have a
virtual presence for them, constructed mostly via text. During the
first week of class, I do have students post pictures of themselves,
and I post one myself. And our first exercise requires students to
state their gender identity and list the pronoun they use—and
again, I do the same myself. Further, each student receives at least
four personal comments from me each week, and all are signed “Prof.
Costello.” So, my gender, pronoun, and the form of address I
expect are theoretically made clear to them. In the early days of my
transition, I was more likely to be addressed as a male in this
online setting, due to my clear masculine self-framing, than I was in
my in-person classes, where my physical androgyny outweighed my
self-presentation in students' minds. But now, the reverse is true.
Students in my in-person classes don't often misgender me. Every
summer, however, I have some students who persistently refer to me as
“she,” or the eye-rolling “Mrs. Costello”--something students
never called me before my transition. I correct them in a
matter-of-fact manner, first addressing whatever their substantive
point was in their post or email, but they often continue to
mispronoun me. Rather than helping to correct any peers who misgender
me in online discussions, other students often seem to become less
sure of the “realness” of my male status, and some become
uncomfortable, seeing me as “forcing my issue down other people's
throats” (an aggressively Freudian description one student gave me
in an email intended to be sympathetic). This happens despite my
constant efforts to be polite to people who refuse to recognize my gender identity and legal sex that trans* friends see as going well
above and beyond the call of professional duty. The persistent
misgendering makes me feel dysphoric, and the class atmosphere less
comfortable for all.
In my class on sex
and gender, I assign one exercise about intersex issues, and one with
an optional trans gender focus. It's in this context where I most
often encounter active student resistance to course content, though
it does arise elsewhere. Now, to be clear, the way I grade all
course exercises is according to the quality of the essays submitted.
Students are expected to cite course readings or lecture points in
analyzing a hypothetical situation. So long as they do that, and
write a coherent essay, their conclusions can be whatever they like.
For example, this summer a student wrote her essay on the abortion
unit of the course about how she believed doctors should universally screen fetuses for
intersex conditions and abort those found to have them. I personally
strongly disagree, but so long as the student cited course materials
sensibly and wrote a cogent analysis, she'd receive full credit. I
don't let the fact that I perceive writing such an essay to a
professor whose intersex birth status was clearly revealed earlier as
microaggressive impact my grading. But if students fail to try to
engage in any way with the course materials, and simply assert their
opinions, citing no class readings (or sometimes citing instead their
Christian status, which is no more a source of sociological authority
than is my being Jewish), then they do quite poorly on an exercise.
The
problem is that such students often perceive their poor grade as due
to my “pushing an agenda.” More: they frame me as an abuser.
They often present themselves as trying to protect innocent children
from sexual radicals who seek to damage them. Complex and inchoate
ideas often come up relating to permissive versus authoritarian
parenting, or eugenic ideology (from white students), or the
imposition of purportedly white preoccupations onto struggling
African American families (from Black students), or about the decline
of American civilization. But central to most student complaints
about poor grades on intersex and trans* exercises is the framing of
me as lacking any authority to teach on these matters, because I am
“biased.”
The
idea that only the privileged have the right to speak about the
marginalized because the privileged are objective and the
marginalized are not has been critiqued by many. Before my
transition, cis male students in my gender class often complained that as
“a woman,” I was biased while they were not, and that the statistics I cited were not credible. I didn't worry
about this at the time, because if any of them ever made a formal
complaint to the administration, I expected the administration to be
suspicious of such a claim. (It turned out I was probably wrong. I
almost didn't get tenure because an outside reviewer claimed that my
research on race/class/gender in the professions was a mere voicing
of personal bias against white men. He bolstered this claim by
attacking my very large qualitative research project (almost 100
in-depth interviews plus 18 months of participant observation) as not
meeting the significance standard for a quantitative study, which was
just silly, but it gave his critique the veneer of “objectivity”
that led my tenure case to be voted down. I did finally get tenure
on appeal, after a long and exhausting battle, but it was a very
close thing.)
Now,
my university, like most, is generally staffed by people who believe
that gender discrimination is a bad thing, not to be tolerated. Even
so, male professors earn more than female ones, are more likely to
get tenure, and are less likely to be accused of bias in their work.
But what about trans*
gender discrimination? While my university does have a formal policy
banning discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression,
in my experience, many of the faculty, students and staff are
uncomfortable with gender transition and hold private or public
cissexist views. And so I am rationally worried about what would
happen if one of my students who do poorly on a trans* or intersex
assignment in my class were to take their complaints beyond exchanges
with me and up the administrative hierarchy. Supposedly I have job
security in the form of tenure, meant to protect professors' ability
to teach and engage in research with full academic freedom. But
tenure is not “forever” if a professor commits an offense, such
as criminal activity, dereliction of duty—or harassment. And I
have no doubt that students who persistently misgender me and who
refuse to engage in course materials dealing with intersex and trans*
materials feel that I am “harassing” them, rather than vice
versa. And remember, some frame me as advocating child abuse, which
is a criminal offense. One of my recent students who watched an
optional video link I posted to a mainstream TV news story about a
young trans* girl wrote a post accusing me and the media of assisting
the girl's parents in “abusing” her by “allowing” a “confused
boy” to wear dresses. And while contemporary social science literature
supports the recognition of trans gender identification in children,
it's plausible that there are administrators at my university who
share my complaining student's perspective: that I am pushing a disturbing agenda and harassing students who fail to parrot it back at me.
Given
that I was explicitly instructed by administrators not to use my
teaching podium as a soapbox for advocating my “personal agenda,” I
worry that including segments on trans* and intersex issues in my
courses on gender, sexuality, and on social problems might somehow be
framed as a breach of duty on my part. But to avoid teaching on
these topics where they are obviously relevant is something I see as
the real breach of pedagogical duty. Should I as a Jew not be able
to address religion in my courses, because as a religious minority I
am not “objective”? Should my colleagues who are people of
color not be able to teach about race in their classes? Taken to its
logical extreme, are the only suitable sociology professors cis,
straight, white, middle-aged, middle-class, Christian men without
disabilities? (Of course, the opposite is in fact true: a person who
has experienced something has a better understanding of what is involved than
someone who has no such first-hand experience. You won't find me
taking a SCUBA diving class from someone with only academic
book-knowledge of diving. . .)
Many,
many instructors have faced this issue of being members of a
marginalized group and being accused of bias when teaching about that
group. As a white man, I enjoy a privilege many of these instructors
have not enjoyed, that of being presumed competent as a professor by
virtue of my race and gender. At the same time, privilege is always
context-dependent. As an intersex trans* person, I'm a member of a
small minority that is currently considered quite
outré
, in the
Midwestern city where I live.
And
thus, in teaching on the topics on which I have the greatest
expertise, I always feel at risk, my job security subject to
challenge from people who refuse even to do class readings. And
that. . . is sad.
