Abstract
Miller opens the book with a personal narrative about the impact that a lack of recognition can have on a trans* child both at home and in school. This moving portrait sets the tone for the book about the importance of teaching affirming, and recognizing trans* and creative youth in pre-K-12th grade. Miller suggests that school curriculum produces a trans* erasure which often forces trans* and creative youth to tolerate microaggressions because of this illegibility. This recognition gap, Miller argues, can shift as teacher educators, pre-, and in-service teachers take up a theory and pedagogy of trans*ness through lessons across all academic and disciplinary contexts. Miller provides an overview of the chapters that attend to this gap through research studies and lesson plans.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
-W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)
I do not want to explain myself to others over and over again. I just want to be seen.
-sj
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Notes
- 1.
I refer to trans* a prefix or adjective used as an abbreviation of transgender, derived from the Greek word meaning “across from” or “on the other side of.” Many consider trans* to be an inclusive and useful umbrella term. Trans (without the asterisk) is most often applied to trans men and trans women, and the asterisk is used more broadly to refer to all non-cisgender gender identities, such as (a)gender, cross-dresser, bigender, genderfluid, gender**k, genderless, genderqueer, non-binary, non-gender, third gender, trans man, trans woman, transgender, transsexual and two-spirit.
- 2.
Expressing gender in a way that demonstrates individual freedom of expression and that does not conform to any gender.
- 3.
I refer to (a)gender as a rejection of gender as a biological or social construct altogether and refusing to identify with gender. The lower case (a) in parenthesis does not nullify gender, it is a way of combining the terms so both gender refusal and gender are collapsed into one word.
- 4.
While the acronym as cited originally in Miller 2015 drew from the conventional use of transgender without the asterisk, from here on out it is replaced with trans* and thereby reflected as such in the acronym LGBT*IAGCQ.
- 5.
This work focuses only on (a)gender, for a discussion of both (a)gender and (a)sexuality self-determination and justice, see original printing, Miller (2015).
- 6.
Flexi-sustainable means models of lessons with affordances that broker spaces for emerging identities that students may proleptically embody. It also means that the sustainability is in process because these models are new and the results are indeterminate.
- 7.
The removal of the ovaries which means the body no longer produces estrogen.
- 8.
The process of cutting the outer labia and fissuring it around the clitoris in order to create a neo-phallus.
- 9.
The process of creating a scrotum by implanting testicles from the outer labia.
- 10.
An incision made in order to reposition the surgically created phallus.
- 11.
While not all trans* people have surgeries or take T, as there is no single trans* story, it was important for me. Trans* people are on a spectrum of identities just as are cisgender people.
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Miller, s. (2016). Introduction: The Role of Recognition. In: Miller, s. (eds) Teaching, Affirming, and Recognizing Trans and Gender Creative Youth. Queer Studies and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56766-6_1
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