The First Time I Died: A Transgender Girl's Lessons in Death

"End? No, the journey doesn't end here."

J.R.R. Tolkien

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I was around three the first time I died. Fortunately, I was witty enough to think my way out of it before it was time for my parents to pick me up from Pre-School. Despite being raised Roman Catholic, I was enrolled in a Protestant Evangelical Pre-School, called "Sunshine." It was there I learned some things about singing, napping, climbing up stairs, and even got my first kiss. The girl had pulled me aside while we were make-believing in the kitchen play set and surprised me with a small peck. I think I spilled my imaginary cup of tea all over the freshly vacuumed carpet. I remember being confused but not upset. I did get confused and upset when I got in trouble for it. The surprise and the adult response was another lesson I received at this Pre-School: openly trusting what people do or say can lead to confusing problems, especially when I have thoughts to the otherwise.

Another confusing problem occurred to me when I was driving home from Pre-School down Park Street, under the canopy of old trees that seemed to be a staple of my hometown, and we were about to cross the tracks to the north side of town. "I don't want Jesus in my heart," I told my mom. She asked me to explain why I say that. "Because I think that would give me a heart attack or something." She laughed. She was confused and asked me to explain. But I was confused too. "The school told me that to be a good person, I need to invite Jesus into my heart," I reported. "But even if he could fit in all those tubes and things, I don't think my blood could get through with a man in my heart." My imagination flashed with all the damage a tiny human could do trying to make a home, sleeping, working, and trying to prepare meals inside a kid's cardiovascular system. I asked her if that meant I was a bad person, because I didn't want a miniature Jesus to give me cardiac arrest. She told me I was a good kid and a bright kid. Then she told me that I could be friends with Jesus even if he didn't live in my heart. I thought that was a sensible compromise.

The sense of doubt in the adults of my Pre-School came in handy when it came time for me to die. They had arranged a trip for us to tour the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center. The first half of the trip was okay. I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and watched a video about Humpty Dumpty. Humpty Dumpty was an egg who fell off a wall and broke but he was able to be put back together. I wasn't a huge fan of the film but then again I tend to not appreciate C-rated horror films as this seemed to me to be. After this, the Pre-School teachers broke us up into groups. About five or seven at a time, we would walk through a door into a dark room. As far as I could see, no one was coming out again after they entered. Then it was my group's turn. Our teacher walked us through the door which shut behind us. I could feel the walls which were covered in some sort of dark carpet but otherwise the room was totally dark and quiet. Then our teacher told us, "you are dead. You have died." I immediately began to panic. Death hadn't hurt but I was very sad to not see my mom or my dogs or my siblings or my dad or my house again. I didn't know anyone who had died and so I felt very alone, despite being dead with a bunch of other three and four year olds.

I stood grieving my own death for about a minute before a door on the other side of the room opened, revealing a brightly lit chamber. Walking through the dark hallway into the light, I was surrounded by a bunch of other dead kids, all standing in a high room painted with bright blue sky and clouds. There was a railing, presumably to keep us from falling back to earth. I wanted to see if I could see Wheaton and maybe my home below us, so I went over to the railing. Looking down, I saw a mirror reflecting my face back at me. Scanning along the other side of the railing, I took in the effect of the mirrors reflecting the lights and the sky to make it seem as though they went on forever. At this point, I deduced that I probably was not dead. 

I think I began to cry. My teacher tried to comfort me by saying something about how we are in heaven, pointing to all the walls and lights. I did not have the presence of mind to tell her how this was a pretty boring looking heaven. I was too busy crying and holding my arms across my body. She then told me that I really wasn't dead, it was just a museum. I wanted to tell her that I had figured that out on my own and that I wasn't crying because I thought I was dead (that experience had mostly come with a sense of guilt at abandoning my family) but rather because of how enraged I was that I had been lied to again. As in the case of the the girl who kissed me while we were playing in the toy kitchen, make-believe is fine and good but you should explain the game to the people you're playing with before you start or make significant changes. I wasn't ready to be some girl's wife, girlfriend, or whatever she thought I was in her imagination. Likewise, while these adults were eager to get Jesus into my heart or get me into Jesus's sky palace, I wish the Jesus they were presenting to me was less eager to see me dead. That said, as the Humpty Dumpty film had already warned me, these adults seemed to like horror films way more than I do. All I wanted was to vacuum the rug, make some imaginary tea and take a nap without being assaulted or killed by my playmates. Is that so hard?

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New Publication: Reconstructing the Pardoner: Transgender Skin Operations in Fragment VI

"Full of still stinging cuts and telling scars, narratives of transgender skin operations testify to the countless lives physically and socially made through the artifice of sharp-machines which continually make and unmake supposedly natural states."

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Transliterature was recently featured in Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer edited by Nicole Nyffenegger and Katrin Rupp with the chapter, "Reconstructing the Pardoner: Transgender Skin Operations in Fragment VI." While published later than other articles and book chapters, this chapter is actually the first finished piece of peer-reviewed work I produced. The book experienced unexpected delays of a couple years that are nonetheless understandable by anyone familiar with the travails of academic publishing. That said, it is great to see the piece finally in print!

The abstract:

This chapter reclaims the Pardoner as a critically trans figure in the Middle Ages through an analysis of the discursive and historical reconstructions of skin. Given how narratives of transition and the politics of surgery become written on the skin of countless transgender lives across time, a trans literary approach to Fragment VI of the Canterbury Tales cannot ignore that the Pardoner’s presence and story arises in response to the Physician’s tale of medical authority and the nature of gender. Putting the medieval praxis of castration in dialog with Judith Butler’s theorizing of the ‘sharp-machines’ that construct culturally intelligible trans bodies, this study looks at how the narratives of Fragment VI fashion skin as a natural signifier of gender in the “Physician’s Tale” and as a mark of unnatural reconstruction in the “Pardoner’s Prologue.” Indeed, the deployment of the Pardoner’s body, relics, and voice speak back with tenants of what might be called medieval trans feminism against the subjugation of non-cisgender men and the devaluation of surgically altered bodies throughout Fragment VI. A critical outcome of such a reconsideration of Geoffrey Chaucer’s sexually complex figure is that while we may never know definitively what is between the pilgrim’s legs – as with many transgender persons – nonetheless, based on the physical and social operation of gender he embodies, the Pardoner evidently stands at the crossroads of medieval trans discourse.

The book Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer is available now for purchase!

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Transgender in the Modern Military: A Lesson in Class and Culture

"The financial cost of transition-related care, in short, is too low to matter."

Aaron Belkin
Caring for Our Transgender Troops

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Framing the Lesson

• Patriotism: x2 Higher Enrollment than % of Cisgender Population
• Veterans: Significant Number of Post-Military Transitions
• Legacy: Long History of Trans Service Persons

Debates around transgender in the military may arise from and may arouse forth a wide range of tangential discussions in a host of classrooms; on medicine, the military, law, government, and politics; on classism, sexism, homophobia, and disability. As an activist and consultant, I see how these conversations have direct effects on the present and future of thousands of transgender persons in the armed forces and countless people affected by the related politics. As a scholar of cultural studies, I see how this issue is inextricably tied to wider norms and problems related to gender, sexuality, class, race, religion, geography, and embodiment. As a historian, especially as a medievalist, I see how this issue is both very much of the present moment, and also very much a part of ancient history. As a public writer, a scholar, and a teacher I want to frame lessons in response to explicit and implicit claims against transgender service people.

Before I do, however, I want to acknowledge that transgender people's relation and participation to the military does not merely exist as a way to spite transphobic complaints. One could and should be able to have a rich, complicated, and historical day (or semester) discussing transgender people in the military without giving transphobes more than a footnote. It might be hard to avoid the draw to address major transphobes, especially those commanders-in-chief, but such trans-positive conversations are possible and important. Reports show that transgender people enroll in the military at twice (x2) the rate of cisgender people. These numbers increase exponentially when they consider all the transgender people who have transitioned after leaving the military. Transgender people currently and historically have a complicated and long relationship to institutions of warfares and service to the nation. Indeed, once one considers the many historical and fictional gender non-conforming and gender variant persons that appear in texts from Disney and Lord of the Rings to Joan of Arc's interrogation, there is material enough to fuel many lessons without directly needing to address the myths and misinformation of transphobes.

Yet teaching often occurs at bleeding edges. And these bleeding edges are often also growing edges. I tell my students that I conservatively spend 60% of my time reading the arguments of people who hate me and my communities; against the remaining time which I get to spend reading about the wonderful things that we actually do and are. In reality that percentage is probably a lot higher. Because lessons are about the information that others need to receive and not about the information I want give, this practice of leaning into the hate is often the most effective at bringing the haters closer to embracing me and my communities. Following that policy, I have thrown together some notes that may be useful for a wide range of audiences on the critiques of cost and class, culture and history in the web of transgender in the military. The goal is to be accessible and adaptable for various readers or teachers. An advanced series of lessons might be given using critical theory, expansive histories, and memoirs that further fill out and complicate these conversations. Indeed, my own scholarship leans into the particular significant nuances of medieval stories, particular those tied to Joan of Arc and Roman de Silence, that are critically important to current transgender studies on issues of military service, nationalism, sexual embodiment, history, and faith. That is where I am going but I do not want to go there alone. Joan of Arc leads by example in showing us that we do not turn the tide of a war on the battle grounds of culture, history, and government in solitude, nor by merely working with those who agree with us, but by working, fighting, and sacrificing alongside those who do not yet understand or approve. The culture and history of transgender in the military time and again teaches many lessons, among them the willingness to serve, defend, and support those who otherwise would not share a church, a nation, or a classroom. Such a willingness may very well better us in our capacities as activists, scholars, and teachers; as it may then affect even more of us in our capacities as citizens and voters.

Example Discussion Questions:

• How does the higher than average number of transgender persons serving in the armed forces compare or contrast with public conceptions of the political alignments of trans populations? What are a few of the social, economic, and historical factors that may contribute to the U.S. military being one of the largest employers of trans persons nationwide?

• How does transitioning after a military career potentially affect relationships between veterans and other service persons? What are a few social, legal, and personal factors that may lead to this historic trend of waiting until after retirement to transition?

• How does the long history of trans persons represented in armed forces (going back to medieval literature and history) widen the conversation about transgender military beyond the immediate concerns of federal bans, American policy, or contemporary politics? What are factors about military service that might be similar and different for trans service persons in the distant past?

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A Lecture on Classism

Responses to Stated Critiques

• Costs: Extraordinary Expenses vs. Low Costs Relative to Overall and Gender-Specific Healthcare Budget Totals
• Cohesion: Prejudice vs. Testimonies on Troop Camaraderie
• Competency: Mental Illness vs. Excellent Records of Service

Costs: The stated critiques around transgender people serving openly in the military open hinge arounds the cost of transition related healthcare. Such critiques tend to claim either concern for ballooning the military budget in general or a personal repulsion at tax money going to help transgender people transition. The former claim is addressed in the critical literature and interviews suggested, where dedicated studies as well as direct professional experience demonstrates that transgender healthcare represents a tiny fraction around (2-4 million) out of the massive healthcare costs of the military (around 50 billion), which is all the more diminutive in relation to the overall military budget (around 600 billion). This is in part related to the relatively small number of transgender service persons and that a great number of these service persons will not elect to undergo surgical procedures which make up the majority of the projected expenses. Furthermore, placing the amount spent on transgender healthcare in comparison to other gender specific expenses (such as the much larger amount spent on erectile disfunction treatment like Viagra) likewise puts these costs in context. In regards to the latter personal concern, the literature likewise addresses how the military covers ordinary and extra-ordinary healthcare costs for all of its service people that is particular to their needs. This includes eye-glasses for those with vision related issues and Viagra for those with erection related issues. For transgender persons, transition related healthcare is deemed necessary and normal by the medical community.

Cohesion: Another area in which the public political concern focuses is on concerns about troop cohesion and culture. The thesis essentially boils down to the projection, "if I, a 'normal' American would have issues working with transgender persons... theoretically ... then the military MUST have issues as well." Based on the reports generated by military leadership, there is no cohesion problem. In this respect, the military seems to know what it can and cannot handle - in respects to troop cohesion - better than the transphobic public; in no small part because of the intentionality given in recent decades to the integration of women, people of color, and LGB service people. This does not mean that every military unit will have a culture that is explicitly pro-LGBTQI politics. What this does mean is that as far as the leadership and independent research has seen, members of the military being LGB or T (transgender) in no way interferes with troop cohesion or effectiveness. In comparison, the military may still be a hard place to be a woman, however being a woman is no longer considered a reason to exclude someone from military service. Addressing this concern, the interviews with current and former transgender military service peoples (as well as their comrades) helps to humanize and contextualize the cohesion already occurring within the armed forces.

Competency: A less popular claim among professional politicians but a more popular claim among the uneducated public is that transgender people are mentally ill and therefore not able-bodied enough to serve. In this respect, not only are the military specific studies helpful but the wide array of medical and legal literature going back for many years that affirm that being transgender is not a mental illness. What educated and specialized experts can explain is that transgender people require gender specific healthcare much in the way other men, women, and intersex people require particular forms of healthcare. The fact that menstruation related healthcare may be needed by some women and not by most men does not make them disordered. The medical community regards transgender persons as part of the natural, normal, and healthy gender diversity of the human species. Some transgender persons may experience gender dysphoria but this can be readily managed by decreasing prejudice against transgender persons and increasing transition related care. Once again, these specific needs for some trans service persons is not considered extra-ordinary nor in any way inhibits their ability to serve. In fact, what medical studies have shown is that transgender troops are healthier and more effective at their jobs when allowed to serve openly as well as receiving the full range of transgender related health care. Once again, interviews with specific service people also demonstrate the many extraordinary accomplishments and success of transgender persons in the military. This replaces the image of transgender persons as disordered with images of trans persons as strong, efficient, and productive members of the armed services.

Example Discussion Questions

• What is the role and responsibility of the military to provide limited or full healthcare to armed service people? Does gender specific healthcare (men, women, trans people, etc.) complicate these responsibilities or not? How should the military respond to partisan political complaints from the public that does not approve of trans healthcare on pro-religious rather pro-military grounds?

• How might a person coming out as transgender improve rather than hinder troop cohesion? How does "bringing all parts of yourself" to military service improve rather than hinder a trans person's capacity to serve? What are non-military or non-transgender comparisons we might draw to similar conflicts around integration?

• How might a transgender service person be trans but not experience dysphoria? How might anti-trans prejudice or transgender bans increase dysphoria? What are the qualities of dysphoria and does it in any way inhibit the performance of duties? How do debates around transgender and mental illness bring latent and overt ableism in the military to the forefront?

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A Discussion of Culture

Responses to Unstated Critiques

• Sexism: Military as Masculine Space vs. History of Women Service People
• Homophobia: Military as Hetero Space vs. History of Queer Service People
• Ableism: Military as Able-bodied vs. History of Extraordinary Health Needs

Sexism: the attacks leveled against transgender service people are in many respects extensions of wars that have been waged against women, queers, crips, people of color, and the poor for decades onto centuries. Approached from a wide-screen historical timeline, transgender exclusion and inclusion in the military may be seen as another wave of the old debate of whether non-men could and should be allowed to serve. In these old assumptions, men were supposed to be cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, white and educated (at the level of command and prestige) or usually, mostly, white and poor (at the level of the commanded). Thus the question of transgender inclusion meets with implicit biases that the military is a place for "real men," meaning cis men. But this tradition of manhood has already been under revision as the complaint that gay men are not "real men" is proven wrong. Likewise, cisgender heterosexual women were and are met with the demand that they can be "just one of the guys" as they fight for the right to fight alongside the "real men." In this vein, the Disney musical Mulan, specifically the song, "Be a Man," gets at a cultural assumption about the military and manhood which is suspicious of other genders, including other ways in which one can "be a man." Consider the line, "you are unfit for the rage of war, pack up, go home, you are through, how could I make a man out of you?" Such a lyric rings heavy in the ears of trans service persons today, just as it rings for the great many queer service people dishonorably discharged from the military on account of their sexuality, as it rings for the centuries of women who could and did fight alongside men in war without recognition. The story of Mulan serving in the military at once represents trans men and women, queers with unspeakable truths and desires, and women doing the work without being able to stand up and claim the credit for fear of being told, "pack up, go home, you are through."

Heterosexism: an excessive amount of critique, attention, and ridicule is leveled at transgender persons through sexually loaded rhetoric. As a scholar but also a reader and target of much anti-transgender argumentation, it is not lost on me how much of the language, terminology, images, and metaphors used by transphobic people are drawn directly from pornography. The term "she-male" is a clear example because a simple Google search with demonstrate that the word is almost exclusively used in porn and only secondarily used in transphobic rants. Other terms such as "tranny" or "trap" likewise drawn from heterosexual anxiety around the intentional sexual engagement with trans sex workers or the fear of unaware sexual engagement with trans persons. Yet even the fascination with trans people's genitals in arguments about what makes a "real man" or "real woman" demonstrates how much of "realness" and "manhood/womanhood" is grounded for many heterosexuals in their sexuality. By this logic, being a man means penetrating women with a penis (as opposed to women-with-penises). As stated above, this not only reduces what it means to "be a man" to a sexual act which is otherwise tangential and irrelevant to military service but an act that is specifically heterosexual. Thus one can understand the exclusion of transgender people from the military as homophobia in another form. This is not surprising, as even within the queer community, extremely femme gay men and extremely butch lesbian women (a certain amount of whom later came out as transgender) were repeatedly hidden or excluded as representing the least socially acceptable version of queerness. The narrative that helped lead to open service in the military for gay men and lesbians was presenting cis queer men and women in ways that contradicted the public image of them as sparkly fairies in drag and the butch leather dykes. One sees even in the "positive" images of transgender persons being represented in the media (in an effort to gain social acceptance) a repetition of the formula, trying to show extraordinarily normative and binary trans men and women as otherwise indistinguishable from the very same cisgender heterosexual men and women that gay men and lesbian women were compared to years prior.

Ableism: across the board, one of the worst things a soldier can be called (insofar as it will exclude them from remaining a soldier) is not simply to be called "not a man," but to be not an "able-bodied" man. All service people in the military (even office clerks) are supposed to be able-bodied combatants that could lift a weapon and fight if the occasion arises. Thus, the exclusion of trans people, women, and queers can be understood as extending from the primary claim that they are not as able-bodied as cisgender, heterosexual men. The line "unfit for the rage of war" is itself an invocation of disability, as the lack of ability or fitness for war. Claims and misinformation that transgender people are innately mentally ill are then also claims that they are unfit for military service. These claims are both the easiest to disprove (for audiences that accept years of medical science and evaluation) and also some of the most problematic to answer without conceding disability in the military as essentially undesirable and unfit. If addressed head-on, this tension can be unpacked to show the complicated network of military duties actually and potentially expected of someone in the armed forces. A wheel-chair may make it hard to move from dug-out to dug-out but may not be a problem for someone driving a tank; unless the tank needs to be abandoned; unless... the list of potential possibilities for service and for an inability to serve multiply with every "what if?" What such evaluations show is that a transgender person is effectively able-bodied in regards to all the same grounds as a cisgender person with all the same capacities. What is also shown is the tangled web of expectation and contingency that defines all the ways a person may be considered able or unable to serve in different circumstances. Inevitably and necessarily, this will also address the ways in which the wages of war produce disabled bodies - literally bodies that have been affected by violence so as to be made disabled. Among the most prominent forms of being disabled by the military is mental illness, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The irony then is that the military produces bodies (including minds) that it otherwise would not include if those conditions were derived before and outside military service. 

Example Discussion Questions:

• Are debates about transgender service in the military separate from other debates around cis women and queer women? In what ways is this a continuation of previous feminist movements and in what ways does it introduce particular concerns? How do you respond to claims that gender segregation should be preserved for biological, reproductive, or traditional reasons?

• How might anti-transgender sentiment be misplaced or misunderstood homophobia? Is the anger against trans service persons vengeance for allowing LGB persons to serve or is this a completely different phenomenon of hate? How might LGB persons be adding fuel to the transphobia?

• Should transgender service people completely disassociate themselves from disability identity in order to serve? Should trans service people maintain this association in order to advocate for people with disabilities being allowed to serve? How are advancements in technology and warfare changing what it means to be a soldier in ways that contrast with the demands for bodily capacity during previous trench wars? How inclusive and accessible should the military be? How might being more accessible provide surprising benefits to force effectiveness?

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Recommended Readings

Critical Studies - Regarding Lifting the Original Ban

• A. Belkin, New England Journal of Medicine, “Caring for Our Trans Troops” (2015)
• Schaefer, Iyengar, Kadiyala, Kavanagh, Engel, Williams, and Kress, RAND Corporation, "Assessing the Implications of Allowing Transgender Personnel to Serve Openly" (2016)

Interviews with Transgender Troops - Regarding the New Bans

• The Ellen Show, Youtube, "Ellen Chats with Transgender Military Couple Logan & Laila Ireland" (2017)
• Fox 11 LA, Youtube, "Transgender veteran Shane Ortega discusses Trump's military ban" (2017)

Film Scenes for Close-Reading - Regarding Military Culture

• Disney, Mulan, "Be A Man" (1998)
• New Line Cinema, Lord of the Rings: Two Towers, "Eowyn" (2002)

Pre-modern Texts for Historical Reference 

• Heldris of Cornwall, Roman de Silence, "Sir. Silence"
• Historical Association for Joan of Arc Studies, Primary Sources and Context Concerning Joan of Arc's Male Clothing

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The Praxis of Silence: Teresa de Cartagena and Grove of the Infirm

"Who could hear with the ears of his soul such healthy advice if his physical ears were filled with the noise of human voices?"

Teresa de Cartagena

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Deafness is traditionally defined as a disability but medieval and modern deaf writers have long made the case for the concept of “deaf-gain.” As part of our embodiment narrative exercises, we have been pushing beyond the intellectual assent to disability theory and into the praxis of enacting life and ideas together. Towards that end, each of you will practice the habit of Teresa de Cartagena by engaging silence physically, intellectually, and socially.

By intentionally experiencing silence in a loud, busy, stimulating modern world, you will engage to the writing of Teresa de Cartagena in a way that makes the theory into an embodied lesson and consider the challenges as well as the benefits of silence.

The Praxis of Silence will begin at the usual class-time (5:30 PM) on Monday. After this time, you have 24 hours to find an 1 hour 15 min of silence. The first critically important and integral task is to find somewhere as perfectly silent as possible to sit or stand for an hour and fifteen minutes. This may be a museum, a library, a park (be safe), or even your own empty room. Please do not use music or other audio to cover over the ambient noise. Note: what you will experience is NOT the same as what deaf people necessarily experience. Rather, you will be learning in your own way and with your own embodiment what it means to live in and with silence.

While you sit in silence, you are to limit your activities and distractions. You may walk around, think, and do some light reading from the book of Teresa de Cartagena OR from read the lyrics to some form of music (e.g. as Teresa does the Psalms). However, reading should only consist of less than half (30 min max.).

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Questions

Before 24 hours is up, you must write a four paragraph post that uses two quotes from Teresa de Cartagena’ in order to help you narrative your embodied experience of silence. How does the theory inform your praxis? How did the physical experience inform your theory? Consider attached questions.

How did the experience of silence affect your body and mind?

• Consider whether or not you moved, fidgeted, sat motionless, etc.
• Consider what emotions and sensations came and went
• Consider how your mind and thoughts changed over the hour.

How did the experience of silence make passages of the Grove of Infirm clearer?

• Consider how certain sentences are different to read than to experience
• Consider how words often are short-hand for complex physical events
• Consider how reading changes in quiet versus among noise

How did reading the Grove of the Infirm affect how you experienced silence?

• Consider what things you focused on because of the book
• Consider how you felt about the experience because of the book
• Consider how the book made the experience an intellectual one

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Additional Pedagogical Resources

Additional Disability Studies

Additional Medieval History

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Beyond Male and Female: How (Not) to Argue On the Internet

“The importance of the Internet for LGBT youth and their peers overall... poses a challenge to educators, 
who must help students learn how to seek out and identify reliable sources of information and safe sources of support amidst the deluge of potential connections online.”

Out Online
GLSEN

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Course Description and Outcomes

Gender is personal and political. Gender is not just a set of physical or mental characteristics but an ongoing social conversation between identities, expressions, and relations that fight to order how we define bodies, how we divide bodies, and what roles or values these bodies will possess. Histories and narratives form and repeat when readers follow debates on gender in society. Such narratives influence cultural imagination with tales that reflect and resist public concepts of gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, disability, and class. In this seminar, we explore how rhetoric and worldviews have worked together to form diverse genres of texts and embodiment that have come to be collected under the name, “transgender,” as well as other forms of gender beyond the binary categories of “male” and “female.”


Course Objectives (Reflecting SAGES Learning Outcomes)

By the end of the course you will be able to T.E.A.C.H. on a range of ethical, historical, and aesthetic subjects:

• THINK critically on the rhetorical and ethical value of cultural narratives 
• ENGAGE respectfully across perspectives alongside and opposing your own 
• ARGUE dialectically with thesis driven claims that actively engage existing debates 
• COMPOSE collaboratively using evidenced-based research and peer-review 
• HONOR differences with nuance, complexity, and sympathy

Sections of the seminar will use (public) Twitter posts in place of Canvas posts. The length of posts should be approximately the same, requiring multiple posts.

Twitter: Create a unique Twitter account for the seminar (unrelated to your name). Be aware that Twitter is an open platform, meaning the safety and respect lessons on the seminar on “How (Not) to Argue on the Internet” will need to be practiced.

Hashtags for Twitter: 

#USSO291T (Seminar) + Section Title (e.g. #Science)

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Selections from the Reading List

Beyond Male and Female: How (Not) to Argue on the Internet is a seminar designed to interrogate the systems which continually reduce gendered embodiment to a binary and the alternative networks which are developing online. The first half of the seminar explores #Religion and #Science as practices of knowing that organize and often limit gender diversity. In the former sub-section, the class practices close-reading texts by creating their own biblical commentaries of key passages on gender and sexuality from the NRSV Bible and analyzing images, memes, and videos in the long tradition of trans and non-binary saints. In the latter, the science of sex is researched through medical histories and intersex memoirs to consider the material evidence of over 50 distinct sexual embodiments. The second half of the seminar is rooted in two critical spaces where the gender binary is enforced or undermined, #Healthcare and #Schools. In the former, students will read embodiment narratives that address different ways that gender dysphoria manifests and is managed in distinct environments: high school, hospitals, prisons, and on the streets. In the last subsections, the class concludes by looking back at how education systems help or hinder trans and non-binary youths through the autobiographic stories including Eli Clare and Jazz Jennings. Throughout the semester, in addition to traditional reading assignments, students will be encountering a variety of digital texts which will augment and model the ways in which the internet argues over men, women, and all those between and beyond.

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#Religion

Print Texts

The NRSV Bible,

• “Genesis I and II,” 
• “Deuteronomy,”
•  “Galatians 3” 
• “Leviticus 21-23,” 
• “Isaiah 56,”
• “Matthew 18-19”

Aiken and Aparicio (dir.), The Transformation (1996)

N. Constas (Trans.), The Life of Saint Marinos

C. Jenner, I Am Cait, “A New Beginning”

Digital Texts

Week 1: Youtube, AustenLionheart, “Reimagining Genesis 1”

Week 2: Youtube, AustenLionheart, “Eunuchs, Prophets, and Coming Home”

Week 3: Youtube, Michael Kasino, “The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson”

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#Science

Print Texts

T. Hillman, Intersex, 

• “Haircut,” 
• “Special,” 
• “Pray,” 
• “Reshaping” 
• “Another,” 
• “Swallow,” 
• “Testosterone”
• “Condition”

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

A. Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body

L. Simon, Confessions of a Teenage Hermaphrodite

Digital Texts

Week 4: Youtube, Boldly, “What It’s Like to Be Intersex” 

Week 5: Youtube, Arts & Ideas at the JCCSF, Exploring Intersex w Hida Viloria

Week 6: Podcast, Transgeneral, “Non-Binary 101” (2/5/16)

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#Healthcare

Print Texts

A.P.A, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), “Gender Dysphoria”

Scholinski, The Last Time I Wore A Dress, Ch. 1-5

K.A. Applegate, Animorphs #3: The Encounter 

J. Mock, Redefining Realness

Orange is the New Black, 1.5. “The Chickening.” (2013)

A. Belkin, New England Journal of Medicine, “Caring for Our Trans Troops”

Digital Texts

Week 7: Podcast, The Gender Rebels Podcast, “Am I Transgender Enough?”

Week 8: Youtube, College Humor, “Coming Out as Trans Everything”

Week 9: Youtube, ATME e.V., “Janet Mock @ Women’s March” 

Week 10: Youtube, MTV, “Lavern Cox Presents: The T Word” 

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#Schools

Print Texts

E. Clare, Exile and Pride

L. Alcorn, Transgender Queen of Hell

A. Cavalcante, Critical Studies in Media, “I Did It All Online”

J. Jennings, I Am Jazz (Book)

J. Jennings, Being Jazz (Book), Ch. 5 

J. Jennings, I Am Jazz (TV Show), “I Looked Like a Man in a Dress”

Digital Texts

Week 11: Youtube, UNHCOLA, Notes on Cure, Disability and Natural Worlds

Week 12: Youtube, lacigreen, “Pray the Gay Away - Exposed”

Week 13: Youtube, tic uk, “Jazz Debates Tomi Lahren!” 

Week 14: Podcast, How To Be a Girl, “Episode 1: Mama, I’m a Girl!” (2013)             

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