Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Issues in Education

Programs, Policies, and Practices

James Sears

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781560235248
• eBook ISBN: 9781136614163
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Understand the challenges from the voices involvedtoday's LGBT youth AND the leading educators and scholars in the field!

Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Issues in Education presents LGBT youth issues through the words of the adolescents themselves, along with clear up-to-date essays about LGBT youth programs, policies, and practices around the world. Leading international educators and scholars examine personal experiences of LGBT youth, cutting-edge programs, and research first presented in the international Journal of Gay & Lesbian Issues in Education. Dynamic and thought-provoking, this insightful book brings together ideas and a vision vital for the future of today's LGBT youth.

Invaluable for educators, counselors, graduate and undergraduate students, and LGBT youth alike, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Issues in Education is readily accessible and easy-to-read, yet still provides in-depth, multidimensional examinations of the LGBT youth programs and practices essential for the propagation of social tolerance, acceptance, and safety of our youth. The LGBT youth voices sing clear their views about the urgent need for programs and policies within educational resources to challenge the present dominant intolerant thinking. The editor presents cogent essays that reveal the complex issues of the educational programs and practices, while offering strategies and hope for societal change. The book strives for the ultimate goal of reaching LGBT acceptance within society, to move beyond simple toleration toward becoming completely equal regardless of sexual identity.

Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Issues in Education explores:

• transgender college students
  
• bullying and homophobia
  
• research on LGBT studies in education
  
• teaching elementary preservice teachers
  
• multicultural school-based programs for HIV education serving transgender youth
  
• successes and deficiencies of gay-straight alliances
  
• race and youth programs in urban high schools
  
• growing up lesbian in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States
  
• growing up gay in Japan and China

Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Issues in Education is an essential exploration of LGBT issues and an excellent educational tool for educators, undergraduate and graduate students, counselors, social workers, LGBT youth, and for any professional working with LGBT youth.

SECTION III: PROGRAMS AND PRACTICES

Chapter 13 Serving the Needs of Transgender College Students

Brett Beemyn

DOI: 10.4324/9780203462591-13

The examples are many:

• A college student gets called “fag” and “queer” because he looks effeminate.
• A campus climate assessment survey asks respondents to rate the environment in the classroom for people of “both genders.”
• A diversity training session acknowledges the different genders of participants by asking the women and then the men to stand.
• A college admission form asks applicants to check a box marked “M” or “F.”
• A transgender student avoids using certain rest rooms on campus because of hostile comments about his gender.
• A student is afraid that he will not be hired in his profession after graduation if faculty members discover that he has transitioned from female to male.
• A transsexual graduate student wonders how she can change her student records to reflect her gender identity and how she will be received by the students she will be teaching.

These incidents occurred in the past year at The Ohio State University where I work as the coordinator of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Student Services. But they could have taken place at any college or university, and, I suspect, few schools have not experienced such acts of intolerance and ignorance around issues of gender identity and the inclusion of transgender students.

There is no accurate measure of the number of trans gender college students (just as there are no reliable statistics on the number of lesbian, gay, and bisexual students). Direct observation and anecdotal evidence suggest that youth who do not fit stereotypical notions of “female” and “male” are becoming much more visible on North American campuses and a growing number of students are identifying as gender variant or, as many describe themselves, “gender queer.”

Yet colleges have been slow to recognize, much less provide support to, transgender people. Although many lesbian, gay, and bisexual student organizations and almost all of the existing campus LGB administrative offices have added a “T” (signifying transgender) to their names in the last decade, this move toward greater inclusiveness has been more symbolic than substantive. Most LGB student leaders and center directors still have little understanding of the experiences of transpeople and continue to engage in trans-exclusive practices. Other administrators and faculty typically are even less educated about transgender issues and only become cognizant of the needs of transgender students when a crisis arises, such as a conflict over a transitioning woman using the women's rest room.

In fairness to unknowing staff and faculty members, there is yet to be any empirical research on the experiences of transgender college students, and almost nothing has been written about transgender issues in higher education (Carter, 2000). With this in mind, I begin by providing a brief history of the discourses and terminologies that have characterized gender-variant individuals and the subsequent movement among transpeople to define themselves and describe their experiences. I then relate these issues to higher education by discussing the narratives by transgender people in Kim Howard and Annie Stevens's (2000) Out and About on Campus: Personal Accounts by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered College Students, the first work on college students to include the stories of transgender youth. I conclude by offering recommendations for educators seeking to improve the campus climate for transgender people, based on my experiences as an openly trans-identified administrator working in LGBT student services. Because most colleges and universities create a hostile environment for gender-variant students, staff, and faculty, there is much that institutions can and must do to become more welcoming to people of all genders.

A NOTE ON LANGUAGE

Complicating any discussion of transgender issues is the lack of a sufficient vocabulary. Only now are words being developed to describe the diversity of gender identity and expression, especially the experiences of transpeople who do not exclusively identify as female or male (Cromwell, 1999). But it is not simply the absence of terminology that has been problematic; existing language also fails to capture the complexities of gender. Feminist theorists have popularized the idea that “gender” is socially constructed, in contrast to biological “sex,” in order to challenge assumed gender roles (Butler, 1990; de Beauvoir, 1953). But as shown by the unnecessary surgeries performed on intersex infants (that is, on babies whose anatomical characteristics do not fit neatly into “female” or “male”) to make their bodies conform to a rigid gender category, “sex” is likewise socially and, at times, literally constructed (Koyama, 2001).

Intersex genital mutilation also points to how “sex” is commonly reduced to one aspect of gender, the person's genitalia. This has the effect of reinforcing a kind of biological determinism that ignores other important components of gender and the ways in which people actually experience their gender (Bornstein, 1998). For example, as I will discuss, few transsexual men have genital surgery, but they do not feel that this makes them less of a man (Cromwell, 1999), and a growing number of transsexuals who have surgery continue to see themselves as transsexual, rather than identifying as “female” or “male” (Bornstein, 1994). In order to avoid making “genital gender” the defining aspect of gender, I will only use the term sex as a descriptor for individuals when citing commonly used language.

TRANS-SEXOLOGY

As it is commonly used today, transgender is an umbrella term for anyone whose self-identification or expression crosses or transgresses established gender categories, including, but not limited to, transsexuals (individuals who identify with a gender different from their biological gender), cross-dressers (the term preferred over transvestites), drag kings, and drag queens. Although this understanding of gender variance is contemporary, developing in the early 1990s with the growth of a trans gender movement in the United States and parts of Europe (Wilchins, 1997), people who challenge societal notions of “male” and “female” have existed in many different cultures and time periods (Bullough, 1975; Cromwell, 1999; Docter, 1988; Feinberg, 1996).

In the United States, reports of women and men who cross-lived and/or cross-dressed have appeared in newspapers, legal records, and medical journals since the sixteenth century (MacKenzie, 1994). For example, firsthand accounts of white explorers and missionaries demonstrate that “women-men” and “men-women” were widely recognized in traditional Native American cultures (Lang, 1999). The writings of European and U.S. sexologists in the nineteenth century included many case histories of individuals who saw themselves as belonging to the “opposite” gender and/or who lived as members of the “opposite” gender (MacKenzie, 1994).

But conflating gender with sexual practice, the literature categorized these individuals as “sexual inverts” or “homosexuals.” Indeed, many sexologists considered transgender behavior to be the sine qua non of homosexuality (Currah and Minter, 2000). The first researcher to publish widely on homosexuality, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, theorized in the 1860s and 1870s that what he called “Uranism” resulted from an individual having a gendered soul different from his or her biological gender. Basing his theory primarily on himself, Ulrichs believed that Uranians constituted a “third sex” who loved others of the “same” gender as a person of the “opposite” gender—a description that would be seen today as more characteristic of trans sexuality than homosexuality. The most influential nineteenth-century sexologist, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, likewise failed to recognize a distinction between homosexuality and cross-gender identity. Whereas Ulrichs argued that the inborn nature of “inverted” gender expression required an end to the legal and social persecution of such individuals, von Krafft-Ebing classified transgenderism as a sexual perversion and a sign of “moral insanity” (Bullough and Bullough, 1993; Hekma, 1994; MacKenzie, 1994).

Not until Magnus Hirschfeld coined the term transvestite in The Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress was gender expression separated from sexual behavior (Hirschfeld, 1991). Hirschfeld, a pioneer in the study of sexuality and an openly gay man who cross-dressed, argued that transvestism was an identity unto itself and that transvestites could be male or female and heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or asexual. Relying on the case histories of sixteen men and one woman, he provided one of the first accurate descriptions of cross-dressers:

In the apparel of their own sex they feel confined, bound up, oppressed; they perceive them as something strange, something that does not fit them, does not belong to them; on the other hand, they cannot find enough words to describe the feeling of peace, security and exaltation, happiness and well-being that overcomes them when in the clothing of the other sex. (p. 125)

Hirschfeld, though, failed to distinguish between cross-dressing and transsexualism. In fact, several of the people he studied who felt a strong desire to be a gender different from their birth gender would be considered transsexuals today (Bullough and Bullough, 1993; Hirschfeld, 1991). The term transsexual began to enter the medical literature in the late 1940s and early 1950s (MacKenzie, 1994; Meyerowitz, 1998), especially through the work of endocrinologist Harry Benjamin (1953, 1966), who described a continuum of cross-gender behavior ranging from transvestism to transsexualism.

Transsexuality entered public consciousness through the 1952 media sensation over the gender transition of Christine Jorgensen. As the first person from the United States to go public after undergoing a “sex change” operation, Jorgensen became “the most talked-about girl in the world” when the former World War II soldier returned from surgery in Denmark as what newspaper headlines described as a “blonde beauty” (Serlin, 1995). Although Jorgensen was the first widely recognized transsexual, the earliest known case of transformative surgery was performed in 1882 on Herman Karl (born Sophia Hedwig), a female-bodied man (Bullough and Bullough, 1993). By the 1930s, stories of European “sex changes” appeared regularly in U.S. tabloid newspapers and magazines, demonstrating that a transsexual identity “did not depend on the invention of synthetic hormones or the development of sophisticated plastic surgery techniques” (Meyerowitz, 1998, p. 161).

But the publicity given to Jorgensen and the creation of a commercially feasible process for synthesizing hormones and better methods for sex reassignment surgery in the 1950s (Bullough and Bullough, 1998) led to a deluge of requests for medical intervention from other transsexuals. Jorgensen received hundreds of letters from “men and women who also had experienced the deep frustrations of lives lived in sexual twilight” (Jorgensen, 1967, p. 150); Danish officials were so overwhelmed with visa requests from people seeking surgery that they forbade such operations for foreigners (Meyerowitz, 1998). Doctors in the United States, though, did not begin to perform sex reassignment surgery until the mid-1960s because of a lack of training in the procedures and a lack of understanding of transsexuality itself, reflecting the belief among many psychiatrists that transsexuals needed mental, rather than physical, intervention (Califia, 1997). But as psychotherapy was shown to have no impact on an individual's gender identity, it became clear that if “the mind of the transsexual cannot be adjusted to the body, it is logical and justifiable to attempt the opposite, to adjust the body to the mind” (Benjamin, 1966, p. 91).

Some in the psychiatric community, thoug...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About The Editor
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• SECTION I: YOUTH VOICES
• SECTION II: RESEARCH AND POLICY
• SECTION III: PROGRAMS AND PRACTICES
• Index