At one year of age, Blue is a curious and precocious pre-toddler, feeling her way through the world, putting everything in sight in her mouth, and grabbing spoons and using the family dog as a drum. Blue runs around a lot. In fact, Blue runs around so much, her family predicts Blue will become a phenomenal runner or some type of athlete. It is the early 1970s so Blue’s parents dress her in gaudy suede jumpers with bling, pink socks, and clogs. Sort of a mismatch to the identity Blue has begun to exhibit.
At two, Blue’s affinity for running has accelerated. Now, Blue runs after the dog, the neighbor, the birds, and right out of the door, into the yard, and even the street. Blue’s mom supports these adventurous pursuits, but Blue’s dad does not think it’s appropriate for his daughter to behave this way, and even asserts, “I don’t want my daughter to be a tomboy.” Blue is just being Blue.
From ages three to five, Blue looks like a boy. Her hair fro’d, her now tube socks hiked up to her knees, her cutoffs pretty hideous even for the 1970s, and her appearance, masculine. Blue likes to watch her father pee standing up, and when alone, tries to emulate the behavior, but with limited success, and lots of splatter on the floor. Blue likes to watch her father shaving, and when alone, smears toothpaste on her face and traces it off with strokes of her toothbrush. She is far more successful with this task than the attempts at urinating. Blue likes to ride her Huffy BMX bike around the neighborhood and bring food home to her mom and sister when her dad is late home from work. Blue steps into a caregiving role, quite naturally, because it is just what feels right.
Blue loves playing football topless in the streets like the other boys do, and seems to be living life in a way that just seems right and normal. Then one day Blue runs into the house screaming, “I want to be a boy!” Blue’s parents do not understand these words, but actually maybe they do. In response, Blue’s dad begins to gender Blue by reminding her of her gender in passive-aggressive ways. For special events, he wrestles Blue into dresses and heels, only for Blue to then throw her body into dog shit and roll around in it. Then Blue’s dad beats Blue and dresses her up again. Helpless and in tears, Blue’s mom, watched passively as her only recourse. To different degrees, this family battle would play out for the next forty years.
At the age of five, Blue enters school. Blue has mostly boys as friends and enacts behavior typical of other boys. Blue plays sports during recess, sits with the boys at lunch, tries to pee in the boy’s restroom, and only wants to be in classroom groups with other boys. The only gender marker to reveal that Blue is a girl is her clothing and the colors, those that typically demarcate girls’ identities. Blue doesn’t understand when the class is separated into groups based on gender and why she is put into the groups with other girls. After all, Blue feels like a boy, thinks she is a boy, and is treated like a boy by other boys in school.
As Blue goes through her primary and secondary schooling years, gender was not on the radar in her teachers’ classrooms. Music, dating, film, and athletics are the only aspects of her life, outside of her family, that gives Blue sources to understand her gender confusion. Blue is drawn to musicians for unconscious reasons. For Blue, the artists and bands she is most drawn to, like Morrissey (the Smiths), Adam Ant, David Byrne, Tracy Chapman, Boy George, Depeche Mode, the Talking Heads, Kate Bush, Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Trio, Oingo Boingo, New Order, Yaz, and David Bowie seem to express challenges to the gender binary through both looks and lyrics. Blue’s favorite musician is Robert Smith, lead singer of The Cure. Smith dresses in black, has disheveled hair, wears lipstick, and occasionally even dresses. Smith’s lyrics are poetic, dark, and forlorn but they bring meaning, order, and respite to Blue. Blue listens to everything produced by The Cure until it drowns out the negative thoughts about Blue’s internal gender struggle. The Cure is the cure.
Throughout high school, Blue dates males. Blue doesn’t understand her feelings but is drawn to boys, as if she herself is one. She has many close female friends and is attracted to some of them, but not from the identity of female; she is drawn to them as if she is male. So she continues to live her life, dates males, acquires friends along a continuum of genders and with queered identities—gay, lesbian, bisexual, and straight. All of this just feels normal to Blue. The unconscious urges to be with males, as a male, remain unremitting but she does not know how to talk about them. None of her teachers address gender or sexual identity in her classes. She reads no texts, sees no examples of herself or others that could possibly help her understand who she is. Even with friends and teachers she adored, she is lost at school.
Blue turns to film for reasons similar to music. Films assuage a curiosity that gives visual recognition to different identities in the world. Without the language to support the unconscious emotionality Blue feels, films such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I’ve Heard the Mermaid Singing, and all films by Ivory Merchant Productions become running stills that shape and inform who Blue is becoming. Many of the characters in the films, and the actors who illuminate them, give calm to the raging storm brewing inside Blue.
Soccer and swimming, two stabilizing factors for Blue’s identity development throughout secondary school, provide critical spaces and opportunities to release pain and confusion. Again, without the language to know what Blue feels inside, these sports calm the inner rage. Blue is a better-than-average swimmer and often places in the top five at meets in both freestyle and butterfly sprints. Blue’s natural talent as a runner is channeled into soccer, and Blue is a star. As a forward, Blue breaks district and state records, leads her team to compete at the state level, and becomes the first female All-American in her state. Six top academic and Division 1 schools offer her scholarships. She chooses Cal-Berkeley. With memories of her family, music, friends, teachers, school, and film, Blue leaves for college—it is 1988. The future is unknown, and it would take Blue until age forty, twenty-two years later, to come to terms with her gender confusion….
Recognition
The struggle for recognition is at the core of human identity. With social positioning as the presumed or “normative” condition, those whose gender identities fall outside of the binary tend to be misrecognized and misunderstood and suffer from what I call a recognition gap, much as I did in my childhood and adolescence, when I was Blue.
Misrecognition subverts the possibility to be made credible, legible, or to be read and/or truly understood. When one is misrecognized, it is altogether difficult to hold a positive self-image, knowing that others may hold a different or negative image (Harris-Perry 2011). When the presumed normative condition is challenged though, a corollary emerges; this suggests that at the base of the human condition, people are in search of positive recognition, to be seen as “normal,” because it validates their humanity.
Looking back into my youth, there was no common language for society to help people understand gender confusion, or if there was it was not brought into my life. This leaves me little room to wonder why a core group of my peers in high school and even in college—many who felt similar to me—have only come to identify themselves as trans*1 or gender creative2 later in their lives. As language and understanding around trans* and gender creative identities have become part of the social fabric of society, youth have had more access to recent changes in health care and therapeutic services that have supported them in their processes of becoming and coming to terms with their true selves. These opportunities for visibility have galvanized a movement fortifying validation and generating opportunities for both personal and social recognition. Now, we see more trans* and gender creative people portrayed positively in the media. With individuals such as Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, Chaz Bono, Aydian Dowling, Scott Turner Schofield, Ian Harvey, and Caitlyn Jenner, and TV shows such as Transparent, Becoming Us, Orange Is the New Black, The Fosters, and I am Jazz, just to name a few, we see a growing media presence. With an estimated 700,000 trans* people now living in the USA, there is even the “Out Trans 100,” an annual award given to individuals who demonstrate courage through their efforts to promote visibility in their professions and communities. But, where teacher education still falls short is in how to support pre-K-12 teachers about how to integrate and normalize instruction that affirms and recognizes trans* and gender creative youth. These identities are nearly invisible in curriculum and in the Common Core Standards. That is why this book was written, as an attempt to bring trans* and gender creative recognition and legibility into schools. In this collection, authors model exciting and innovative approaches for teaching, affirming, and recognizing trans* and gender creative youth across pre-K-12th grades.
To understand the role of recognition in school, this work draws inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois who, in The Souls of Black Folk, wrote about the struggle for Black recognition and validation in USA. In this book, Du Bois (1903) describes a double consciousness, that sense of simultaneously holding up two images of the self, the internal and the external, while always trying to compose and reconcile one’s identity. He concerns himself with how the disintegration of the two generates internal strife and confusion about a positive sense of self-worth, just as I shared in my story.
Similar to what Du Bois names as a source for internal strife, youth who live outside of the gender binary and challenge traditionally entrenched forms of gender expression, such as trans* and gender creative youth, experience a double consciousness. As they strive and yearn to be positively recognized by peers, teachers, and family members, they experience macroaggressions, because of their systemic reinforcement, and are forced to placate others by representing themselves in incomplete or false ways that they believe will be seen as socially acceptab...