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Article Excerpt
If I could change one thing, it would be that all people were required to understand that there are more than two categories of gender. That way other kids won't have to suffer like I did.
--17-year-old transboy (quoted in Brill & Pepper, 2008, p. 67)
Our biggest issue with the school was their lack of knowledge. At first it was suggested that we switch schools to one that is 12 miles away. Thanks.
--Parent of a 7-year-old transboy (quoted in Brill & Pepper, 2008, p. 154)
Schools serve as a setting in which students come to understand gender. One group that is largely left out of discussions of education consists of transgender students, those who transgress societal gender norms. The high level of harassment that transgender students face poses sizable obstacles to school success. If the field of education is committed to equity and social justice, then teacher education programs must prepare educators to teach gender in more complex ways that take into consideration the existence and needs of transgender people. This article is intended to begin the discussion of transgender issues in teacher education by providing a rationale for why teacher educators need to care about transgender issues, presenting definitions of basic terms and concepts related to gender and transgender, offering a new framework for understanding gender privilege and oppression, examining three previously proposed or existing types of gender education and proposing "gender-complex education" as an alternative, and exploring possibilities for "gender-complex teacher education."
Definitions and Terms
Foundational Gender-Related Terms
To work with future teachers on approaching gender in more complex ways, teacher educators must develop a vocabulary of gender. According to Bornstein (1994), gender identity "answers the question, 'who am I?' Am I a man or a woman or a what?" (p. 24). Bornstein wrote that it is "one's sense of self as a boy or girl, woman or man (or, as we are increasingly realizing, as a nongendered, bigendered, transgendered, intersexed, or otherwise alternatively gendered person)" (Tranzmission, n.d., p. 10). The term originated in the field of psychiatry, which included "Gender Identity Disorder" as a classification in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychological Association, 1980) beginning in 1980 (Wilchins, 2004; Zucker & Spitzer, 2005). This conception of those who do not follow the dominant model of gender identity as "disordered" is a manifestation of and has contributed to the oppression of transgender people. Whereas the origin of the term gender identity is less than ideal, when used without a connection to "disorders," it is a useful term.
Gender expression, a second useful term, refers to "the manifestation of an individual's fundamental sense of being masculine or feminine through clothing, behavior, grooming, etc." (Wilchins, 2004, p. 8). In other words, gender expression consists of the behaviors in which a person engages that show that person's gender. Significantly, whereas people choose how to express gender, they do not choose how others will perceive their genders. This leads to another term, gender attribution, which is the process "whereby we look at somebody and say, 'that's a man,' or 'that's a woman'" (Bornstein, 1994, p. 26). Gender attribution is based on various cues. Among the types of cues, Bornstein (1994) listed physical cues (body, hair, voice, skin, movement), behavioral cues (manners, decorum, protocol, deportment), textual cues (histories, documents, names, associates, relationships), mythic cues (cultural and subcultural myths that support membership in a given gender), power dynamic cues (modes of communication, communication techniques, degrees of aggressiveness, assertiveness, persistence, ambition), and sexual orientation cues (whom one dates, with whom one has sex, with whom one has romantic relationships). People use all of these cues in combination to decide (usually unconsciously) to which gender someone belongs.
Gender roles refers to "social expectations of proper behavior and activities for a member of a particular gender" (Stryker, 2008, p. 12). They are socially constructed ideas about how people will look, dress, and behave based on the gender category to which they belong. They consist of stereotypical behavior prescribed by assigned or apparent gender. Gender assignment, on the other hand, refers to a society's official designation of one's gender. In the United States, doctors assign gender based on one's genitalia at birth. This assigned gender is then recorded on an official birth certificate. The process of gender assignment differs among cultures. For example, among Navajo people, gender assignment has traditionally occurred at a later age based on one's choice of objects rather than on biology (Bornstein, 1994).
Defining Gender
Given these interacting concepts of gender identity, gender expression, gender attribution, gender expectations, and gender assignment, it is clear that gender is a complex concept that is not easy to define. In English, the word gender has a long history. Beginning in the 1300s, gender began appearing in written text to mean "kind, sort, class" (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989, n.p.). Here, gender is a broad term implying a sorting of persons or objects into categories. Categorization highlights one dimension along which persons or objects differ and marks boundaries according to this distinction. In this broad use, the aspect of distinction highlighted is not specified in the term gender itself; rather, gender is used merely to indicate that some sort of distinction exists.
The contemporary use of the term gender incorporates certain distinctions that play out in the concepts of gender expectations, gender expression, gender attribution, gender assignment, and gender identity. Wilchins (2004) defined gender as "a language, a system of meanings and symbols, along with the rules, privileges, and punishments pertaining to their use--for power and sexuality (masculinity and femininity, strength and vulnerability, action and passivity, dominance and weakness)" (p. 35). Furthermore, following the work of Derrida, Wilchins explained that "words and meanings actually work because of a process of exclusion. ... With gender, we create the meaning of woman by excluding everything that is non-Woman, and vice versa for man" (p. 36). Hence, the contemporary definition of gender retains the idea of distinction and continues to mark boundaries according to certain ones.
Wilchins's (2004) definition includes a number of other helpful ideas. The idea that gender is language relates to gender expression. People can express ideas using oral or written language; people can also express ideas related to gender through certain ways of dressing, behaving, and so forth. As in other forms of language, the message one intends to relay is not necessarily the message others receive; hence, gender attribution is another's interpretation of one's gender expression. A direct correlation between gender identity, gender expression, and gender attribution does not exist, just as a direct correlation between speech/textual acts and the reading of speech/textual acts does not exist. Wilchins's definition also points out that gender is a system of power relations that includes rules with privileges and punishments. This system of power relations and its related privileges and punishments will be elaborated in the section on the gender-oppression matrix.
Defining Transgender
The English word transgender was coined in the 1980s by Virginia Prince to mean someone who changed gender by changing their presentation of self through clothing and behavior rather than by changing their bodies (Stryker & Whittle, 2006). After the publication of Leslie Feinberg's Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time has Come in 1992, transgender quickly "became an umbrella term for anyone who crossed gender lines" (Wilchins, 2004, p. 26). Hence, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, or PFLAG, defined transgender people as "those whose gender identity or gender expression differs from conventional expectations for their physical sex" (2004, p. 3). Similarly, Tranzmission (n.d.), a transgender and transgender ally activist group, defined trans or transgender as "those who transgress societal gender norms ... those who defy rigid gender constructions, and who express or present a breaking and/ or blurring of cultural/stereotypical gender roles" (p. 14). These definitions of transgender bring together many of the gender-related concepts described earlier. Transgender peoples' gender assignment does not match their gender identity. Furthermore, transgender peoples' gender identity and/or gender expression fall outside of stereotypical gender roles. The gender others attribute to transgender people may or may not match their gender identity.
Definitions of transgender emphasize that it is a broad umbrella term that often entails long lists of identities. For example, PFLAG (2004) has the following list within its definition of transgender:
Transgender people include pre-operative, post-operative and non-operative transsexuals, who generally feel that they were born into the wrong physical sex; crossdressers (formerly called transvestites), who occasionally wear the clothing of the opposite sex in order to fully express an inner, cross-gender identity; and many other identities too numerous to list here. Trans people...
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