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This is an essay about the pedagogical stakes of navigating identity categories and terminology in transgender studies classrooms. It is a challenging essay to write precisely because explaining the persistent difficulties of terminology requires using terminology that itself will always be imperfect. Each time I teach my transgender studies course, students voluntarily note the essentiality of their specific gender identities and the terms they use for themselves: terms they wish others in the classroom to know, understand, and use. I take seriously these identifications. They matter to me, as they do to the students themselves. Paradoxically, their importance can also become an obstacle for the intellectual and political work of a transgender studies course as I endeavor to organize it: a course in which the goal is not to learn about particular people who can be grouped under terms such as transgender, but about how such terms themselves develop, the meanings they carry, and the uses to which they are—or can be—put. This is, then, an essay about the always unfinished work of balancing classroom participants' sincere need for and investment in specific identity markers against the more formal pedagogical task of teaching the critical framework of transgender studies.
I write this in a particularly charged political moment that necessarily shapes what both my students and I bring to the classroom. What media outlets have recently designated the "transgender tipping point"—the undeniable rise of transgender visibility across all manner of industry, government, and public discourse—perhaps unsurprisingly coincides with tremendous amounts of violence against gender nonconformity in all its manifestations. This violence is not new in itself, but takes new shapes through surveillance and policing practices that criminalize, incarcerate, deport, impoverish, and kill those who can be recognized as transgender; in part, it is through increased visibility and recognition that systems of power can more effectively track and punish. We can observe, for instance, that persistent anxieties over public restroom use have prompted (and excused) violence against gender-nonconforming people since public restrooms were first developed in the United States, particularly as gender, race, class, and disability converge in these public spaces. Yet the specific naming of transgender people as a targeted population in such criminalizing practices is a more recent development that responds to the rise...