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Unlearning gender—Toward a critical communication trans pedagogy

Gender eludes definition. Thus, to teach gender is to work with and against the ineffable, the uncertain, and the particular. Gender is ineffable because it is far too expansive a cultural and personal phenomenon to grasp with any meaningful complexity. Gender is uncertain because it is animated in the liminal space between identification and interpolation or between self and/as other. Gender is particular in the sense that gender is rendered legible exclusively through competing ideological discourses that attempt to contain the ineffable and the uncertain despite their elusiveness. In short, teaching gender is necessarily complicated. Teaching gender that affirms transgender and transsexual subjects (henceforth “trans subjects” unless specificity demands otherwise) provides a unique set of challenges. These challenges include at minimum (1) mass-mediated representations and (2) the institutionalization of trans studies coupled with liberal inclusionary gestures. First, the recent proliferation of mass-mediated representations of trans subjects has ranged from the profoundly problematic to the ontologically complex. The result is a bevy of competing ideological orientations. And while it is reductive to suggest media provides the primary means of acquiring knowledge about marginalized groups, recent evidence suggests the broader public continues to avoid genuine dialogic relationships with trans subjects. For perspective, a recent YouGov survey found that while 40% of respondents know a transgender person, 27% are unwilling to befriend transgender men or women. Moreover, the survey found roughly three-quarters of respondents are unwilling to date a trans person and even more were unwilling to engage in sexual activity with a trans person. More than “preferences,” these results indicate a larger systemic patterning that positions trans subjects as being outside the scope of sociability. And in the rare moments when trans persons are present, their/our bodies emerge as unwilling pedagogues of another’s presumed terrain. Lacking dialogic encounters, cisgender and/ or nontrans folk may rely on mediated representations of trans and gender non-conforming folk as pedagogical means. This may include students, just as it may include instructors and senior faculty. Several scholars have noted the skewed mediated representations of transgender identity across various mediated platforms. In the end, trans persons emerge as spectacle to a mass-mediated audience that is more likely to know conceptually rather than to know dialogically a trans person. Mass-mediated representations, in short, provide a