Diversity Fellows Project:Â Autoethnography of a Transgender First-Year Writing Teacher
This is the first part of a project that I tried out in my second semester of teaching English 112: College Writing. Originally I was interested in investigating how my silence in the classroom on the topic of my trans identity propped up the structures of power I criticize in my academic life (i.e. what did my passing as a cis straight male teacher say about who I thought I had to be to hold the most power in the classroom?). Gradually this goal narrowed into wanting to find a way to address my identity as an FTM (Female-to-Male) transgender individual openly in the classroom, while finding personalized strategies to discuss complex social issues in a writing classroom. The end product here is two-fold: a personal autoethnography of my experiences with teaching and gender, and a roadmap for a College Writing unit in which students produce their own autoethnographies.
By the end of this project, I realized that what was for me a hugely important aspect of my identity, to the point of hindering my teaching ability when I didnât acknowledge it in class, was ultimately for my students not a big deal. Before coming out in class I was hyper-focused on identity, and so I ended up overlooking ways in which I could have more closely united writing and learning about writing to lived experience. In the end, many student writers turned in generic comments on diversity (i.e. what they believed I wanted out of them as writers) instead of engaging with their personal experiences. While I did improve my discussion practices in class and there were moments of success throughout, the following project is both a narration and a reconceptualization of this unit 4. In the future Iâd like to use the autoethnography as a chance to get students to âwrite about themselves writing,â much like I write about myself teaching in the following essay. The class and discussion format wouldnât need to be altered much, and would ultimately be a more successful engagement of personal history, writing, and, if a student chooses of their own accord, identity. The second part of this project follows in the form of a syllabus for the unit, and an essay assignment sheet, all of which can be adapted to suit the needs of the teacher.
Autoethnography of a Transgender First-Year Writing Teacher: If Iâm Writing About Teaching to Learn How to Teach, Shouldnât I Let my Students Write About Writing to Learn how to Write?
When I was very young all of my best teachers were women: Mrs. Curro with the glass eye; Mrs. Twyman with her secret cache of erasers; Mrs. Short with a height to match her name, all of whom were kind and loved words and showed me how to love words, but if I didnât love the particular words or book that they loved that was still OK, and I was invited to show them why I disagreed or how I wanted to disagree. Debate over words was encouraged among us women in the classroom, a trend that carried over into my college years, surrounded by other women who loved words: the novelist who praised my stunted stories; the journalist who reported on tragedies until she lost the capacity to sympathize with the victims of the Oklahoma bombing.
So where do I stand now? I had male teachers I liked as well, but perhaps I didnât identify with them as much, not as much as with my female teachers, and maybe that matters, or maybe it doesnât. When I watch movies like Dead Poets Society or Stand and Deliver Iâm put off by the macho implications of the male teacher as hero trope, because for some reason our masculine teachers on film can only succeed, or if they are shown to fail itâs only in the beginning, in a montage of lockers slammed in frustration or empty classrooms that soon fill up once theyâve reached the turning point. Do I need to see a narrative of teacher uncertainty, or the story of a transgender teacher in order to make my own story? Iâm not sure. Do my students need to see such a movie about the trans teacher succeeding in the classroom in order to know itâs possible? Probably not.
Today I tried to teach Kiese Laymonâs âHow To Slowly Kills Yourself and Others in America.â I begin with a story from Henry Louis Gates Jr.. Heâs written about a bar bet heâs made with bar regulars before, telling his audience that there are 40 million African Americans living in the US. He then bets $5 that they canât guess how many of those are professional athletes. They throw out numbers like 500,000 and 50,000, assuming they know better than Gates because they watch sports and black men are all over ESPN. Ultimately, he wins the bet, and reveals to them that there are only 1,200 African American professional athletes in the US. He goes on to add that there are 12 times as many black lawyers, 15 times as many black doctors, and 20 times as many black dentists.
I think Iâve brought this into the discussion to talk about media representation of African Americans and Kiese Laymonâs article. I want them to draw a connection between these statistics, and then Laymonâs strategy of not negating them. He spends an entire article writing about the violence in African American communities, the violence he has both experienced and been a part of, the violence that is really there, not out of some innate ability to play sports and be aggressive, but out of a layering of racism and poverty that is strong and painful and beats people down. He shows us the genealogy of this violence through his own life and the lives of others, through the eyes of people who see black men as aggressive and violent and so are quick to pull their guns on them.
And to my surprise, they get it, they bring all this up without much prompting, and theyâre saying intelligent things in class, and offering nuanced opinion. One student volunteers that his father is half-black and that heâs seen many of these same scenarios of violence, of police pulling a gun on his father, as Laymon describes. He goes on to say, in reference to the Gates story, âplot twist: Iâm terrible at basketball.â Itâs a beautiful moment of vulnerability and honest laughter shared by the class, and I have no idea what to do with it.
Among all the horror stories I hear about classes and the stunted ability of undergraduates to process nuanced racial topics I forget that, with a little guidance, they can actually latch onto it pretty quickly. This shouldnât surprise me too much, but it does. I think about my own moments of revelation in a classroom setting and in discussion, and I can remember the feeling of the light bulb switching on suddenly. Iâm told so much that my own privilege and education makes these kinds of moments easier for me in the classroom, but that can overshadow the equally revelatory moments of students from working class backgrounds. The truth is that now I have a class of 15 students staring back at me, apparently speaking eloquently about the topic of minority representation in the media, and I have no idea where to take them next.
Fortunately, 15 minutes after class lets out I walk down the hall to teach a second section of English Writing 112: College Writing. This class is already going much smoother; the last discussion we had ended with a student asking the question in class âDo a bunch of subjective realities together make an objective reality?â I asked them to think about this question over the weekend while they were reading Laymon. Discussion ended up in interesting places, and this time I had a place to take them to. After about 10 minutes of full class discussion, I had them turn to their neighbor and discuss whether or not they think an accumulation of personal experience can lead to something objective and undeniable fact or phenomenon. This kicked things into higher gear and we reached a level of discussion that allowed us to talk about the rhetorical shifts people make when they deny the existence of racism in America.
But then we moved into sharing entries from journals. The way Iâve structured this particular unit is about process, and each class is divided into three sections: discussion of the previous reading, sharing, and writing time. Weâve done the work to build trusting relationships in this class, though I fear it may have come too late in the semester. Two people share, and the second person shares a very personal entry about how because he was born in South Korea, he has to leave at the end of this school year to perform his mandatory two-year military service in a country heâs never lived in. The class is dead silent. The student obviously chokes up a little while reading, and he leaves to go to the bathroom, but he does come back. Suddenly Iâm worried again -- worried that in this class where half the students are people of color, Iâm asking them to do too much or all of the work, asking them to serve as the critical sounding board for their white classmatesâ growth. I havenât done any of my own writing or homework in the last week because in preparation for this unit Iâve been trying to find incisive, relatable personal essays by white people about their whiteness, about race, but I canât find any. Any! I just need some way to implicate my white students in this dance around identity and subjective experience; to show them that this is also about them, and itâs also about them doing work on themselves, not just listening to other peopleâs struggles.
At the same time of this project, I have a young male professor in a fiction writing workshop. Iâve rarely had young male professors and I feel myself bristle. I write about transmen, faggy transmen like myself, and weird sex and hormones, and Iâve only ever shared this stuff with teachers who are women. I think heâll never get it, or even worse, heâll only get part of it.
But thatâs not what happens. It takes me about a month to start thawing out, to stop immediately thinking all his exercises are stupid and all his comments slanted. Itâs after Iâve shared a big chunk of a novel Iâm working on that features a relationship between two trans men that he sits down with me in a cafe over coffee and devotes the next hour and a half to talking about these characters, this plot, this writing about something so dear to me that I unclench. Heâs clearly paid attention to the story and to what the characters are saying. He seems excited about the direction such a novel could take; he calls it âimportant work.â Heâs willing to sit and talk forever about the intricacies of transformation and whether or not thereâs a lineage of transgender authors/fiction that Iâm building on. Iâve never been able to have this kind of conversation with anyone, and now here I am, having it with a cisgender white man.
In among the joy at having found someone who recognizes what it is Iâm trying to do, thereâs some guilt, too, that maybe Iâm feeling so good about this recognition precisely because itâs being handed down in the form of approval from someone who physically embodies the dominant American academic institution: cis straight white male teacher. Am I so happy because Iâm finally being told itâs OK to write about these topics and still be told that what Iâm producing can be counted as âLiterature?â And is my writing allowed to own this capital âLâ above writing by queer people of color or trans women precisely because I am a white, binary-presenting trans man?
I havenât quite reconciled with all these issues that grow between who I am and what I want to do.
Iâve closed off a lot of parts of myself in the last few years since starting to transition in 2011. Iâm much more careful of my body now than before. Iâm wary about how it moves through space, how excess physical movements can be interpreted as dangerous masculine aggression. I used to be an athlete, and Iâd spend my days running and jumping through school and town on long distance runs; now Iâm wary of how people can misinterpret my body, and so I never feel comfortable in groups of people, especially men, or in public space in general. Especially troubling for me are the ways in which these ways of closing off have forced similar truncations in my loved ones. My partner, Greg, is an open person, a musician who approaches everyone he meets with love and an open mind. But soon after we started dating several incidents made me realize that it was too triggering for me to walk in public with him knowing that he might choose to engage a stranger in an innocent interaction that could turn hostile if they questioned my gender. I asked him to please change the way he moved in public, and he did. It was both a touching moment of being understood and a heart wrenching instance of feeling implicated in a closing off of a loverâs personality.
Itâs only recently that Iâve found what might be a new place I can try opening up again. Ironically, the classroom provides a rigid set of social standards where it feels safe for me to open up parts of my identity to my students. I have more power to control the narrative than with a group of strangers, and Iâm not afraid of physical violence in the classroom. I realize, of course, that not all teachers feel this way, especially others who are visibly not white men in a position of power. But Iâm finding that in being granted this privilege to speak in front of a class that there are ways in which I can use my identity as a trans man, sometimes openly, and my passing privilege as a cis white man, to open up to my students and perform the role of a person of power privileging marginalized narratives above the norm.
One student in particular has made me realize how much sway I hold in the lives of my students, many of whom have never met a person like me before. Early on in the semester I come out as trans to Max in a one-on-one conference. I realized that I need to figure out a different way of explaining my identity beyond just âtrans,â because he quickly comes back with âwhat is a trans?â But since that meeting Max has returned every 2-3 weeks for long discussions about his writing. He asks me if I think he could make it as an English major. He asks me questions about navigating family and romantic life, questions about how to balance his schoolwork with his commitment to the campus reserve unit he joined after basic training. Most of his questions Iâm not equipped to answer, but I do my best or else I let him down gently. He keeps coming back. I tell him that if a girl doesnât like him thatâs her choice, and youâll be happier when you find someone who really does like you. He writes about how heâs nervous about shouldering responsibility, despite being the oldest sibling when his family immigrated from Russia to the US when he was 6, and how being in the Army has been one way for him to offload some of this responsibility.
In class, too, interactions deepen. I assign an article about Deaf culture to prompt a discussion about the idea of a dominant culture, along with another article written by a biracial womanâs relationship to passing as a white straight woman in public. Iâve already come out in an earlier class, and I spontaneously find myself folding the word âcisgenderâ into the mix, not really intending to but there it is, written on the board in my hand writing and defined by my voice. This leads to another white male student to ask in front of the class if I ever identify myself as a trans male when in a group of men that I believe to be acting in a sexist or wrong way. I end up telling the class that sometimes I do and sometimes I donât, just like sometimes I come out as a trans teacher, and sometimes I donât. I talk about passing, and how sometimes itâs important for the dominant culture to hear criticism from without, and other times critique from inside a power structure itself is more effective.
I wish I was more prepared with a writing assignment or some way to fold this realization into their own writing. Like so many other times in this process I feel a short-lived happiness at having reached elusive discussion goals in class, which is then followed up by my realization that beyond writing prompts I havenât done the work to connect these discussions with writing goals for first year students.
One of the reasons that Iâm so interested in teacher identity is because I think about it all the time. I canât help thinking about gender and the many possible outcomes of disclosing my identity to a room full of students. Until I had done it I could obsess endlessly over the many different ways I should do it, and how it might go. But once I did come out to students, I realized that most students donât pay much attention to an instructorâs identity, and if I do want to use it as a chance to bring up social issues that otherwise wouldnât get talked about, the most important part would be to connect it in some way to writing strategies.
Itâs a double-edged sword. The writing teacher who feels hypocritical or silenced by keeping their sexual or gender or other invisible identity secret from their students, may find that divulging this information tips the balance to the opposite extreme where instructor identity arrives at the forefront of the class without any immediately obvious connection to the goals of teaching first-year writing. In my experience, Iâve been reminded that writing doesnât âget taughtâ through social and cultural issues just by virtue of thinking about complex ideas.
Clearly this is no real pedagogical breakthrough, and if I were more widely read in leading writers and academics in the field Iâd be able to cite some appropriately scholarly sources right here. But the more important point for me to take away from all of this has been that as a queer and trans teacher, it was important for me to address my identity directly as a first-year teacher. It had become my elephant in the room, and until I experimented with engaging with it in the classroom, I couldnât move past a narrow definition of âclassroom diversity.â Because my head was so engaged with identity politics, I assigned a narrowly focused group of readings that also engaged with similar issues. Race, gender, sexuality, class and religion were all topics we discussed in class, and ultimately topics that my students chose, perhaps feeling urged to do so because they saw these as issues I was passionate about or interested in. Some students were engaged by the material, but the majority of essays produced regurgitated messages from class discussions without really applying such messages to their own lives or looking beyond into the implications these issues had on their own writing.
And how could I expect them to make those connections on their own? Itâs not an easy jump to make between the structures of racial inequality in America and constructing a logical essay with a clear flow of ideas and purpose. Arguably, I was teaching them to think and write about one topic for content, and then evaluating them on the form the essay took instead. There are places where form and content can overlap (most readily in the need for first-year college writers to understand how to build a complex, nonbinary argument, no matter their field of study), but maybe what I need to do more of is push these two closer together.
After all, thatâs what most of my own autoethnography has done. Iâve written about teaching in order to better understand how to teach from my particular position. My students should also be given the opportunity to write about writing in order to better understand how to craft an essay. For some students maybe writing is tied strongly to their identities, like it is for me; for other students this wonât be the case, and thatâs OK. There are other things writing does aside from explore identity, like make an argument, evoke emotion, convince people in power to hire you, etc. And investigating this relationship to writing in order to develop writing as a skill still doesnât have to be a bloodless activity. Many of the discussions I had with my students this semester, slightly reframed and connected to the process of writing and personal writing histories, could work in this context.
