Being transgender at university
A student blogger explains the difficulty of reconciling academic study of trans issues and the actual experience at university
- Student life
Lu Allan
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Trans (self-)advocacy isnt some amusing pastime of mine. Its a survival technique, and its exhausting & unrewarding. Morgan Potts ()
Earlier this year, I rolled up to my sociology 1B The Body within Society classes full of fresh-faced, naive enthusiasm; as a non-binary trans person, I was certain that my unconventional experience of having a body within society, and the wisdom that Id acquired because of it, would provide me with a deeper understanding of the lecture content and equip me with plenty to talk about in seminar discussions.
The reality, however, was quite different. Despite having read up extensively on gender, bodies, etc, in my own time, studying these things in an academic context was incredibly alienating. Being transgender, never mind non-binary, was a phenomenon that was either overlooked completely or totally misrepresented. None of the academic reading I encountered about trans issues resonated with me, or how Ive navigated my identity, whatsoever. Once, in a class discussion, I tentatively suggested that not all women had vaginas and not all men penises and you couldve cut the tension with a knife. It was all very invalidating. I started to doubt myself a lot.
A lot of people just dont get the concept of being transgender. Im one of them. Ive done my research; I have the lived experience and yet how gender works on an individual level why some people suit the labels given to them while others very much do not is a total mystery to me. And therein lies the problem: academia requires things to be got. As long as trans identities and issues exist, academia will take them on and overanalyse them into abstraction meaning that folk like me have to spend a lot of time and energy having tiring debates and writing articles such as this one.
I feel I cant offer a definitive solution to the alienation of transgender people in academia and the study of gender: I see indubitable value in research about any aspect of social and psychological life; however, on a real-life level, Id really rather not have to deal with my existence being the object of scrutiny or the subject of competing discourses.
