Join the College of Education Studies on Monday, April 15, 2024, 4:30 at PAC100 for our Colloquium talk presented by LJ Slovin.
For decades, caring adults have understood trans and gender-nonconforming youth as especially at-risk in schools. As a result, they have worked to create inclusive policies to accommodate, protect, and safeguard these young people from the increased challenges they encounter. I offer that accommodation approaches in schools participate in narrowly defining a particular form of trans identity as the only or ‘right’ way to be trans. Many trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming youth are missed and excluded by these policies and practices. Based on a yearlong ethnography in a high school in Western Canada alongside youth who were rarely recognized as trans, this talk will explore the often-unnoticed labor youth performed as they worked to exist and thrive, regardless of whether others understood them. Youth daily worked to invite expansive genders in school, demonstrating the potential and importance of educational spaces that want trans youth to be present. I call on educators to cultivate a desire for youth to be and grow up trans by turning away from ideas of risk and concern. This is the critical labor youth performed in the school as they explored and lived in their gender-nonconformity. They engaged in this labor because they cared – about themselves, their genders, and the trans communities they were building together. Through their care and their labor, they show us that different, queerer worlds are possible in schools. In fact, they are already happening, if we know where to look.
LJ Slovin is the Martha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Their book, Fierce, fabulous, and fluid: How trans high school students work at gender nonconformity (NYU Press, 2024), is based on a yearlong ethnography in a high school and interrogates how dominant approaches to trans-inclusivity in schools reproduce constrained understandings of trans identity that are informed by and uphold structures of whiteness, settler colonialism, and ability. Slovin was a Vanier Scholar, the 2020 recipient of the Pat Clifford Award, and the 2021 recipient of the Queer SIG Article of the Year Award at AERA. Their work has been published in Curriculum Inquiry, Journal of LGBT Youth, Sex Education, and RERM.
