Trans youth and the labour of world-building


LJ Slovin, University of Toronto

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 are presumed to encounter. This presentation offers that accommodation approaches in schools participate in narrowly defining a particular form of trans identity as the only or ‘right’ way to be trans. Drawing on scholarship from queer and trans theory, youth studies, and the field of education, this presentation questions an investment in legibility and visibility as incontrovertible paths to safety and progress for trans and gender-nonconforming youth. Many trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming youth are missed and excluded by these policies and practices because their genders and lives do not align with whitewashed, colonial, and ableist societal expectations of transness. Based on a yearlong ethnography in a high school alongside youth who were rarely recognized as trans, this presentation explores the often-unnoticed labour youth performed as they worked to exist and thrive, regardless of whether others understood them. Trans and gender-nonconforming youth worked hard every day to navigate the transphobic elements of East City High, a large urban high school in Western Canada. However, they likewise performed the labour of world-making, which was aimed at creating other, queerer spaces in the school where they could exist outside and in rejection of adults’ narrow ideas about gender. Thinking alongside Tourmaline, Stanley, and Burton’s concept of trapdoors as well as José Muñoz’s work on queer utopia, I consider the myriad forms of care work that youth engaged in to not only navigate the cisheteronormativity of East City High but to make queer and trans worlds of their own. I explore youth’s creation of trapdoors , queer and trans utopias that already exist yet were rarely noticed by adults in the school. The youth built these physical and imaginary worlds as important spaces of escape and refuge where they could explore and engage with their genders and each other more expansively. This presentation highlights one of these worlds: the tech booth. I examine how 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 labour youth performed as they explored and lived in their gender-nonconformity. They engaged in this labour because they cared – about themselves, their genders, and the trans communities they were building together at the school. Through their care and their labour, they show us that different, queerer worlds are possible in schools. In fact, they are already happening, if we know where to look.

This paper will be presented at the following session: