Methodology as Pedagogy: Trans Lives,Social Science,and the Possibilities of Education Research

Abstract

Over the past decade, public awareness of transgender people has rapidly increased. Yet people who do not conform to the expectations of their assigned gender often face social prejudice and structural marginalization. Within this context, an increasing number of education researchers have shown interest in taking up questions related to transgender communities. Although there is great potential for education researchers to play a useful role in cultivating trans-competent educational environments, this heightened engagement raises new challenges. How can education researchers design methodologies that avoid reinforcing the structures and epistemologies that have done harm to trans people? This article places that question in historical context through an overview of the relationship between transgender people and social science research over the last century, and the emergence of transgender studies as a response to that history. Then, the article presents a consideration of the role of education research in bridging tensions between the fields of social science and transgender studies.

Within the first four months of 2022, nearly 240 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced to U.S. state legislatures. Most of them target transgender ¹ people, particularly trans youth in schools. This represents a growing pattern: in 2021, more than 150 anti-trans bills were proposed (Krishnakumar, 2021; Lavietes & Ramos, 2022). Many of these bills and policies have sought to ban or even criminalize trans youth’s participation in recreational school sports or their access to trans-affirming health care. Others restrict discussions of gender and sexual orientation with young children in public schools, like Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law passed in March 2022, which states that “Classroom instruction … on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards” (Diaz, 2022). There are also increasing attacks on adults who support trans youth: in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott directed the state Department of Family and Protective Services to launch child abuse investigations into parents and guardians that support trans-affirming health care for their children (Yurcaba, 2022). In Idaho, proposed House Bill 675 would have made it a felony to support trans-specific health care for youth, but included a provision that would allow for non-consensual surgeries on intersex ² infants (Reuters, 2022). Both proposals sent shockwaves of fear throughout trans communities living within an increasingly hostile political climate.

Although the targeting of trans people has dramatically intensified, gender surveillance and regulation are hardly new. There is virtually no part of the human lifespan that remains unaffected by legal and medical gender categories. Gender categorization increasingly begins even before birth, ranging from the use of technologies that enable sex-selected embryos for in vitro fertilization (World Health Organization, 2020) to “gender reveal parties” that imagine a particular future for a child based on their perceived genital anatomy (Smith, 2020). Sex assignment is a mandated item on birth certificates, which register citizenship, provide access to public services, and form the basis for legal identification for the rest of a person’s life. Those of us who do not conform to the expectations of our assigned gender often face a range of obstacles, ranging from social prejudice, to inconsistent legal documentation, to extraordinary violence—which are exacerbated by racism and poverty (Spade, 2007). Although transgender people often face the greatest harms produced by how gender is structured in the United States, the structures themselves shape the lives of the entire population.

Public awareness of trans people has rapidly increased over the last decade. Yet, as our legislative scapegoating reveals, hypervisibility without adequate support has made us vulnerable. Trans people have remained marginalized by the systems and institutions that govern our lives, including the public school (Keenan, 2017). Within this context, an increased number of education researchers have shown interest in exploring questions related to trans livelihood. Although there is potential for education researchers to play a useful role in cultivating trans-competent educational environments, this heightened engagement raises new challenges. How can education researchers avoid reinforcing practices that have historically done harm to trans people? Trans life is commonly characterized by the constant burden of explanation: exhausting interactions with clinicians in order to access competent medical care, navigating complex and bureaucratic legal systems, and describing the basic conditions of transness to family, friends, colleagues, and—yes—researchers. In order to avoid recreating the same struggles they may seek to eliminate, it is crucial that researchers seeking to support trans communities do so with care and caution.

Transgender existence is often framed as a recent emergence. Yet a closer look at the historical record reveals that trans and gender nonconforming people have been the subject of social science research for well over a century. In this article, I examine what social science has historically taught the public about trans existence, focusing on the United States and Western Europe. I highlight how social science research has operated pedagogically in shaping narrow and racialized public understandings of gender in the United States, and describe how trans studies aims to teach something different. Finally, I present a preliminary consideration of how trans studies might inform methodological practice and design in K–12 education research.

Methodology as Pedagogy

Research methodology functions as a kind of pedagogy. That is, the way that scholars study a topic shapes how people understand it. As Tuck and Yang (2014) write, academic scholarship often does little more than “reproduce stories of oppression in its own voice” (p. 227). Although education scholars may not view their methods as pedagogical in and of themselves, it is undeniable that research has played a key role in contributing to the ways that gender is (mis)understood. The decisions that researchers make about what kinds of questions to ask and data to collect, the theories that guide their analysis, and the presentation of data all contribute to knowledge production within the academy and among the public, including even how research participants may come to understand themselves (Bettcher, 2014). Within the context of the United States and Western Europe, social science research has historically emphasized the categorization of gender. In turn, the normative categories established through psycho-medical scholarship have been used to justify the management of legitimate genders within legal and administrative systems. Importantly, as I detail later in this article, administrative gender categories have been heavily shaped by the idea of race. These systems of governance position the lives and bodies of trans and gender nonconforming people as what critical trans theorist Eric Stanley (2011) has termed “fugitive flesh,” that is, a kind of criminal relationship to the governance of gender.

Throughout the United States, people commonly take gender for granted as a static and dichotomous binary. Among experts in the biological sciences, though internal controversies about the interpretation of human sex difference persist, it is widely accepted that sex and gender are far more complex than visual perceptions of anatomy (Ainsworth, 2015; Davis, 2015; Fausto-Sterling, 2012; Jordan-Young, 2011; Karkazis, 2008). Yet, graduate coursework in quantitative social science methodologies commonly refer to sex and/or gender as instructive examples of binary variables, a pedagogical decision that fails to engage with the full complexity of gender in favor of “collapsing the data” to remove trans and intersex individuals due to our small numbers within the general population (Currah & Stryker, 2015). Qualitative methodologies frequently treat gender as a simple matter of visual observation by a researcher rather than as a multifaceted sociocultural construct. When researchers oversimplify gender in favor of shorthand or efficient analysis, their methodological choices serve to teach the public a reductive understanding of a highly complex phenomenon. While this may serve the immediate goals of a researcher, it risks sacrificing rigorous scholarship and public education.

These methodological choices can have a harmful impact. Social science research has historically often contributed to what Subini Annamma (2017) refers to as the pedagogy of pathologization. Conceptualized within her qualitative study of the conditions facing incarcerated girls of color, Annamma extends from Foucault (1977), suggesting that the pedagogy of pathologization constructs criminality by establishing a normative taxonomy for all of humanity through three key mechanisms: labeling, surveillance, and punishment. In practice, these three mechanisms function to regulate human behavior, including the construction of (il)legitimate genders. Trans legal scholar Dean Spade (2015) has asserted that standards of classification like these become calcified in law and institutional policy. Spade emphasizes that administrative systems that “classify people actually invent and produce meaning for the categories they administer, and [ . . . ] those categories manage both the population and the distribution of security and vulnerability” (p. 32).

The effects of the pathologization of trans people are wide reaching and shape nearly every aspect of our lives. Specifically, pathologization contributes to pushing trans people out of public systems. According to the largest U.S. survey of trans-identifying people to date (James et al., 2016), a third of respondents reported negative experiences with health care providers related to being transgender, ranging from refusal of treatment to sexual assault. Twenty-three percent of respondents reported avoiding medical care out of fear of mistreatment. Seventy-seven percent of respondents reported gender-related mistreatment in K–12 schooling, and 17% reported leaving a school due to the severity of gender-related mistreatment. When these statistics are disaggregated by race and gender, trans girls and/or youth of color experience even higher rates of harm in schools. Taken together, this and other studies suggest a strong correlation between institutional mistreatment and pushout (Snapp et al., 2015).

Social Science Research, Knowledge Production, and the Racialized Management of Gender

What has social science taught the public about the lives of transgender people? Although the term “transgender” has only emerged into popular use since the 1990s, human transgression of socially produced gender norms and categories has been a subject of formally documented research since at least the mid-19th century. Throughout most of its over 100-year history, such research was overwhelmingly focused on the classification of “normal” and “abnormal” genders. This process of classification, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) writes, was (and is) central to the project of colonialism. The formal categorization of normal and deviant genders was used to justify the legal preservation of heterosexuality and racial stratification, serving as kind of public pedagogy of pathologization as described by Annamma (2017).

Early social scientific study was used to analyze gender nonconforming behavior in order to eliminate it, in large part because it was perceived as a threat to the preservation of white supremacy ³ through heterosexuality. Nineteenth-century gender nonconformity was generally understood by European medical and social scientists as a disorder, guided by the idea that “whereas physicians had first believed that medical and nervous disorders were the result of unnatural behaviours, psychiatrists now took a different view, suggesting that such disturbances were actually the cause of sexual deviance” (Oosterhuis, 2000, p. 133). For example, Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s highly influential 1886 work, Psychopathia Sexualis, featured a lengthy list of sexual ⁴ pathologies, including “men, without exception, [who] feel themselves to be females; [and] the women, without exception, [who] feel themselves to be males” (p. 280). Krafft-Ebing believed that “sexuality is the most powerful factor in individual and social existence” (p. 1), and emphasized that men and women must be “well bred” in order to continually improve the so-called genetic quality of the human race. Krafft-Ebing’s scholarship on gender and sexuality relied on racist ideology, treating gendered forms of embodiment in places like South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa as barbaric and primitive. Through their taxonomy of normal and deviant genders, the work of Krafft-Ebing and others shaped public understanding of the racialized meaning of gender and helped lay the ground for the development of eugenic science at the turn of the century (Ordover, 2003).

Throughout the history of social science, there has been a vocal minority of scholars who viewed gender nonconformity as a benign human variation that did not warrant corrective treatment. In 1910, prominent German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld published Die Transvestiten, among the first scholarly efforts to depathologize homosexuality and gender nonconformity. Hirschfeld’s work was a landmark shift away from general practice that aimed to extinguish gender nonconformity and toward examining the social conditions that seemed to cause harm or distress for trans people. Hirschfeld was given the authority to issue then-required medical licenses for cross-dressing, and successfully engaged in an educational campaign with Berlin’s police to help them understand cross-dressing as harmless behavior (Mancini, 2010, p. 67). He founded the Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, where trans people built and shared knowledge, and where the first documented sex reassignment surgery was performed in 1931. As Adolf Hitler rose to power, he reportedly referred to Hirschfeld as “the most dangerous Jew in Germany” (Stryker, 2008, p. 40) likely because of the perceived threat that Hitler believed Hirschfeld posed to the “hereditary quality” of the German people (Weikart, 2009). Brownshirts raided the Institute for Sexual Sciences in 1933, destroying more than 10,000 texts in one of the first instances of Nazi book burning (Haeberle, 1981; Weikart, 2009). Hirschfeld’s legacy highlights one of the most extreme cases of how support for trans existence has been interpreted as a threat to social reproduction, and illustrates that the struggle for trans survival and knowledge production has endured for far longer than many might think.

Throughout the history of the United States, the legal and medical construction of gender worked in tandem with the construction of racial hierarchy. María Lugones (2010) and Sylvia Wynter (2003) assert that the racial ideology of colonialism positioned colonial subjects outside of what Wynter referred to as the “ethnoclass concept of the human” (p.314), a system that aimed to stratify the living world through Eurocentric norms of gender and sexuality. Black studies scholar C. Riley Snorton (2017) argues that the construction of U.S. racial ideology depended upon conformity to gender categories formed through the prism of Whiteness, which consistently placed people of color outside its borders. In this context, gender became a “material staging ground” (p.83) for Black fugitivity – that is, expressing modes of being beyond the gendered structures of white supremacy. In sum, as sociologist Tey Meadow writes (2017), “Claims to gender legitimacy are always strained through the mesh of racial legitimacy” (p.1307).

Managing Gender Through the Child

Gender nonconforming children have historically had a particularly complicated relationship to research. Historian Jules Gill-Peterson (2018) reveals disturbing evidence of how 20th-century social science and medical research aimed at studying gender often treated “the child’s body [as] a central living laboratory . . . while at the same time actual children were rendered passive and invisible within the closure of its discourse” (p. 36). Gill-Peterson explains that, over the course of the 20th century, researchers began to understand childhood gender as “plastic”—or, flexible. Researchers like John Money argued that chromosomes and gonadal structure were not reliable predictors of a person’s gender role, instead pointing to assigned sex and socialization as more impactful in shaping a person’s self-concept (Money et al., 1955). Instead of using this as motivation for deregulating inflexible systems of gender as they were imposed upon children, or seeking ways to compassionately and ethically work with children directly to more deeply understand the social meaning of gender, the most influential 20th-century U.S. researchers saw it as their goal to “to normalize the development of intersex or gender nonconforming children so that they would grow up to be either a woman or a man, and nothing else” (Gill-Peterson, 2018, p. 119). This process of normalization was heavily focused on White children, who were seen as having greater potential for assimilation into a normative gender binary than children of color. To illustrate this point, Gill-Peterson (2018) presents detailed evidence of common practice at the Brady Institute in Baltimore, which opened in 1915 as a hub for the early medical treatment of intersex children, and whose protocols would later be used to facilitate gender transition more broadly. The Institute’s primary focus was on the medical production of binary sex rather than responding to a child’s expressed sense of self. Many patients’ families resisted or refused treatment. This seems to have been especially true of Black families, who were often written off by Institute staff as “difficult” or combative (p. 79) surrounding treatment of their intersex or gender nonconforming children. Gill-Peterson argues that anti-Black racism was a central feature of the Brady Institute, which treated Black children as “suitable experimental subjects because of presumed access and disposability,” whereas White children “were framed as exhibiting the potential for a normative cure or at least improved normality” (p. 79).

The imposition of gender as it was understood in Western Europe was also a key element of global imperialist expansion, including the structures of colonial schooling. The pedagogy of imperialism strongly featured normative teaching about gender through a Eurocentric frame (Lugones, 2010; Wynter, 2003). For example, in his book on the residential schooling of Indigenous children within the United States throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, D. W. Adams (1995) wrote, “In the eyes of the reformers no sphere of Indian life was more reprehensible than the relations between the sexes” (p.189). The carceral structures of residential schooling included an emphasis on assimilation into Anglo-American gender roles, including everything from haircuts to clothing to familial organization. Full discussion of the web of connections between schooling, gender, and the maintenance of white supremacy is beyond the scope of this article. However, it is crucial that education researchers seeking to study gender are aware that (1) Eurocentric ideas about gender have been made justifiable through academic research and scholarship, (2) that these ideas have pathologized transgender existence, and (3) that while the gendered structures of white supremacy have been imposed upon virtually all people in colonial societies, the design of these structures has historically served to facilitate the reproduction of a White and wealthy ruling class.

Trans Studies and the Possibilities of Education Research

The Emergent Pedagogy of Trans Studies

The word “transgender” was popularized ⁵ within the trans community as a grassroots attempt to reclaim and subvert clinical terminology. It became more widely used after the publication of Leslie Feinberg’s (1992) pamphlet Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come. Feinberg’s use of the word was different from how it is sometimes understood by the general public today. It was not meant to describe only those who transition from one discrete legal/medical gender category to another—that use of the word is largely rooted in medicine. Instead, Feinberg used “transgender” as an umbrella term meant to catalyze a grassroots social movement. This was a kind of pedagogical decision in its own right, one intended to invite political connectivity among all people who did not fit within the often harshly enforced “social constraints” (p. 5) associated with strictly defined gender categories. Insisting that “simplistic and rigid gender codes are neither eternal nor natural,” Feinberg argued that gender self-determination was crucial to transgender liberation, echoing the demands of other trans activists like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. The pamphlet called for solidarity among transgender people in a common struggle against colonialism and capitalism, which Feinberg explicitly articulated as the basis of contemporary transgender oppression.

Trans studies grew out of trans social movements in the 1990s. Originally grounded in the humanities, the field of trans studies has informed a wide range of research and scholarship across academic disciplines around the world. Importantly, trans studies does not simply refer to any scholarship addressing trans existence. To the contrary, there are far more studies that address trans phenomena than would be considered to fall within the area of trans studies. In its early formation, trans studies sought to cultivate knowledge that would teach the public about gender in new ways. Rather than measuring and defining gender, trans studies called into question the very epistemological underpinnings of how gender is understood, treating trans existence itself as a site of knowledge production. Susan Stryker (2006), a trans historian and one of the field’s initiators, described the foundations of trans studies in her introduction to the first Transgender Studies Reader:

The new field approached gender not as a system for correlating two supposedly natural, stable, and incommensurable biological sexes (male and female) with two normative, fixed, and equally incommensurable social categories (man and woman). Rather, it called into question that entire epistemological framework, and conceived of gender as yet another global system within which a great many diverse and specific forms of human being were produced, enmeshed, and modified along multiple axes of signification. In a world seemingly bent on becoming one, transgender studies grappled with the imperative of counting past two, when enumerating the significant forms of gendered personhood. (p. 8)

More recently, trans studies has returned to questions related to the conditions of poverty, colonialism, and global capitalism that were at the heart of some early trans social movements (Ferguson, 2018; Stryker & Aizura, 2013). This intentional shift is meant to move away from the initial predominance of unmarked Whiteness and focus on the United States within the academic field of trans studies. It is also a response to the neoliberal institutionalization of trans studies that risks absorbing trans people into existing social paradigms without an in-depth analysis of the foundational structures that have led to our marginalization. These institutional moves toward inclusion often rely on a normative construction of a legitimate trans subject. Instead, contemporary trans studies asks questions about how people come to understand gender and embodiment, how those understandings shape the material conditions of the living world, and the relationship between gender and cultural production.

Contemporary trans studies is a porous field that defies neat definition. Like other academic fields, it has a multiplicity of internal debates. However, scholars who engage with trans studies generally unite on several overlapping points of agreement. First and perhaps foremost, trans studies holds that sex and gender are more complex than the institutionally produced systems of classification that govern lives all over the world. Second, trans studies scholarship argues that institutionally prescriptive and inflexible gender categories contribute to increased vulnerability for those who challenge them. Third, trans studies broadly aims to contribute to material change in the conditions of trans life by identifying and dismantling the root causes of transgender oppression, and contributing to the development of alternate social formations. Instead of bolstering systems of identity management and categorization, many trans studies theorists seek to cultivate societies that support gender self-determination, suggesting, for example, that “wildness . . . should characterize the health of our gender ecologies” (Stryker & Aizura, 2013, p. 7). Trans studies reaches toward a world where access to life-sustaining resources does not depend upon one’s institutional legibility.

Trans Studies and K–12 Education Research

Trans studies has always been a form of educational praxis. Furthermore, the academy and the wider public have always been learning about transness, though not always by name and not always explicitly. As societies assign meaning to gender, they dialectically assign meaning to those who exist outside its governing parameters. Much of that meaning-making takes place in schools. However, despite that there have always been young people and school workers who challenge legal and medical gender categories, the U.S. education system has largely reinforced prescriptive and inflexible structures of gender governance. Indeed, as previously mentioned, school and other public institutions have historically often served as an explicit means to socialize children into Eurocentric gender norms. In addition to the harmful origins and continued impacts of the pedagogy of pathologization embedded within the dominant structures of gender, the common acceptance of these systems without interrogation in schools and education research forecloses meaningful public engagement with the full complexity of gender.

As a field devoted to the study of teaching and learning, education research could lead scholarly reconsideration of the pedagogical implications of research methodology. What do research methods teach researchers and the public about gender? How does that facilitate knowledge production surrounding gender within the academy and other educational environments? To what extent do methodologies hold public understanding captive within prescriptive categories that structure differential life chances, or generate new knowledge to expand public understandings of gender toward the cultivation of less violent societies? K–12 education research is well-positioned to contribute to the further development of research, scholarship, and professional practice that, for example, aims to (1) account for and repair the history of harm done through the regulation of gender as a racialized construct in U.S. schooling, (2) examine the role of schooling in shaping the contemporary landscape of gender, and (3) to build from that knowledge in order to engage in a careful process of working toward less harmful educational formations. The practice of education is a fundamentally relational one. Whether explicit or not, people learn a great deal about what it means to exist together in shared space through education within and beyond schools. In a society where gender is among the most central mechanisms of social categorization within and beyond schools, what are education researchers doing to deepen knowledge about gender? Here, meaningful engagement with trans studies has much to offer our field as a whole.

It is not my intention to suggest that trans studies has not already made an impact on the field of education research and scholarship in the United States. Over the course of the last 20 years, a relatively small but robust body of research and scholarship has emerged that addresses trans experience as it relates to education. Although there has been somewhat more research on trans life in higher education (e.g., Beemyn, 2019; Courvant, 2011; Garvey et al., 2019; Jourian, 2017; Marine, 2017; Nicolazzo, 2016; Nicolazzo et al., 2015; Stewart & Nicolazzo 2018), nearly 70 peer-reviewed journal articles have been published that focus on or engage extensively with trans experience and knowledge production in U.S. K–12 education ⁶ (Meyer & Regan, 2021). Notably, the majority of these publications have appeared in specialist journals like the Journal of LGBT Youth, Gender and Education, and Sex Education. ⁷ Many of these studies address the urgent and necessary task of describing the challenges faced by trans youth and their families as subjects, and/or consider the policies and practices that schools might implement to support the immediate practical needs of students who specifically identify as trans (e.g., Abreu et al., 2020; Greytak et al., 2013; Mangin, 2020; McGuire et al., 2010; Meyer et al., 2016; Wyss, 2004). However, there has been somewhat less engagement with the literature produced in the larger field of trans studies as a conceptual lens or methodological guide in examining the historical, political, and/or epistemological underpinnings of how gender has been (re)produced as a dominant, stable, and binary category within U.S. K–12 schools (e.g., Jones, 2018; Kean, 2020; Keenan, 2017; Mayo, 2017; Stiegler, 2016; Suárez et al., 2018; Woolley, 2017) and teacher education (miller, 2016; Rands, 2009; Sifuentes, 2019). Furthermore, despite 30 years of interdisciplinary trans studies scholarship that has now shaped a variety of academic fields, there is scant evidence of shifts in general methodological practice surrounding the categorization and interpretation of gender in K–12 education research writ large. My citations here are not exhaustive. It is beyond the purpose of this article to provide a comprehensive overview of the existing literature in this area (for a more detailed review, see Meyer, this issue, pp. 315–323), but I highlight this state of the field to draw attention to the profoundly limited impact of trans studies on education research methods more broadly. It is far past time for education researchers to engage with gender in greater depth and complexity, foregrounding its relationship to other forms of subjection.

Here, I caution that there is no quick fix to trans oppression. It would be wholly insufficient to simply add one more category to previously used methods of data collection, or to create avenues for individuals to change their gender in existing information systems without interrogating why that information is being collected and to what end. If only it were that simple! Instead, what trans studies demands of scholars is reexamination of the foundational epistemologies that undergird how gender is constructed and managed in public life, reckoning with the impact of those epistemologies, as well as reconsideration of how their work might contribute to constricting or expanding possibilities for human expression and its interpretation.

Conclusion

The field of education research has a responsibility to do all that is within our power to support systems of public education that serve the entirety of the public. As a field, can we rightfully say that we have done as much as we can? Regardless of whatever hostility there might be toward trans people, the basic fact remains that transness is a part of public life. What has education research done to, as Stryker (2006) suggests, “count past two” in considering the possibilities for gendered personhood? What has education research done to engage with knowledge produced by those who live across, between, and beyond the historically racialized borders of legal gender? To date, trans life has been treated as a specialist—and therefore marginal—area of study in education. Trans studies, however, invites a reconsideration of general practice in scholarship and research methodology toward the creation of K–12 schools that more carefully engage with the complexity of the living world.