Trans Teacher, Detrans Student

He walks into my classroom during a sparsely attended remediation session, as he often does, though he is not a student of mine, and anxiously bounces around the space as his friends eat lunch. His presence is familiar, as is the running joke that he will not tell me his name. He is Nameless to me.

Noticeably jittery and hovering around my desk as I grade tests, he digs through his phone, ever so often stuttering “hold on,” “look,” “should I show you this one?” A few long minutes later, he shows me a photo of himself the year prior. He is recognizable but different. His hair was shorter, his eyes brighter, and his posture more confident. I look up from the phone to find him teary-eyed and trembling. He cries at my desk for an hour.

Nameless has detransitioned; he has reassumed his assigned gender following a transition, a decision that is nearly always taken due to the pressure of disapproving family and community. A teenage boy who mustered up the courage to look like himself for half of the previous school year, he decided to go on a weeklong field trip “as a girl.” The way he describes his assigned gender as an experiment is painfully relatable. He relays to me the excruciating realization — one that my transmasculine friends often tell — that everyone is nicer to him when he’s a girl. In his own words, he describes a universal truth of being trans: One’s safety is in the hands of the beholder, be it the state, their teachers, their therapists, their friends, their family, or, God forbid, anyone who clocked them.

It is plain how dire his need for support has become. He tells me about disinheritance from his family, guilt for “burdening” his parents after they immigrated, rage and jealousy reserved for a close, cisgendered friend who was supported when he came out as gay, and the emptiness left by a trans friend who ended their life. The familiarity of his abjection cuts the air of teenage fatalism that usually finds itself across my desk; the seething resentment of life before transition haunts me like a phantom limb.

I’m torn. Sending Nameless to the school’s guidance counselors and social workers risks disclosure that could make living at home more dangerous. He could be placed in the custody of child welfare, where children are routinely forced to trade abusive households for an abusive system, where migrant families are systematically eroded. My distress must be showing because Nameless stops me and says he’s going to be careful about what he says to me, so as not to put me in any professionally compromising situation. My heart breaks for this child. How many times has he been let down that his instinct is to protect the teacher?

It’s not as if caution isn’t on my mind. I’m transfemme; if most teachers feel like they’re walking on eggshells when dealing with students’ personal struggles, I’m walking on tissue paper. It feels like a matter of time before a parent claims I’m grooming their child by supporting them. Me and Nameless are in murky territory. There is nothing in the professional code that addresses my transness nor any school policies that address his. We are just making up what we can with the little we were given, to ensure that we survive. As a teacher, I’m scared to voice truths that — as a trans person — I know I must.

I tell Nameless that he is right. Being trans is dangerous. He is not being treated fairly at home, where his Latine identity precludes his transness, or at school, where gender discourse is situated in a colorblind vacuum. The only way he could be expected to feel was angry. I offer no optimistic platitudes; I know too many people for whom home was a grave they narrowly escaped, to say nothing of school. I tell him that I still experience outbursts of violent harassment at the hands of strangers. I, too, mute myself when I am unsure if I am safe. I offer Nameless the pragmatic hope of finding a community: trans friends who love him unconditionally and trans elders who could share with him the knowledge that few live long enough to hold; trans migrants who will name feelings he can’t yet. In that, he will find a way to retransition, to survive, and to endure the struggle we share, as well as those we don’t. I tell him to find that community outside of school because school is not ready for kids like him — kids for whom transition is not a frictionless act of resistance and self-determination but a potentially costly, treacherous one.

When the bell rings, we go silent. A moment passes and I say I’m tired of trans kids dying. Voice still trembling, he says he is, too.

Erasing the Way to Trans Visibility

When I began teaching in high schools last year, I was not ready for the condition in which I would find trans students, for whom I was often the first trans adult they had encountered. In between periods, students with heavy hearts sought refuge in my classroom: a prodigious pupil who felt they were not “non-binary enough” to compete in a math contest for self-identified girls and gender nonconforming youth; a young transwoman looking over her shoulder every other word as she came out to me; and many casual retellings of transphobic harassment — of a variety that I had naively presumed anachronistic — on school premises. I was inevitably disarmed when students shed their poise to entrust me with their feelings that were deemed unruly elsewhere in the school; feelings that held a mirror to my life in discomfiting ways. Despite vocally advocating for the liberatory potential of teaching throughout my teacher training, the acute contradiction of being an authority in a public institution while living through the rising tide of state-sanctioned transphobia was exacerbated by those exchanges.

Given that predicament, it was jarring to see other teachers’ doors often adorned with pride flags and messaging to the effect “everyone is welcome.” Entire lives, like Nameless’, are lived in the margins of those words. Stories that stay in the margins as they shrink point us toward the inevitable confrontation with the systemic nature of oppression, past a rhetoric of inclusion, toward collectively reckoning with the role our schools play in that system. The root of my trepidation, my discomfort, in supporting Nameless was that it required me to be honest about the institution that brought us together. No matter how welcoming I am to my students, public schools are run by states that manufacture and materialize transphobia, mass deportations, and incarceration; that are funding the bombing of schools — students and teachers alike — in Palestine. They are often the sites where legislation that endangers trans youth is meant to be enacted. 

It is infuriating, unjust, and violent, yet difficult to admit to a child whose well-being I am ostensibly meant to ensure within the school; it is a contradiction, an indictment of my profession, and dehumanizes us both. I am in a compromised position, unable to opt out of participating in a system that is anything but liberatory. All that remained between me and Nameless, by the time our conversation was over, was a shared pain and solidarity by way of it. My choice was to defer to hopelessness or to accept the weighty truth his story carried, exerting ever more pressure on him as it was pushed into shrinking margins, and start chipping away at its mass.

Turning Pain into Practice

We cannot welcome trans youth into our classrooms without acknowledging the enduring, systemic nature of transphobia that follows them in. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are revered for rioting at Stonewall against police repression. But they were poor, racialized revolutionaries, who were ostracized by bourgeois gays at the time despite their immeasurable contributions to gay liberation. Swiftly abandoned by that movement, trans women were all but barred from employment until recently and sex work was, by and large, the only means by which they could survive. Today, there are elevated levels of depression and, subsequently, substance use in trans communities. Many are precariously housed or unhoused. Incarceration is even more dangerous when trans. Trans health care is gatekept by the state, weaponized in a war of attrition on our communities. These things carry weight that does not serendipitously vanish when students walk into the classroom.

We must also recognize the distinct features of transphobia acting on individuals. For closeted, pre-, or detrans people, gaslighting is ambient; a deep-seated pain that denies its own existence. And if transitioning is healing, it is not without a price; many trans people have experienced violent reprisal for actualizing. It is a fundamentally relational act that is both lifesaving and life-determining. Healing one’s relationship to their gender requires a transformation that is witnessed by others, by a system that has inadvertently created the need to transition but bitterly refuses to acknowledge it.

What everyone, teacher or otherwise, can learn from the struggles of trans youth is not new pronouns or gender labels; it is the moral imperative to transgress when limits are imposed on our humanity — to transform ourselves, and everything around us, until the limits no longer exist. Including anyone in a system that was made to oppress them is a covert agreement to revise the historical record by casting that oppression as an unfortunate lapse of judgment, rather than a deliberate outcome. Instead, we must refuse to look away from history and dare to question the inevitability of the world we have inherited, assigned to us as arbitrarily as a gender at birth. To do so is to make possible a world where no one’s oppression is a foregone conclusion.

There is no step-by-step procedure to offer for teachers’ roles in this transformation — no lesson plan for revolution — but there is hope: If schools as we know them were made, they can be unmade and remade. When Nameless found me in the state he did, I understood it to be the product of teachers’ collective failure to offer that hope to our students, of a contagious complacency in our functions. To remake schools, we will have to begin by imagining them with our students, from the places of the dehumanization everyone experiences in these institutions, and be radically honest about the roles they have played in tightening the grip of social control.

Though truth-telling is a humble first gesture, the stakes are high. We are living through a global rise of fascism. During this ascent, teaching in public schools will only become more value-compromised. Whether or not the institutions can be saved is not entirely in our control, but the fundamentally humane practice of teaching transcends national identities, political pendulum swings, and the curricula that reflect them; there is enough historical precedent to know that surrendering teachers’ wills to fascists would be catastrophic. As the social fabric around us continues to erode, we have a collective responsibility to ensure that professionalism — our allegiance to the laws of a system that requires the subjugation of most for the benefit of a few — does not preclude our humanity, that of our students, or the practice of teaching toward the horizon of liberation.

* * *

A few weeks after my talk with Nameless, he finds me, drops off a card and runs away. The words are moving. This passage strikes me:

You’re the only adult I’ve been able to talk about it with and the only person to actually give me options with my home situation and to say anything coherent. I’ve never been able to get angry about it before because as you know, cis people get sad when you imply the society that they set up is the problem.

He signs it with his chosen name. I choose to start chipping away at the problem.