While doing research on trans-inclusive policies at the Five Colleges in Massachusetts, one of us (Perry Zurn) stumbled across a document referencing an old memo from 2001 on best practices for trans inclusion. It was this memo on which one of the colleges proposed to base their policies. Curiously, though, that memo was from American University (our home institution) and, more curiously, choice few of the recommended policies had been implemented at AU. Who created the document to begin with? And what happened in the intervening years? The institutional memory of a university is an interesting thing, given that the student body is constantly changing; as each senior class graduates and new students arrive, demographics, student interests, and priorities shift. When certain groups, like trans students, do not have solid institutional support or any structure for preserving continuity over the years, the likelihood of information being lost and projects abandoned becomes greater. Perhaps this was what contributed to the disappearance of this influential document. These were the considerations and the curiosities that spurred the development of “The AU Trans Experience: Then and Now” archival and oral history project.
“The AU Trans Experience: Then and Now” project is an interdisciplinary, collaborative, and multimedia effort that explores and celebrates transgender experience at American University over the past several decades. Working together with Stephen Masson (MA ‘19), Leslie Nellis (University Archivist), Erica Bethel (Library Marketing and Design), and undergraduate students Hana Hentzen and Scout Pruski, we collected archival data on trans life at AU and oral histories from current and former transgender students. We then wove these narratives into a display at the Bender Library and in StoryMaps digital archives.
As philosophers, how we envisioned and theorized the project is naturally situated within a broadening conversation about and with trans people in philosophy. Trans philosophers and allies have recently become more vocal not only about the difficulties of being trans in philosophy, but about the imperative of a new field: trans philosophy. As defined by the Trans Philosophy Project, trans philosophy is philosophical work that is accountable to and illuminative of transgender experiences, histories, cultural production, and politics. At its best, trans philosophy is also public philosophy, engaged in community concerns and collaboration. From language and politics to feminism and phenomenology, this new field of philosophy concerns itself with trans worldmaking in all its excruciating beauty and mundanity. In undertaking “The AU Trans Experience: Then and Now” project, we found that resisting forces of epistemic injustice, and reflecting deeply on trans wisdom and belonging, where we are provides a springboard for trans philosophy as public philosophy.
I. “The AU Trans Experience: Then and Now” Project
Digging into AU’s records of student groups, university offices and policies, and campus events, we were able to trace public trans life at AU back to the first uses of the word “transgender” in early 1990s organizing documents. Among the highlights of our archival discoveries were a 1997 trans-affirming student group called At Least 10%, a 2000c. “Tranarchy” student poster, a 2007 staff initiative for trans healthcare, a 2011 student project with the National Center for Transgender Equality, and evidence of the first trans studies course in 2016, not to mention flyers for events with trans visionaries such as Riki Wilchins, Kate Borstein, Leslie Feinberg, Loren Cameron, Jessica Xavier, Danna Galán, Marion Fixico, Janet Mock, Laverne Cox, Eli Clare, Che Gossett, and Mel Chen. Even this first round of archival work—focusing primarily on public-facing, university-approved records—showed that trans students and allies were there all along, fighting for recognition and claiming their space on campus. Filling out this picture are the oral histories with current and former transgender students. Here, students speak about their trans experience at AU, their journeys of gender exploration, how they navigate gendered spaces—physical and social—on campus, and their hopes for the future of trans life at AU.
Compiling the information is one matter but making it accessible and widely known gives that information power. Exhibiting the archives and oral histories at the Bender Library and on StoryMaps was a crucial component of the project. These platforms help raise awareness about transgender experience within the broader AU community and equip current trans students to situate themselves within a history of those who have come before. Our hope is that the project provides a rich springboard from which to imagine the future of trans life at AU (it is already energizing new trans-inclusive bathroom and name/pronoun policies), as well as across other campuses and beyond.
In this post, we describe in more detail the commitments, themes, and value of “The AU Trans Experience: Then and Now” project as a form of philosophical and public engagement.
2. Resisting Epistemic Injustice, Doing Genealogy
“I lived 17 years not knowing anything about my history or my community’s history. So I want to learn more about it and be able to help share it with other people.” –Kai Walther
“I have heard so many stories about students before me who have worked really hard on things at AU for trans students. And they’re just sort of like these fables of people whose faces I’ve maybe […] never seen or maybe I don’t even know their name.” –Blaine Smith
In Epistemic Injustice, Miranda Fricker identifies two aspects of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Hermeneutical injustice, which is the most salient to our understanding of trans history, is the injustice that occurs when there is a gap in collective knowledge that prevents a group from understanding an aspect of their experience or identity. The lack of knowledge and information about the trans community impedes present understandings of what it can mean to be trans and prevents the creation of a strong sense of community and shared identity. This hermeneutical gap is an injustice; trans narratives have historically been, and continue to be in many cases, suppressed. We see an example of how this lack of knowledge plays out in the students’ oral histories. They spoke frequently about not having the language or knowledge to understand their trans identities, nor did they know that there is a community of people who share their experiences.
Building—and making widely accessible—a trans history at AU contributes to remedying this injustice by unearthing knowledge that has been buried. In so doing, it creates potential for a deeper connection between and among trans people across generations, as well as between trans and cis people on campus. For the several months that the display was in the library, it was hard to miss. A large timeline in the bright colors of the trans pride flag stretched across two walls with tables in front displaying documents from the archive and other resources. Even if students didn’t look at the materials, there was no ignoring the display’s presence. It’s visibility and unavoidability made clear the existence and history of trans communities on campus and invited people to learn more.
Doing this work genealogically involves refusing to tell a single story. We tracked the evolution of language used to talk about trans issues, the shifting priorities of trans activism on campus, and the limits of trans inclusion in university policies. We also insisted on an intersectional picture of trans life at AU, marking where trans people of color, trans people with disabilities, and two-spirit people either surfaced or were sidelined. Having this complex picture of trans history equips trans people currently at AU to situate ourselves within a historical community and understand ourselves as part of an ongoing story. But it also challenges us to grapple with the contingencies of trans language, expression, and inclusion.
3. Doing Phenomenology, Activating Curiosity
“My journey isn’t finished yet. […] And in five years I don’t know that my identity is going to be the same as it is right now. It’s a very dynamic field for me. […] You don’t have to have it figured out right away. And that’s ok, that’s a journey you’re on.” –Ollie Steinberg
“I don’t know where we’re going necessarily, but I think we always need to be doing the listening and not just the telling of where we should be going.” –Charlie Everett
Perhaps the single strongest thread we found binding trans life across decades was a practice of listening or, one might even say, of doing phenomenology (Bettcher 2019b). Over and over again in the archives, people investigate what trans looks like, feels like, sounds like; what makes it possible, what makes it impossible, what makes it even remotely thinkable. In the oral histories, students explore their own experience of gender, of gendered embodiment, and of gender in intersubjective relation. They speak of how they are seen as they move through different spaces—ways in which their gender is read differently, and how their understanding of their own gender has fluctuated over time. Reflecting on transition, recognition, and belonging, students theorize gender through their own experiences of a gendered world.
But trans people do more than experience things. Trans people resist the cisheteronormative structures in which they find themselves thrown. As they contemplate their own experiences, trans people also ask—even demand—that cis people get curious, too. Questions motivate the oral histories and militate in the archives. They are used to initiate education, to challenge privilege, and to build community. These questions, often printed in bold, funky fonts on brightly colored paper, also ask cis people to step out of abstract conceptions of trans people generally and engage with their trans colleagues in their shared campus space. Decades later, these questions have returned to demand the consideration of an entirely new generation of students. Investigating oneself and enjoining others to do the same is a kind of phenomenological listening—a kind of political curiosity—that insists on freedom.
4. Trans Philosophy as Public Philosophy
Philosophers have a tendency to think and write about trans people in the abstract. Calls to accountability typically suggest reading philosophical work on trans issues and maybe a few trans memoirs; sometimes they even suggest acquainting oneself with a trans person. Demands for local accountability, however, are strikingly absent. Philosophers weighing in on trans issues are rarely—if ever—encouraged to connect with trans communities in their cities or on their own college campuses. But accountable theorizing requires more. We chose to generate wisdom and belonging where we are, in our communities and in our universities where trans people are consistently written out of employment and education opportunities, saddled with high levels of isolation, alienation, and minority stress, and neglected as thinkers in their own right (Pitcher 2018). Like many marginalized communities, the trans community is a counterpublic in the academy. Insofar as trans philosophy is engaged in the lived realities of trans people, then, trans philosophy at its best is a kind of public philosophy.
Public philosophy is a philosophy rooted in people and in place. Doing public trans philosophy involves doing philosophical work relevant to the trans community, with the trans community, and transforming philosophy itself on that journey. As philosophers undertaking this project, we had a sense of the philosophical meaning of the work, but by grounding the work in our campus community, we opened up the conversation to a much broader array of people. Anyone can see the project and learn something from it, be moved by it, without needing to know the philosophical theorizing behind it. On the other hand, those of us in philosophy can not only appreciate the theory behind the project but the challenges and invitations trans life poses to philosophy writ large. Engaging trans philosophy as public philosophy in and outside the academy, the project will culminate in a public event to discuss the importance of trans history to the development of self-knowledge, community building, and collective vision.
To trans students, staff, faculty, and community members alike, the visibility of this project sends a message. There is a space for you in the world and on campus; you are not alone here but part of a legacy of trans life and activism. There is space for you in the community and in the academy; there are others engaged in trans theorizing, claiming and holding open this space.
Perry Zurn
Perry Zurn is assistant professor of philosophy at American University. He researches in political philosophy, gender theory, and ethics. Zurn is the author of Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (forthcoming) and the co-author of Curious Minds (under contract). He is also the co-editor of Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition (2016), Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge (2020), and Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, 1970-1980 (forthcoming), as well as a special issue of Carceral Notebooks (2017).
Matthew Ferguson
Matt Ferguson recently graduated with his MA from American University. His research interests include ethics, social epistemology, trans philosophy, and phenomenology.
