General Editors’ Introduction PAISLEY CURRAH and SUSAN STRYKER s trans studies has become more institutionalized, it has rarely departed from A the norms of elite academic traditions that privilege research and publication over teaching, while neglecting critical interrogation of higher education insti- tutions themselves. While the market-based logics of outcomes assessment for teaching have begun to penetrate the domain of higher education, research out- put is still what really counts for getting a job, tenure, promotion, a better job, or even a raise. As the guest editors of this issue point out in their introduction, “in the three seminal publications that signal the emergence of trans* studies as a field (i.e., The Transgender Studies Reader, The Transgender Studies Reader 2,andTSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly), there is only one article that has a specific focus on formal educational contexts and pedagogical concerns.” While scholars of edu- cation and pedagogy have published highly regarded work in their own disci- plinary journals regarding the reproduction and contestation of gender norma- tivity in educational settings, there has been a marked absence of such scholarship in the field-defining venues of trans studies—until now. With this special issue on “Trans*formational Pedagogies,” guest editors Z Nicolazzo, Susan B. Marine, and Francisco J. Galarte redress such absences and argue that explicit attention to the institutional contexts of formal educa- tional activities should be central to trans studies in the moment of its increas- ingly rapid institutionalization. The collection of essays they offer here, described more fully in their own introduction to the issue, range from an examination of how teachers renaturalize the gender binary in classroom practices, to a study documenting the privileging of masculine norms of embodiment among trans men in college, to a dialogue between two trans teachers in Spain about their approaches to trans* pedagogy in public school classrooms. The articles make visible the reproduction of gender normativity in most educational settings and point to the transformative potential of education for dismantling such unthinking “genderism.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 2, Number 3 * August 2015 365 DOI 10.1215/23289252-2926328 ª 2015 Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/2/3/365/485483/365.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 366 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly Much of the content in this issue’s recurring sections amplify the issue’s theme. In “Book Reviews,” j wallace skelton and Amy McNally each offer reviews of several children’s books that feature “gender-independent” or transgender young people, while Cris Mayo reviews the revised second edition of trans icon Kate Bornstein’s popular My Gender Workbook, and Aaron Link profiles The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard, an anthology from all- trans Topside Press, which is gaining acceptance as a teaching text in trans lit- erature classes. In the “Research Note,” Tre Wentling’s discussion of classroom pronoun attribution reveals that roughly 50 percent of the students he surveyed report that teachers use the students’ preferred pronoun only some of the time or not at all, and that teachers were more likely to use the desired pronoun when a student expressed their gender identity in a binary rather than genderqueer manner. In the “Policies” section, which appears for the first time in this issue, Genny Beemyn and Dot Brauer examine resistance to making name and gen- der changes in student records at US colleges and universities; Don Romesburg chronicles the efforts of a committee of scholars to add LGBT history to Cali- fornia’s elementary and high school curriculum and describes how material on transgender history was especially likely to be overlooked. This issue debuts two other recurring sections: “Fashion” and “Transla- tions.” In the first, TSQ editorial board member Frank J. Galarte, who will reg- ularly curate the fashion section, offers a brief autobiographical reflection on what trans fashion means to him and what it can teach all of us, before interviewing textile, text, and film artist L. J. Roberts, whose embroidery of a photo of Jackie Mautner carrying a sign at the 2012 New York Drag March expressing solidarity with incarcerated trans woman Cece McDonald is the cover image for this issue of TSQ. In the inaugural translations section, translation scholar David Gramling has selected contributions from Italian medievalist Fabian Alfie, who translates a fourteenth-century bawdy tale involving cross-dressing, and from gender studies scholar S. P. F. Dale, who translates a statement by Ray Tanaka, contemporary Japanese author of Toransujenda¯ feminizumu (Transgender Feminism, 2006), on the neglect by feminist antiviolence activists of intimate partner violence expe- rienced by trans individuals. Paisley Currah is professor of political science and women’s and gender studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and general coeditor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Susan Stryker is associate professor of gender and women’s studies and director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona and general coeditor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/2/3/365/485483/365.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 Introduction Z NICOLAZZO, SUSAN B. MARINE, and FRANCISCO J. GALARTE n 2005, the Sundance docu-series Transgeneration first aired, chronicling an I entire academic year in the lives of four trans*-identified college students and introducing viewers to issues that trans-identified college students grapple with at institutions of higher education. Ten years later, as transgender studies has begun institutionalizing itself as an interdisciplinary field and “transgender” and trans* narratives have become almost routine in mainstream entertainment, the editors of this special issue on trans* pedagogy find ourselves confronted with a paradox. While there is in general unprecedented social awareness of trans* identities, (particular) trans* people, and trans* issues, there has yet to be a serious con- centrated effort to explore trans* subjectivities, identities, and experiences in educational contexts. For example, in the three seminal publications that signal the emergence of trans* studies as a field (i.e., The Transgender Studies Reader, The Transgender Studies Reader 2,andTSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly), there is only one article that has a specific focus on formal educational contexts and pedagogical concerns. This is not to suggest there has been no scholarly research or writing on trans* issues in education. Much to the contrary, scholars have produced exceptional work regarding trans* people and educational experiences in other venues. Radical Teacher devoted an entire special issue, titled “Beyond the Special Guest—Teaching ‘Trans’ Now,” to the topic in 2011 (Agid and Rand 2011). The voices and experiences of trans* educators and students have been centered in a variety of disciplinary scholarly texts and journal articles (e.g., Catalano, McCarthy, and Shlasko 2007; Jourian 2014; Marine 2011a, 2011b; Nicolazzo 2014). However, trans* experiences in education have not yet been featured in the main venues of the emerging field of transgender studies. In an attempt to address this significant gap, this special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly takes up matters of schooling, learning, and ped- agogy. Both Paulo Freire (2000) and bell hooks (1994) declared that education should be a “practice of freedom,” one that enables individuals to “deal critically TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 2, Number 3 * August 2015 367 DOI 10.1215/23289252-2926360 ª 2015 Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/2/3/367/485487/367.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 368 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world” (Freire 2000: 34). All too often, however, formal educational practices foster conformity, deter necessary transgressions, and systemically seek to regulate rather than radicalize (Aronowitz 2004; Entin, Ohmann, and O’Malley 2013). This is particularly true with regard to the concept of ‘genderism,’ which Darryl Hill defined as the “system of beliefs that reinforces a negative evaluation based on gender nonconformity . the cultural notion that gender is an important basis by which to judge people and that nonbinary genders are anomalies” (2003: 119). This concept, which refers to the biopolitics of gender from an overarching societal perspective, has also been found to operate within educational contexts (Bilodeau 2005, 2009; Marine and Catalano 2014; Nicolazzo 2015), regulating the lives of trans* people and thereby mediating how they navigate such spaces. We contend that formal education typically enacts genderism. With this special issue, “Trans*formational Pedagogies,” we seek to reinvigorate ongoing conversations about education as a practice of freedom by exploring ways in which educational processes can specifically challenge the oppressive aspects of the binary gender system. In particular, the pieces included in this special issue center on the following questions: What counts as learning? What is pedagogy, and where does pedagogical practice occur? What