I am embarrassed to admit how little I know about transgender issues.
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If I were in my early 20s, then maybe — maybe — I’d have an excuse. But I’m not, and I don’t.
I’m not saying that people in their early 20s shouldn’t know about such issues, especially in 2020. But I grew up sheltered. In my 20s, I was only beginning to understand women’s issues. I knew next to nothing about issues affecting gays or lesbians. I don’t think I even knew that transgender people existed.
As I’ve written before, I grew up a white evangelical Christian. Pretty much all my friends went to my church; my parents kept a pretty tight rein on who I could hang out with. Since I lived on the other side of the hill from my (Christian) school, I rarely spent time with other students. The only things I could do without much argument were church activities.
That church, which I attended from elementary school through my early 20s, wasn’t overtly anti-feminist or anti-gay. I don’t remember many sermons about the role of women, for example, and I don’t remember any about homosexuality.
But something was definitely in the water. Of the few controversies I remember at that church, one involved appointing a woman — a doctor and Holocaust survivor — to serve as deacon (a position of leadership reserved for married men with kids); another involved the church leadership’s unwillingness to discipline a gay couple (a decision that cost the church something like a third of its membership).
So aside from a couple of friends who had somehow expanded their experience beyond that of just the church, I made it into my early adult life with virtually no exposure to the existence, let alone the importance, of women’s or gay issues.
By the time I entered grad school — we’re talking in my mid 30s — I figured I had at least a passable handle on feminism. And while I don’t think it would be accurate to say I was yet an ally to the gay community, I figured that I was at least not in the way.
Grad school disabused me of that. I learned how little I actually understood and, worse, how inadequate “at least not in the way” is.
All this is a long-winded way of saying that — thanks in part to a sheltered youth — I was pretty late to the party. (This is probably true about pretty much all the parties, both literal and metaphoric.) I spent much of grad school getting a handle on feminism; by the time I left grad school, I had only skimmed the surface of queer theory.
But even so — even as my understanding grew, even as I actively worked to catch up — the “T” in “LGBT” remained invisible to me until recently.
Embarrassingly recently.
A few years back, I had dinner with a couple friends (former students) at their apartment in San Francisco. One of them was up to his eyeballs in grad school, studying and teaching pretty cutting edge stuff in and around gender studies. The conversation turned to my ignorance about transgender issues; he sent me home with his copy of Stryker and Whittle’s The Transgender Studies Reader.
Three or four years later, I’ve finally started reading it.
I’m not sure why I waited so long. I suppose that, as much as I wish this weren’t true, the topic makes me uncomfortable. But transgender issues have become more prominent in our cultural conversation, and transgender people are under increasing fire, especially in the recent surge of reactionary conservatism.
So I pulled out The Transgender Studies Reader and committed to working my way through it. It won’t be a quick read; it’s a collection of 50 essays and clocks in at 750+ oversize pages. It’s not the type of book one simply reads through. But it is the kind of critical theory book that I loved as a grad student — curated by knowledgeable scholars and representing a wide range of opinions, from historic to contemporary, from mainstream to controversial.
So far, I’ve read the introductory material — and I find myself even more deeply embarrassed by my ignorance. Given how little I knew, I’d assumed that transgender studies couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen years old — certainly, I figured they couldn’t have come into their own until after my stint in grad school.
But no: transgender studies were taking off in the ’90s, while I was solidly a grad student — and had been around decades before that. I should have run into some of these essays. Indeed, I suspect I did run into some of them; I recognize some of the writers in the collection. But since I was still finding my footing with feminism, and since queer studies were, for me, the absolute cutting edge… well, I didn’t realize that transgender studies even existed.
I can’t go back and fix my past neglect. But I can end the delay. And who knows? Maybe I’ll finish before summer, and I can drive up to Portland, where my friends now live, and return the book to its rightful owner.