The Survey as a Drag Performance: Allowing for Openness and Complexity When Designing a Survey for Trans Workers in K–12 Schools

• In Event: Mobilizing Traditional Methods for Transformational Ends: Subversive Possibilities When Combining Critical Frameworks and Conventional Methodologies

Abstract

Objectives and Framework: Critical trans scholars argue that transforming society to sincerely welcome trans people will not happen through discrete interventions like new laws and policies (Spade, 2015). This work requires - and must build on - complex, enduring, and multi-pronged mobilization for change. At the same time, existing research suggests that structural changes like protective educational policies (Day et al., 2019; Hatzenbuehler & Keyes, 2013) and institutional supports (Day et al., 2016; Demissie et al., 2018) benefit transgender students. This research plays a crucial role in furthering efforts to support trans youth: it informs the decisions of policy-makers and school leaders, helping them take actions that have the highest chance of doing good and the least possible harm. But while large quantitative studies can provide decision-makers with useful information, much complexity is missed when people are reduced to numbers. Further, the transformation of deeply personal experiences and identities into ‘data points’ is profoundly and inextricably entangled with ongoing histories of anti-Black racism (McGlotten, 2016), imperialism and Indigenous erasure (Smith, 1999), and violence against trans communities (Stryker & Currah, 2015; Labuski & Keo-Meier, 2015). How can we design studies that spur material change while also honouring the complexity of the people and communities with whom we work? How might we chart the conditions shaping trans people’s work in schools without flattening their experience or colluding with deficit narratives?

Data: We write from the perspective of two qualitatively-oriented scholars who are currently part of a larger team collaborating on the first known survey to examine the working conditions of trans employees in K-12 schools across the US and Canada. The team plans to outline the structural working conditions, school climate, and health of these employees using descriptive statistics and chart the relationship between working conditions, wellbeing, and support through bivariate and regression analysis. In this paper, we describe how our backgrounds as qualitative scholars and as trans people have informed our survey research methodology.

Findings/Conclusions: We suggest that drag as a useful metaphor for how we might consider survey research as a strategic tactic for change. Drag is an art form rooted in “disidentification,” which queer studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz (1999) describes as going “a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture” (p.31). While we do not believe that surveys can fully account for the complexity of trans existence, we argue for the use of surveys as a kind of conscious performance; a mechanism for translating some part of the “unthinkable” world of trans life in schools into recognizable form. While transgender experience is profoundly complex in ways that surveys cannot measure, surveys can help us better understand what trans educators need to thrive in their jobs. Accepting our responsibility to our participants means both allowing for complexity while also documenting and communicating material needs in pursuit of meaningful change.

Authors

• Lee Iskander, The University of British Columbia

• Harper Benjamin Keenan, University of British Columbia