Agitating Community and Seeking Clues for Coalition through Trans Radical Love

• In Event: Queer and Trans Activism, Resistance, Remedy, and Repair in Tough Times: “We’re Still Fucking Here”

Abstract

Context:
The importance of affinity spaces for students marginalized by systems of domination (which is all students, but especially students from non-dominant backgrounds) is evidenced by the instrumental role GSA’s (Gender and Sexuality Alliances) play in the livelihoods of queer and trans students (Marx & Kettrey, 2016). The power of shared identity lines is also evidenced by the increased level of self-perceived resilience in trans young people of color when they feel like they belong to a trans community (Singh, 2013). When considering the conditions for research, remedy and repair in education, especially in service of teaching as a freedom practice (hooks, 1994) what about the role of coalitions? What happens when finding our people, as a trans person or a person of color, is more complicated? What might need to change about how we describe and interpret community when writing, researching, and teaching for queer and trans activism in schools?
Drawing from data collected during a group session involving six trans people of color, located in the Southeastern United States, the author and five trans young adults, this paper attempts to agitate ideas and notions about building community for queer and trans young people in service of activism in school settings.
Data and Methods:
Rather than the binary of resistance or resilience characterizing the stories told about trans people in and outside of education research (Gill-Peterson, 2021), the group session under study invited dialogue and interpretation of what it means to love, particularly what it means to love transly and radically. This group session occurred as the final component of a multi-phase, intentionally queeruptive research study. Queeruptions have been taken up in education research to describe opportunities and locations for critical consciousness raising; for us, by us or FUBU creativity; centering relief and pleasure; and illuminating the epistemologies of queer and trans people of color to name a few characteristics (Darling-Hammond, 2019). Importantly, this study was also queeruptive in the author’s focus on process rather than outcome and in its rootedness in relationality beyond demographic qualifications for inclusion such as identifying as transgender and additionally as a person of color. While the relationships weaving all phases of the qualitative study were established on identity affinities and local activism through a community-based organization in partnership with local school districts, collaborator participant stories, as witnessed, offered windows into why the “we” in activism for collective liberation, including but not limited to queer and trans young people, remains elusive.
Results and Significance
Through a framework of trans radical love, the author focuses on two key findings. One, that feeling a sense of community is challenging, especially when it comes to students’ involvement with activist spaces. Second, that opportunities for witnessing may be a more reliable condition for activist endeavors than affinity or shared experiences along identity lines. These findings and this study are significant given the imperative for sustained activism on behalf of and with LGBTQ students in schools and the historical precedence of coalition in any movement for social change, regardless of the cause (Caruthers, 2018).

Author

• Page Valentine Regan, Colorado College