B O O K R E V I E W

Trans as Subject and Reader

in Higher Education

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T. J . J O U R I A N

Trans People in Higher Education

Edited by Genny Beemyn
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. 342 pp.

Being and Becoming Professionally Other: Identities, Voices, and Experiences of

U.S. Trans* Academics
Erich N. Pitcher
New York: Peter Lang, 2018. 203 pp.

Interest in trans subjects in higher education is not new, with scholarship on trans
students in particular now spanning almost three decades. What is new is the
surge in trans authorship of this scholarship (Nicolazzo 2017). Once dominated
by cisgender authors and predominantly written with cisgender readers in mind
(Jourian 2020), this surge highlights and begins to address the limitations in the
breadth and depth of the extant work. Genny Beemyn, the editor of Trans People
in Higher Education, is a notable exception to the cis dominance in higher edu-
cation scholarship—Beemyn’s name has been showing up in reference lists and
literature reviews for almost as long as higher education scholars have been writ-
ing about trans students. Their work holds a constant presence in both campus
climate research and recommendations of best practices for trans inclusion in
particular, in both trans-inclusive (within broader LGBTQ studies) and trans-
specific studies.
Erich N. Pitcher on the other hand, author of Being and Becoming Pro-
fessionally Other: Identities, Voices, and Experiences of U.S. Trans* Academics, is
part of a newer wave of emergent trans scholars who push existing boundaries, ask

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 8, Number 1 * February 2021 135

DOI 10.1215/23289252-8749694 ª 2021 Duke University Press
136 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

new questions, frame questions differently, and reimagine the audiences of trans
scholarship. Pitcher and Beemyn —themselves both trans— meet at their shared
intentions to hold perspectives of trans populations in postsecondary education
that reveal the fallacy and problematics of a singular trans narrative. However,
their work diverges in almost every other way. Published in the same year, the
books together point to a moment in higher education scholarship that is
demanding polyvocality and departures, rather than further convergences, of our
understandings of transness and trans embodiment.

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Trans People in Higher Education meets this demand as an edited volume
comprising sixteen chapters covering a variety of experiential, institutional, con-
ceptual, and reflective revelations of transness. Although the majority of the chap-
ters focus on trans students, they begin to break down a trans student popula-
tion whom some researchers often represent monolithically. For instance, several
chapters focus on or include (and name) nonbinary and gender-nonconforming
students, and two chapters highlight graduate students. There is also some insti-
tutional divergence from the common emphasis on four-year public institutions
with two chapters examining historically women’s colleges and another focusing
on community colleges. Furthermore, five of the chapters bring forth the expe-
riences of trans faculty and staff, all pointing to their restricted existence in trans
scholarship. Authorship is also not limited to researchers, with chapters written
by students, staff, scholars, and those who straddle across these positionalities,
providing not just polyvocality but also multiperspectivity.
Seeking to contextualize the chapters, in the volume’s introduction Bee-
myn reviews the history of trans-inclusive policies in higher education and des-
ignates most as lagging behind. They also summarize the research on trans people
on college campuses and identify some current trends, including scholarship
attending to differences within trans populations. However, as Beemyn points
out, most of the cited research continues to position trans students in a unified
comparison to cisgender students.
The first seven chapters are grouped as narratives, and the remaining nine
are identified as research. There are chapters, however, that beg for a blurring of
this binary line, with S Simmons’s “‘I Am Because We Are’: Holding a Mirror as a
Trans Educator” a prime example. Simmons’s chapter cannot strictly be cat-
egorized as either narrative or scholarship; their autoethnographic contribution
showcasing the embeddedness of narrative and scholarship within each other
“transes” (Jourian 2017) the artificial dichotomizing of the two. Even with chap-
ters more easily classified as one or the other, there appear to be some that could
have been placed in conversation with each other across the divide, to lessen the
separation of “life data” from “research data.” For example, a dialogic positioning
of Shannon Weber’s “(In)Visibility and Protest: Trans Men, Trans Women, and
 JOURIAN * Trans as Subject and Reader * Review 137

Nonbinary Students at New England Women’s Colleges” with Caden J. Campbell’s

narrative in “An Unescorted Male: Transcending Gender at a Southern Women’s
College” (and without the need to prioritize a cis coauthor’s perspective of that
narrative) would bring about a necessary muddling of that separation. Addi-
tionally, with a few of the research chapters void of the researchers’ narratives or
positionalities, this binarizing of “voices of” and “research on” trans people
forecloses possibilities to trans research, to trans narrative, and even to trans me-
search, and was a missed opportunity to create something bigger than the sum of

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its chapter parts.
The text includes compelling pieces, such as Annabelle Talia Bruno’s
narrative in “Transitional Matriculation: Losing (and Finding) Yourself in Higher
Education.” This chapter describes a process of “clumsily” moving into wom-
anhood, and it chronicles the intersecting experiences of trans-antagonism and
misogyny that are further intensified by the pressures of graduate education to
achieve “a mastery of myself” (26). The analytic concepts of the additional labor of
educating others, the wall of oppression as endemic to higher education, and the
tension that comes with attempting to enact change but hitting the wall appear in
Pitcher’s “Microfoundations of Trans Academics’ Experiences: A Sense of Para-
noia and Hypersensitivity,” as well as Jackson Wright Shultz’s and C. Ray Borck’s
chapters. In “On Being (In)Visible in the Academy: A Trans Scholar’s Narrative,”
stories replete with paranoia and fear bring Wright Shultz to rename academia’s
popular “publish or perish” mantra to “publish and perish” in the case of trans
scholars. Borck’s reflections in ‘“Do You Get to Choose How Big Your Penis Will
Be?’: Transitioning as Faculty” present several interesting tugs and pulls, entan-
glements between the political and the personal in terms of gender in and around
the classroom, and harkens on the additional labors of both teaching while trans
and teaching trans while trans. Incidentally, similar to Simmons’s contribution, as
“a sociological reflection on the entanglements of academic and gender practices,”
(51) this chapter clearly belies the narrative-research dichotomy.
Dichotomizing also shows up in a particularly unnecessary and harmful
manner in the invention of the binary trans and nonbinary trans . . . binary. A
symptom of Beemyn’s stated desire to make trans subjects more legible to cis
people, this arbitrary line in the sand between one set of trans people and another
relies on the proliferation of the “trans enough” trope, a reemergence of bio-
medical transition as a measure of gender achievement, and on attempts to sta-
bilize unstable identities and embodiments (Jourian and Nicolazzo 2019). In
Weber’s chapter, mentioned earlier, the author states that one student’s narrative
“complicates the idea of a cis-trans binary” (187), resisting the supplanting of one
gender binary with another (Enke 2012). Beemyn’s use of the “binary” trans
designation in their (ironically named perhaps) chapter, “Get Over the Binary:
138 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

The Experiences of Nonbinary Trans College Students,” reveals some of the prob-
lematics of the capricious assignment of binariness or nonbinariness, thereby
undermining students’ own self-determination. For example, in the chapter
Beemyn identifies some of my work as being exclusively about “binary” trans
men, thus silencing, erasing, and/or renaming how students themselves self-
identified —many in fact did not identify as (trans) men. One need not create one
binary in order to “get over” another one.
Beemyn points to the lack of nonbinary trans people in media as evidence

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of “binary” trans people’s arrival, without regard for cisheteronormativity’s power
in choosing which trans people to highlight—precisely because of who cis people
find palatable. The weaponizing of the “binary” trans label furthers a new trope of
being “not nonbinary enough.” Nonbinary people are and have always created
their/our own media, imagery, and standards with little regard to cis attention
and even at times in avoidance of it (Tourmaline, Stanley, and Burton 2017).
Additionally, it is disconcerting when white trans people like Beemyn perpetually
use Laverne Cox and Janet Mock as emblems of trans people who have “made it,”
promoting the idea that Black “binary” trans women are now getting too much
“positive” attention. While I wholeheartedly agree with both Beemyn and Abbie E.
Goldberg (and many others elsewhere) calling for more scholarship with non-
binary trans people in higher education, their use of false dichotomies and placing
nonbinary trans people in opposition or comparison to “binary” trans people is
a trap, setting up distracting and destructive hierarchies in a trans oppression
Olympics, while material dangers and forms of violence continue, most notably
against Black and brown trans women (Tourmaline, Stanley, and Burton 2017).
Another unsubstantiated and comparative assertion Beemyn makes in the
introduction is that trans students face more difficult struggles than trans staff
and faculty, one that wholly dismisses Borck’s and Graves’s narratives, and is itself
challenged by Pitcher’s chapter and book. Based on a dissertation study with
thirty-nine trans academics, Being and Becoming Professionally Others is a searing
indictment of the institutionalized and sociocultural othering practices embed-
ded in academia. The stories and portraits Pitcher shares add evidence to the
barriers and foreclosures to possibilities that minoritized academics continue to
face and resist in a workplace intent on capitalizing on their tokenized inclusion.
The introduction contextualizes trans academics’ experiences in the his-
tory of trans people in the United States and the emergence of trans studies and
visibility in the media. Pitcher is interested in conveying a variety of stories to
negate the singular trans narrative, while pulling on threads of connections across
them. As “both an insider and outsider within this work” (23), Pitcher is inter-
ested “in the ways that trans* academics are simultaneously ‘in’ institutions of
higher education, but not ‘of ’ the institution” (2), extending Gayatri C. Spivak’s
 JOURIAN * Trans as Subject and Reader * Review 139

(1993) and Patricia H. Collins’s (2000: 11) work to envelope trans academics as
“outsiders within.” Additionally, Pitcher positions this insider-outsider duality as
mirrored in trans academics’ personal lives, occupying simultaneities of being
“within privileged and marginalized spheres” (18) and thresholds “of precarity
and security” (14). This mirroring and intertwining of the personal and profes-
sional, including as Pitcher personally connects with some of the participants,
forego the insistence that emotion be removed from academic work, be it in the
classroom, the department meeting, or research (including this study). As such,

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Pitcher is engaging in profoundly personal and vulnerable work, transing schol-
arship and the academy.
Compared to Trans People in Higher Education, Pitcher’s book is less
accessible, as the former sought to abandon academic jargon in its delivery. To
supplement its intellectual rigor and scaffold the reader through the deep theo-
rizing in the book, Pitcher offers chapters (all even-numbered chapters) with what
they refer to as “theoretical interludes” throughout the text. These are followed by
chapters that knead those theories into his analysis of trans academics’ experi-
ences. By doing so, Pitcher’s text engages in a dialogue across space and time,
advancing—at least rhetorically and in scholarship—“notions of coalitional pol-
itics, the interconnection of all oppression, and the imperative that justice advances
through seeing trans* academics’ struggles as bound to the struggles of all min-
oritized scholars” (23). Black feminist thought has long articulated the vital role of
liberatory theory in liberation work (Hamer and Neville 1998; hooks 1994), and
Pitcher’s book promotes that vitality by undertaking the tasks/responsibilities of
critical scholar/activists (Apple 2009), a stance they articulate in chapter 12.
In its content, framing, and organization, Being and Becoming Professionally
Other employs “marginality as a site of resistance” and “a site of creativity and
power where we recover ourselves” (hooks 1990: 343), rather than employing
marginality as a cis-pity-seeking exercise that feeds off and into trans-as-tragedy
narratives. Resisting neoliberal desires for “best practices” and “tick box diversity”
(Ahmed 2012), the final chapter calls us all to “imagine academe as it might be”
(181) and disrupt institutional and cultural norms that shape trans academics’
experiences of isolation, alienation, precarity, and silence, rather than community,
familiarity, security, and voice. As a whole, the book and the study on which it is
based are models for trans studies in higher education moving forward. Pitcher’s
work is written primarily with/by/for disaggregated and nonmonolithic trans
people, builds on trans-centered scholarship in solidarity with the scholarship of
other minoritized people, and moves us beyond rearranging the diversity slots in
higher education to radically reimagining the whole structure.
140 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

T.J. Jourian is an independent scholar and consultant with Trans*Formational Change. He

writes on race, gender, and sexuality in higher education, with particular attention to mas-
culinity, transness, and racialization; campus gender and sexuality centers and practitioners;
and trans*ing constructs and methodologies.

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