LJ Slovin and Margaret O’Sullivan led an excellent symposium today, giving depth to often taken-for-granted questions of reflexivity and positionality in research. I want to follow up here on trans activism across campuses this past year on genders and gender pronouns. For women, the work of reforming or transforming gender and gender pronouns on campus dates back about a century. For LGBTQ students, staff and faculty, the work dates back about 50 years but only recently have we seen structural changes in recognizing diversity in genders and gender pronouns and infrastructural changes in accommodation.
Most recently in Canada and the US, over the past year, campuses have offered signs of change. In the February New York Times, Julie Scelfo wrote:
Activists on campuses as diverse as Penn State, University at Albany, University of Chicago, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and University of California, Riverside, are laying claim to a degree of identity freedom nearly unimaginable when the first L.G.B.T student centers were established… In hopes of raising consciousness of the biases built into social structures and into the language we use to discuss them, students are organizing identity conferences and inventing new vocabularies, which include pronouns like “ze” and “xe,” and pressing administrations to make changes that validate, in language, the existence of a gender outside the binary.
Following Vermont, in September Harvard took steps to recognize a wider range of genders and gender pronouns. In Canada, York has led changes across campuses leaving the balance yet to follow.
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