Letter to my Alma Mater

This was an assinment for a class during my first semester of university, fall 2022. TW for transphobia and s*cide

To the [high school] school board,


My name is [name], and I use he, him, and his pronouns. Last year, I attended [high school] as “[deadname],” a name that may be familiar to the school board as I spoke to you personally during a school board meeting. I am transgender, and I am writing about the [transphobic policy], preventing students from deciding their own name and pronouns. This decision is wrong. It is a rejection of academia, it unjustly targets transgender students, and it is an act of violence.

As [high school] is an academic institution, I hope you would wish for nothing more than to respect current scientific and academic findings. And almost unanimously, experts agree that transgender people are the gender they state they are, and the best way to help transgender people is to respect their gender identity, yet the new policy rejects this fact.

Logically, there is no reason to implement a policy such as this. Students have been choosing how they have been referred to for decades at this school. It’s common for teachers to ask students to correct them on the first day of the semester if the student would prefer to go by a different name, often a nickname. However, as transgender acceptance in society has risen, transgender students have been using this as an opportunity to quickly disclose to their teachers how they want to be referred, which isn’t much different from a student choosing to go by a nickname.

It’s often argued that the current policy is simply addressing the idea that politics should stay out of education, but what is more political than judging and discriminating against a group of students? It’s no secret that this policy is specifically meant to target transgender students. It only prevents transgender students from choosing how they are referred to, whereas cisgender students are able to decide what their teachers call them. This policy is political, and this policy is discriminatory. Everytime a teacher refers to a student, they are making a political action because you have decided to make how we refer to students at this school political. And your politics lead to harm.

Have you heard of “performative speech?” Performative speech refers to how the mere words being spoken out loud leads to direct outcomes. These statements draw their power and efficacy from established conventions and norms. In a school, the norms are created by the teachers, staff, and, in this case, the school board. You are forcing speech on teachers, powerful speech. The act of referring to transgender students incorrectly is performative speech, and denies the identity of transgender students. Instead it reinforces the toxic concept Judith Butler refers to as “gender performativity,” which creates gendered expectations that are impossible for transgender people to meet. Due to their position of power, teachers have the power to establish a student’s social standing simply through speech. By rejecting the gender identity of a student, they are establishing the student as deviant because they are transgender. These students wish to live normal lives, amongst their peers, but the current policy further separates and isolates these students. When not only peers, but figures of authority, enforce that transgender students are deviants, isolation and bullying will increase.

History suggests that it's not logic that motivates the passing of this policy, but fear. It's the advancement of transgender rights that scare you, no? Your decision is merely the historical repetition to the advancement of minorities. During the 1940s-1960s, in colleges throughout the country, queer men were sought out and lost jobs, had their scholarships removed, and were even expelled. At my college… There was fear that gay men may “corrupt” others, and thus, their expulsion was justified.

Their actions then were not normal, and your actions now are not normal. You may think that being transgender is the abnormality, but transgender people have existed since humans have existed. If you never saw transgender people before it’s because you were not looking and now you are being forced to look. For once, we have an opportunity to come out and be our truest, fullest selves, and [transphobic policy] is an attempt to force us back into the closet. We are already a demographic that struggles, with only 44% of LGBT students at [high school] having a sense of belonging at the school and only 55% having a teacher to talk to. If these statistics were to follow the patterns of national statistics, and they likely do, they would be much lower for transgender students.

Transgender students are at risk. They have higher rates of feeling isolated, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts, but these statistics improve when schools accept transgender students. To a transgender person, the denial of their gender is unfair. It’s unconstitutional. And, as Judith Butler writes, it’s “gender violence.” When a person's survival depends on their identity being respected, as it often does for transgender people, to deny that right is violence.

Policy such as this leads to the death of transgender children. And when the day comes, that a transgender child is seriously hurt, perhaps even dies, within this school district, we will have to ask why. And I point to the words of Vito Russo, an AIDS activist, a member of ACT-UP, and a person with AIDS: “So, if I'm dying from anything, I'm dying from homophobia.” When a transgender student kills themselves, they don’t die from suicide. They die from transphobia.

I hope this letter someone that cares to listen.