Primary School Teachers Misrecognizing Trans Identities? Religious, Cultural, and Decolonial Assemblages

Abstract

Background: Teachers’ support for addressing cisgenderism and cisnormative cultures in schools is necessary to support students’ freedom to express gender in expansive ways and to embrace trans identities. However, few questions are asked about how primary school teachers grapple with trans identities in South Africa. Purpose: The article fills this gap by focusing on how school teachers negotiate their understandings of gender identity and gender expression by showing their capacities and potential in creating a trans-affirmative climate in primary school. Participants: Participants were 30 self-identified heterosexual primary school teachers of diverse race and class backgrounds who were located in one primary school in South Africa. Research Design: This qualitative study employed in-depth face-to-face and telephone-based semi-structured individual interviews. The article draws from new feminist materialist approaches to “assemblages” and decolonial thinking to consider how participants negotiated gender expectations. Findings: Trans identity is conflated with being gay and misrecognized through a reliance on historically produced religious and cultural norms that are part of the colonial and apartheid legacies in South Africa. While the trans assemblage shows potential to challenge and question the sex-gender conflation, historical legacies, suffused with cis-heteronormative logics, lead to a fundamental misrecognition and erasure of trans as a sign of being gay. Conclusions/Recommendations: The utility of a decolonial trans assemblage is evident in examining how epistemic erasure occurs through historical mechanisms, while denaturalizing the reliance on binary gendered systems and Western knowledge. If primary schools are to support gender-expansive ways of being, addressing how historical processes, cisgenderism, and cisnormative cultures permeate teachers’ understanding of gender remains vital work.

Decolonising Classroom Management and Its Political Hegemony in Universities

“…It seeks to critique colonial institutional scripts and orientations that have shaped our understanding of the world by addressing the unequal relations of power between coloniser and colonised (Dastile and Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013;Morreira et al 2020) while also developing a more nuanced appreciation of knowledge rooted in communities and marginalised forms of thought (Bekithemba and Dipane 2017). Spanning beyond the political realm, decoloniality focuses on cultural practices that address lived experience, such as gender identity, race, class, and ethnicity, as well as language, literature, education and religion (Schiwy 2007;Bhana 2022). A fundamental element of decolonising scholarship is that it is rooted in acts of humility: resistance to hierarchies coupled with an understanding of multiple perspectives (Behari-Leak 2019).…”

A Transgender Studies Approach for Educators in Schools: Reflections on “Cissexist Pitfalls,” Bifurcated Frameworks, and Racial Justice

“…This “collapsing of queerness and transness” represents a fundamental misunderstanding of differential forms of oppression that are tied to gender and sexuality, which, Laing argues, “is reflective of the ways in which Western systems of classifying gender and sexual diversity within the LGBTQ umbrella disregard the distinctness of gender and sexuality” (p. 33). Indeed, it is a problem that speaks to Radi’s (2019) concerns about an opaqueness that results in a fundamental misrecognition and disqualification of “trans* epistemic subjectivity” (p. 52) (also Bhana, 2022).…”