The Politics and Limits of Transgender in South Africa

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

“…By situating teachers’ perspectives of trans in an ever-shifting and changing assemblage, entanglements with particular social and cultural conditions of the local context provide possibilities to reinvent trans as it travels. Connecting trans and decoloniality, as Camminga (2017) suggested, opens up possibilities for new ways of existing as gendered beings within a decolonial framing that brings to light and questions how trans is apprehended and its movement curtailed. In this article, this has allowed insight into the organization of gender, its religious-cultural anchorings, and the heteronormative and cisnormative compulsions through which trans is negated or interrogated, showing epistemic erasures and potentials.…”

“…Thus, the need to address the politics of the continued subjugation of—and desubjugating (Stryker, 2006)—trans from its colonial hooks remains vital in decolonizing trans assemblages. Camminga (2017) suggested that decolonizing trans involves attention to subjective, situational, and lived experiences in order to denaturalize cisgenderism and the fixation on the anatomical power granted to gender assigned at birth, and the norms attached to gender. This requires critical recognition of the South African historical and social landscape, how “gender operates within a colonial matrix of power,” and the “toxic nature of gender” (Camminga, 2017, p. 34), in that gender is also implicated in other matrices of power and oppression.…”

“…Camminga (2017) suggested that decolonizing trans involves attention to subjective, situational, and lived experiences in order to denaturalize cisgenderism and the fixation on the anatomical power granted to gender assigned at birth, and the norms attached to gender. This requires critical recognition of the South African historical and social landscape, how “gender operates within a colonial matrix of power,” and the “toxic nature of gender” (Camminga, 2017, p. 34), in that gender is also implicated in other matrices of power and oppression. As such, a decolonial trans assemblage can draw attention to cisgendered erasing, misrecognition, and pathologization, while critically engaging with the potential for radical gender politics.…”

“…A striking feature of research and debate on gender and sexuality in South African schooling is that questions about how primary school teachers understand and grapple with transgender people are hardly commented on. Although teachers could play a central role in confronting the pathologization of “gender-nonconforming people to traditional gender normativities” (Camminga, 2017, p. 2), a focus on primary school teachers’ “trans informed gender justice” work (Martino & Cumming-Potvin, 2018) is missing in the country. Trans is a practice that “assembles gender into contingent structures of association with other attributes of bodily being, and that allows for their reassembly” (Stryker et al, 2008, p. 13), and it is both a disciplinary tool and a line of flight.…”