Every week, I export all of the readings from Courseworks into Notability on my iPad. I normally do this in the order that they’re presented on Courseworks, and then read them in that order as well. In preparing for this week’s readings, I exported Jack Helton’s Tran* /School: Across and Beyond Queer-Inclusive Pedagogy into Notability, read the first sentence, and couldn’t stop. I then proceeded to finish this article and quickly move onto their Learning butch: tracing lesbian and trans becoming in the classroom, then Topographies of Disruption Queer(ed) Literacy Pedagogies Beyond the Binary. Before I could think twice, I sent them an email and let them know how much their work had just impacted my life.

Taking this course seems to be very fitting with where I’m at in exploring my own gender identity. Up until this summer, I had never even taken a beat before saying “she/her” when asked what my pronouns were. Working at my childhood sleep-away camp—one that’s always championed gender questioning, fluidity, and neutrality—this summer, I found myself saying “she/her… I guess” while co-leading my August bunk’s Circle. I later found myself in a rant about how I didn’t really like the idea of pronouns in general, and that I’m just “Izzy.” Since starting the semester, I’ve begun saying “she/her or she/they” when asked to provide my pronouns.

All three of Helton’s pieces now exported into Notability on my iPad are decorated in lime green, hot pink, turquoise, and purple highlighting and annotations. Reading their work made me think so deeply about my own constructions of gender throughout my life, especially as a child (which I wrote about in my first discussion post). As I stated in my email to Helton, their pieces “made me reconsider, or maybe truly consider for the first time, my own queerness.” As I continued in my email, “I have so much to say to my little girl self who ran around the playground in Prospect Park shirtless, consistently played "the boy" in every game of "family," proudly wore clothes from the Boys Section of Target, and kept her long hair messily tied back in a low-pony.”

In the opening paragraph of Helton’s Topographies of Disruption, when writing about how their 7th grade students used to speak to them in class, they wrote “Bullard. The only of their female teachers they addressed without a title, as they did with their male teachers,” (Helton, 2022). This made me think about my experience as a bunk counselor this summer. I was assigned two female-identifying bunks (although many used she/they or they/them pronouns), but for 3-days during Mini Camp, I was placed in a male-identifying bunk. I’d spend Bunk time and Circle with the Sycamores, as the only non-male identifying person in the room. At Circle, I could feel my “otherness” in comparison to the five 11-12 year-old male campers, two 15-year-old male Camper Workers, and one 19-year-old male counselor. Yet, as I sat on the floor, knees slightly turned out and up to my chest in my Boys Youth Large Adidas basketball shorts, rolling my eyes with a smirk as they made comments you can imagine a group of boys would make comments about, I felt I fit in with them much better than many of the other female-identifying counselors.

“That in between ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is a beautifully expansive horizon—an expanse wherein I believe most of us reside,” (Helton, 2022).

I was so moved by so many of the ideas Helton presented, especially the ones presented towards the end of Topographies of Disruption. “I taught my students the importance of remaining in the closet by inhabiting it myself. I taught shame and apology by living it. When I am hiding I teach my students that they must hide,” (Helton, 2022). This quote brings to light how integral teachers can be in the identity (re)forming and (re)shaping of their students. “We teach our students what’s allowed by what we say, but perhaps even more powerfully by what we don’t,” (Helton, 2022). I’m left still thinking about this quote. Helton wasn’t intentionally trying to convey to their students that they shouldn’t be loud and proud about their queer identities, but by keeping their queerness locked up and tucked away, that was the inherent message they passed onto their students. As the role model a student has for the majority of their days, for the majority of their weeks, for the majority of their year, the body of the teacher is perhaps the most important aspect of a student’s schooling. In Trans* /School: Across and Beyond Queer-Inclusive Pedagogy, Helton makes it clear that yes, curriculums themselves should include and celebrate “queer” titles, but the real site of resistance against the “oppressive regimes of cis-normativity, heteoropatriarchy, and racism” (Helton, 2020) is the body of the teacher, the manifesto of queer pedagogy.

Queer and trans pedagogies are the future of education. They require that students and teachers connect to themselves, their bodies, and to each other, and create a community of mutual learning that celebrates each and every body present in the classroom.