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Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity

Online ISBN:
9781479819621
Print ISBN:
9781479819591
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity

LJ Slovin
LJ Slovin

Martha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellow

University of Toronto
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Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
11 June 2024
Online ISBN:
9781479819621
Print ISBN:
9781479819591
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

For decades, caring adults have understood trans and gender-nonconforming youth as especially at-risk in schools. As a result, they have worked to create inclusive policies to accommodate, protect, and safeguard these young people from the increased challenges they are presumed to encounter. Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid offers that accommodation approaches in schools participate in narrowly defining a particular form of trans identity as the only or ‘right’ way to be trans. Many trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming youth are missed and excluded by these policies and practices. Based on a yearlong ethnography in a high school alongside youth who were rarely recognized as trans, this book explores the often-unnoticed labor youth performed as they worked to exist and thrive, regardless of whether others understood them. Youth daily worked to invite expansive genders in school, demonstrating the potential and importance of educational spaces that want trans youth to be present. Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid calls on educators to cultivate a desire for youth to be and grow up trans by turning away from ideas of risk and concern. This is the critical labor youth performed as they explored and lived in their gender-nonconformity. They engaged in this labor because they cared – about themselves, their genders, and the trans communities they were building together at the school. Through their care and their labor, they show us that different, queerer worlds are possible in schools. In fact, they are already happening, if we know where to look.

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