Journal Club: The Impacts of Trans Erasure
A 2022 paper explores the impacts of trans erasure in an academic field known for its “gender essentialist” thinking.
by Veronica Esposito
Over the past few weeks it has become extremely clear that trans erasure is a major part of the agenda for president Donald Trump’s second term. The community was recently rocked by reports that trans people had been erased from the Stonewall National Monument, a designated site that specifically commemorates an LGBTQ+ uprising that was led by trans women. More recently, the Centers for Disease Control announced its decision to “no longer process transgender identity data,” dealing a major blow to our ability to better understand the needs of trans people and conduct research to the community’s betterment.
These are just two recent flashpoints of an all-out assault that includes removing trans people from the armed forces and federal workforce, erasing trans identities from federal identity documents, and bullying service organizations around the country into erasing trans people from their operations and public information.
A 2022 paper by A. M. Aramati Casper and colleagues looked into the consequences of trans erasure via a qualitative study of the experiences of trans individuals in undergraduate biology courses. The authors chose biology because of the rich literature indicating that it is a field rife with “gender essentialist” thinking; the authors argue that the harms of this thinking are extremely evident—for instance it negatively impacts how professionals that undergo such training ultimately practice of medicine, and it also negatively impacts the marginalized groups who pursue such studies. The results of this research pose a stark warning as to the harmful effects of failing to recognize the existence of beings beyond the sex binary.
Casper et al. recruited students from a single institution of higher education by means of flyers, and ultimately they were left with just 5 participants who fulfilled the eligibility criteria. Indeed, it is not easy to find transgender/gender nonconforming (TGNC) people in STEM fields. The researchers noted that there are so few students with queer genders in STEM that “simply knowing a student’s gender and orientation identities, major, and racial and ethnic identities could make them identifiable.” This is already a kind of trans erasure in the field.
After a series of three interviews with each participant, Casper et al. synthesized their data to generate two “master narratives” about gender essentialism that are present in biology courses, as well as a list of the harms that these narratives perpetuate and the resilience factors used by queer students to resist them.
The master narratives that students found in these courses were that sex is a binary contingent on heteronormative assumptions, and that biology is “neutral” in that it simply reports the scientific facts and does not welcome conversations around the potential impacts that questions of identity and society inequality may have on biology’s claims.
Overall, students believed that the course instructors found sexes beyond the binary “to be controversial or too political” to discuss, opting to avoid the subject altogether. (One participant noted that an instructor went so far as to discredit the idea of sexes beyond male and female.) One student recalled asking “about how the [course] content related to being transgender, [with] the instructor [responding] “. . . we’re not gonna talk about that in this class.” Another student shared this experience:
There was a concerted effort to simply just stay away from [conversations about gender and sex outside the binary], to be safe. It was intentional in the fact that they [the instructor] didn’t want to offend or hurt anybody but they would simply stay away, just drop the topic, but they wouldn’t necessarily go either/or in terms of invalidating it or in terms of making a point to reaffirm it.
One student reported that their fellow class attendees also seemed to shun the idea of discussing sex beyond the binary, as well as their own trans identity: “Identities were not things that came up, that just wasn’t a part of the conversation. . . . It would feel like you are forcing an issue . . . like you would be stepping out of line or doing something unusual.”
Casper et al. reported that these classroom experiences of trans erasure caused a variety of harms: students felt a diminished sense of belonging in these classes, they lost interest in pursuing biology degrees, and they believed themselves to be less prepared for a career in STEM. One student shared this experience of seeing their gender identity erased by a professor:
The moment that [sex and gender topics] come up in class, I look around and people are in agreement with it. . . . If the professor said [the color] is red, it’s red. They’re not looking to challenge these ideas. They’re not looking into the exception; they’re not asking these questions. . . . It makes me extremely uncomfortable around my peers. I’m not close with my peers in my science classes as much as I am close with my peers [in other classes].
Another student shared the enormous difference it makes when trans people are purposely erased versus purposely included:
If you don’t see the safe zone sticker, if [professors] don’t initiate the conversation, can we really share who we are with them? . . . Cis-het students have it so much easier because . . . they don’t have that barrier of having to . . . come out to [their] Professor. Are they going to accept me? They don’t have to do that.
Another student shared how trans erasure materially impacted their career prospects:
[Lack of identity safety] gives me a hard time building personal relationships with [instructors] and then that prevents me from getting letters of recommendation so I can pursue future, you know, academic endeavors and I think that’s a barrier for a lot of LGBTQ students.
In the face of this adversity, trans students attempted various resilience strategies, which the researchers summarized as follows: “lowering expectations of biology content, focusing on personal goals, connecting with people they knew were safe, searching out alternative sources of information, and thinking critically.”
Building queer community and offering opportunities to work with queer mentors were two key strategies that these students used to overcome the trans erasure in their courses. Explicitly offering trans inclusion on an institutional level was another key factor in providing these students with a learning environment in which they can thrive.
As one student experienced, seeking out and sharing biological counternarratives is also an extremely important way to fight back against trans erasure:
Small subsections [about diverse animal sexuality] were mentioned in [the] textbook as exceptions . . . except biology has a lot of exceptions, you know. They make a huge difference, they make a completely other conversation. It is their adaptability. Lions just don’t interact with other lions [referencing same-sex sexual behavior in lions from the textbook] because they’re bored. There’s a reason why they do certain things for survival, it’s tied to their biology and it’s just not a choice or decision. It’s something that they’re born with like how we humans are too. . . . We should have talked more about the exceptions, just as much as we talk about the main narrative.
At a time when trans lives and trans narratives are being erased at multiple levels, Casper et al. offer important scientific data to demonstrate the harms perpetuated by such efforts. As the authors state, it is vital for instructors and other holders of power to use their status to create inclusive and welcoming environments. Their research offers many good ideas for how such individuals can do exactly that.
It is also important for trans people and their allies to continue sharing information about the material harms caused by trans erasure—the loss of life potential, loss of prospective careers, the loss of environments to flourish and contribute to the betterment of everyone. Casper et al. have provided a wealth of real-life stories of just these things, and it is our turn to continue the work.
Veronica Esposito (she/her) is a writer and therapist based in the Bay Area. She writes regularly for The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and KQED, the NPR member station for Northern California, on the arts, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues.