Text of Teaching in Two Genders: Lessons From a Polytechnic's First Trans Instructor

[BLACK]

Thank you for coming to my session today! There were many other great choices, and I’m honoured that you chose to hear my story. I’d like to thank my department and PD committee, who made this possible.

The title “Teaching in Two Genders: Lessons from a Polytechnic’s First Trans Instructor” was provocative for two reasons: the first, that gender is a spectrum and not binary. If you came to support that, I’m glad you’re here. The second is that I’m the first instructor that I know of who transitioned while teaching here. I’d like to believe that there were others.

[SLIDE]

After my intro, I’m hoping you’ll feel comfortable asking questions you might not ask your trans friends or students. I’ve opened up a Slido session for you to send me your questions anonymously. Go to slido.com and enter 2901 776. I’ll put it up again at the end. 

[BLACK]

Imagine your doctor told you that your condition would only get worse if you continued doing what you’d been doing for fifty years. Would it be easy for you to give up what had been a comfortable habit? What if it was killing you slowly?

That was the question that I faced over 9 years ago when I finally asked for help for my gender dysphoria. I was growing more anxious and depressed, and asked a psychologist whether taking an antidepressant would keep me from spiralling downward. This was a psychologist from our Employee and Family Assistance Provider, whose number you might find on the back of your employee benefits card. She said that gender identity was something intrinsic to my personality, to my being, and an antidepressant wouldn’t change how I perceived my gender. It wasn’t the answer I wanted.

Taking an antidepressant was the easy answer. Popping a pill every day would have kept me on the same, safe path I’d been on since I left high school. 

[SLIDE]

Straying off the path is what led David to become a werewolf in American Werewolf in London, Dorothy to opium poisoning in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Little Red Riding Hood to the wolf’s stomach. With all of the messages from my peers and parents to stay on the path, I couldn’t do anything different without risking their disappointment.

[BLACK]

Straying off the path was one of the hardest things to attempt after years of conditioning. I was programmed to keep things as they were, and became anxious when anything changed. Although I had some experience with change before I came to teach here, as all of you do. I was raised in a small town of 800 and worked various jobs since I was fifteen, including fast food potato washer, lawn mower, ditch digger, industrial worker, nursing assistant, and camp counsellor—so change was built into my life. 

[SLIDE] 

I also moved west 3000 km to Los Angeles to become a PhD student in neuroscience, north 1800 km to Seattle for postdoctoral studies in pharmacology, east 4800 km to Connecticut for my first professorship in neurophysiology, and 5000 km west to Vancouver to work in project management, clinical research, and medical writing for two biotechs and a multinational pharmaceutical company. Each of these moves came with personal, professional, and financial changes. 

[BLACK]

So, what would you do if your doctor told you that you had to change your life?

Like every other animal on the planet, we’re wired to avoid pain and seek joy. Freud called it the pleasure principle.

In my case, when I realized I needed to change genders, the pain was depression, anxiety, and gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria was distress from a mismatch between my gender identity and the gender I was assigned at birth. I’d been through bouts of depression and suicidal ideation over the previous eighteen years and reached a point where I couldn’t look at my reflection, couldn’t listen to my own voice, and struggled to put on the clothes I’d worn for years. That was the pain I needed to escape.

Joy from changing gender—known as gender euphoria—wasn’t something I’d ever imagined. What positive could come of changing gender? Without a pleasure to seek, making a lasting change as big as gender was impossible. Pain could force me to start changing, but I needed joy to keep from sliding backwards—to make the change permanent.

[SLIDE] 

You can see the joy in this crow who sleds down a snowy rooftop on a lid. Their motivation is simple pleasure. We all look for those moments of pure joy to outweigh times of pain. It’s also this joy that can motivate us to learn new things and achieve the goals we dream of.

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How many of our New Year's resolutions last into spring? Often, the pain isn’t enough to begin a change, or the joy isn’t attractive enough to keep us from going back to what’s become a habit. Before I committed to transitioning, I listed the risks and benefits in that order. 

The risks included losing friends and family, losing my job, losing male privilege, losing esteem in my colleagues’ and students’ eyes, and losing self-esteem if I ended up back where I started. 

[SLIDE]

This was 2015, and gender identity wasn’t added to the BC human rights code until the end of July 2016. I hoped that my union would have my back, but reading the collective agreement, gender identity wasn’t included in our non-discrimination clause, nor was gender-affirming care added to our benefits. Another risk was that a lack of support from students and coworkers could make it uncomfortable enough for me to quit.

[BLACK]

The benefits of transitioning included being able to look at myself in the mirror and shower again, feeling comfortable in my body and personal interactions, and the feeling that I wasn’t hiding an important part of myself from others. It was hard to weigh the risks against the benefits, but listing them in that order, ending on the positive, made it easier to step back and see the bigger picture and a happy ending. 

Coming up with ways to mitigate the risks also helped tip the balance. In my case, I was hopeful that friends and family would support me, and that I’d find my “chosen family” of new friends if others fell by the wayside. I hoped that my students would be supportive for a couple of reasons: all had hopes of careers in their chosen fields and treated class like an extended interview. They were also more aware of gender identity and knew more gender diverse people than I did. When I came out to my first group of students, one asked me which pronouns I used. I’d been so focused on my name, clothes, hair, and voice that I hadn’t stopped to think about pronouns!

The next thing that helped prepare me to transition, in retrospect, was testing the waters of change. I wasn’t thinking about gender at the time, but in 2014, I came out as a vegan and pierced my ears. There was some resistance. Some friends said that eating vegan was unhealthy, and my partner, Sarah, worried about how we’d eat meals together, but we made it work. We both had fun exploring new recipes, and it only made our relationship stronger. It built better communication between us. 

Piercing my ears was the first significant thing I’d done for myself in years, so it helped me focus on what would make me happy, as I fought to overcome others’ resistance to my transition.

[SLIDE]

The next big step was coming out. Coming out to my family was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. Coming out was also the most important step in committing to change. It was not so much that my family had to agree to hold me to it—that would make it worse because I’d resent them for nagging me—but coming out drove me to follow through on my need to build a happier life for myself. 

The memory of telling them kept me motivated, like the memory of the crying loop Sarah and I lived through the morning of Wednesday, March 16, 2016—the middle of Spring Break—when I came out to her before work.

Coming out to Sarah, my partner of 30 years at the time, could have gone either way, but once I opened up to her and she accepted the uncertain future, I could start making plans. 

[BLACK]

You’ve probably heard that it’s important to break big tasks into little ones, and transitioning is no different. I had to plan out the many medical and social steps, so I made a list of them without dates. 

[SLIDE] 

I’d worked as a project manager in industry, so I knew the value of a Gantt chart like this one. I didn’t make one for my transition because the timing of many things was out of my control. I had to wait to get doctors' appointments and schedule surgeries. Setting and missing arbitrary due dates would have killed any sense of progress.

[BLACK]

Having a list, on the other hand, helped me see what was behind and what lay ahead. A list with tasks checked off, no matter how trivial or started with things I’d already completed, helped me see that I’d made some progress.

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Come out as vegan, check. Pierce ears, check. Schedule appointment with a psychologist, check, come out to Sarah, check, come out to my doctor and get help, that was next.

[BLACK]

Once the proverbial ball got rolling, momentum carried it along, and I found myself six months into looking and feeling more female at home and in public. I realized that I needed to come out here, at work. So, what was it like to end one term presenting as male, and starting January 4th, 2017 as female?

Before: I often had students come to office hours to ask questions, they asked me to be a job reference, and some gave me positive reviews on Rate My Professor, where students often go to complain. As chair of the Research Ethics Board, faculty respected my suggestions on their research ethics applications.

Afterwards, the students were great! Maybe they respected my openness, and maybe I still carried some male privilege. One group of students even gave me flowers! Quantitatively, my student reviews were the same, and we still had a great time learning in class and labs. But qualitatively, students stopped asking questions in class, stopped coming to office hours, stopped asking me to be a job reference, and some were more aggressive and disruptive in class. Some faculty said that they wouldn’t apply for ethics approval.

Most of this was probably from being female.

I also experienced deadnaming (some used my previous name unintentionally), misgendering (some used the wrong pronouns intentionally or unintentionally), and microaggressions, which are all too common for those of us in the minority. 

Some colleagues were unaware of the differences between transitioning due to gender identity, cross-dressing, and drag, and expected me to come to work wearing more makeup, dresses, and heels. For the record, I’ve never worn heels or seen Drag Race. 

[SLIDE] 

The Venn diagram of transitioning, cross-dressing, and drag has some overlap because some who cross-dress identify as the same gender they dress in, and some who do drag identify as the same gender they do drag in, but most identify as the same gender they were assigned at birth, they’re cisgender, and enjoy the private or public performance of cross dressing or drag. Most of us who transition don’t do it for the clothes or to perform; we transition to be comfortable in our own skin. 

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Fortunately, students and colleagues were respectful here. As a polytechnic, our culture is more like a workplace than a university, so it’s a pretty safe place to transition. Others have studied gender differences in the classroom and reported a gendered bias, with female instructors receiving lower ratings from male students than female students, and male instructors receiving the same ratings from both. 

As a result, female instructors receive lower ratings on average. 

[SLIDE]

Anonymous self-reporting, such as Rate My Professor, shows large gender differences, especially in the language used to describe instructors, with female instructors described more often as unfair, as nasty, as unprofessional, as disorganized, and many other negative adjectives. The differences persist across disciplines.

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In my case, we changed over to electronic student evaluations soon after I transitioned, and there were only a few student reviews of my teaching, so I stopped looking at them, knowing that the small sample size and self-selection wouldn’t help me improve my teaching as much as when I gave everyone paper forms in class. 

[SLIDE]

With the paper forms, they provided positive and constructive feedback to help me improve my teaching. It was the two written questions on the back that were the most helpful, so I gave them that page and set them aside until the final marks were in.

[BLACK]

Gender biases are alive and well in the classroom and not going away anytime soon, but knowing they exist can help us get the feedback we need to improve our teaching and avoid the pitfalls.

So, what did I learn about making yet another big change in my life?

[SLIDE] 

I learned to SCAN, by

-- Identifying pain and pleasure motivators, to understand what was driving me to make a change.

-- And listing the risks and benefits—In that order, to focus on the happy ending.

I learned to PLAN, by

-- Figuring out how to mitigate the risks, to keep them from derailing my plans.

-- Testing the waters of change, to see how others react and learn how to navigate change with them.

-- And making a list of steps with some checked off, to build momentum.

And I learned to GO, by

-- “Coming out” to create self-accountability

-- And importantly, letting things take as much time as they need, because Gantt charts can be a downer sometimes.

[BLACK]

Not every change we make needs to be as big as a gender change, but with planning and patience, we can change our lives for the better.

Thank you!