In the captions of her Instagram photos, Grace Lavery describes dabbling with waxing, the foibles of facial lasering, and the wonders that hormones have worked on her skin.
Lavery, an assistant professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, writes about her body in intimate detail. As a trans woman, she sees herself as one among many in a tradition of feminist critics who regard their bodies as worthy of discussion.
Lavery also writes about how she sees her body as politicized. The bodies of transgender people are frequently at the center of free-speech debates and, more extremely, the target of right-wing agitators. In 2016, Milo Yiannopoulos mocked a trans student on stage during his college tour. Afterward, academics debated whether he should be allowed on other campuses, including Berkeley. “The whole debate was deliberately and carefully staged on the wrong terms,” Lavery argued in a Los Angeles Review of Books piece, “and revealed that for some in academia, the political personhood of a trans woman is quite unimaginable.”
Lavery spoke with The Chronicle about why she writes about her transition, why she thinks the framing of the free-speech debate is bunk, and what it’s like to operate under different sets of gender roles in academe.
Tell me about your journey in deciding to transition.
I went through most of college wearing dresses. It was an important part of who I was, rather than just a boy dressing up. After college, I immediately stopped doing that. I felt some kind of regret, but I didn’t feel like I made a terrible mistake.
The big moment for me was when I got sober a few years ago. I realized, “Oh, my God. This whole thing was present with me for all my life, and I was aware of it and not aware of it in different stages.” I started to feel waves of remorse. Not so much that I had missed the opportunity to come out, but that I had neglected or failed the young vulnerable trans woman whom I had deprioritized in order to prioritize my addiction.
Trans people are constantly asked to perform a kind of reasonableness.
I talked about it endlessly for a couple years. In 2016, I was in Sedona, Arizona, in a hot tub, and I felt something new happening with my body that felt sort of miraculous and freeing. I felt these words leaving my body. I said, “I’m so tired of being a man, and I’m not going to do it much longer.” Between 2016 and 2018, I was really thinking, “This is probably going to happen, but it’d just be so much hassle. I’d already published stuff under my old name. I can’t do this now.” But actually, the truth of the matter is, you totally can. Almost as soon as I started hormones, within a day or two, I found that amazing feeling of transcendence was returned to me and has not really left my side since.
In academia, name recognition is entwined with scholarly reputation. Was that something that concerned you before you transitioned?
I managed to transition before I had to submit the final edit of my book to Princeton University Press. That was a really gratifying occurrence. And I was able to transition before I submitted my tenure dossier. That was very meaningful because it was a way of establishing that the scholarly reputation that I had built up under my old name was something I’m carrying with me.
There’s this new urgency to find ways of writing as a woman. I now feel not only entitled to do so, but obliged to write in certain ways in relation to a tradition of queer feminists.
When you came out publicly, how’d you talk about it in the classroom?
I was teaching one class, a smallish graduate research seminar. I think I’d already been wearing dresses for a little while. They knew something was up. They didn’t know exactly what it was. I emailed all my students and said, “As of today I’d be grateful if you addressed me as Grace Lavery and used the pronouns ‘she/her.’ See you all in class.” That was it. They were just so beautiful about it. It neither became the Grace Lavery show, nor did we pretend that my transition was totally irrelevant.
A few months ago, Christopher Reed, an English professor at Penn State who’d gotten complaints for misgendering students, published a now-deleted post that, in part, defended the practice.
You responded by writing that “blurring the line between harassment and hate speech has been one of the signal strategies of the ethno-nationalist movement, … and it is remarkable that so many people in colleges and universities have fallen for it.” How have colleges and universities fallen for it?
View the rest of our coverage of the voices of transgender students and academics as they gain visibility on campuses and elsewhere.
Academics are very used to having a certain kind of debate around free speech. It’s organized around the case law of Skokie, Illinois, and the American Nazi Party, which is to say, if we have people espousing a hateful, genocidal, white-supremacist ideology, what are their legal rights to speak in public spaces? Rightly or wrongly, various Supreme Court cases have decided that the American Nazi Party has the right to march in Skokie, Illinois. If that was all that Milo Yiannopoulos were doing, he would have a right to be at Berkeley.
It’s an argument that academics love to have because it allows for a certain kind of liberal virtue signaling. But it isn’t an accurate representation of what Yiannopoulos and Steve Bannon are up to. Yiannopoulos wanted to find trans students to target and humiliate to force them out of college. He said as much!
That is not the conversation that academics were having. Their argument was simply the Skokie case redux: Here’s a bad guy espousing opinions we don’t like. Here are some leftist activists and antifa activists who are saying he should be excluded because of his opinions, which they don’t like. No, that is not what was happening at all. This is about the targeted harassment. If you want to defend that as a free-speech practice, you can do so. But you’ve got to do so honestly.
I don’t think it’s an accident that one of the most significant political movements over the past 50 years has been the #MeToo movement, which is an attempt to massively reorganize our public conception of workplace harassment, and how it should be addressed. Therefore it’s inevitable that the right would respond to #MeToo by finding ways to normalize harassment and to try to place harassment under the broad umbrella of free speech. That’s the game that they’re going to play.
After you wrote the piece, you said that dozens of trans and nonbinary students and faculty members told you about low-level hostility and ignorance at their institutions. What were they describing?
At the extreme end, people told me that graduate-school advisers have refused to work with them after their transition. It goes against everything that one would want a teacher to do. There’s routine deadnaming [calling a trans person who has changed their name by their previous name] and misgendering.
When people talk about misgendering, people will begin by saying, “I’m not going to get this right all the time, so please forgive me.” Everyone understands that some of this stuff is complicated, and it takes a little while for people to change their predispositions. But the demand for perpetual leniency becomes its own form of harassment, where trans people are constantly asked to perform a kind of reasonableness. Whereas in fact being deadnamed and misgendered really hurts. Right now, some of those students don’t want to go to graduate school, because they are particularly afraid of the university as an unwelcoming space.
Something surprising about my transition is that most women that I meet — unless they’ve already decided not to — they get it. Mostly they address me as a woman. Even though, as you can hear, my voice is by no means self-evidently feminine. My hair is a little longer now than it used to be, but it’s still not that long. I am so self-conscious about the fact that I’m not doing womanhood correctly. But I think many women are conscious of that, too. Especially in academic spaces.
How so in academic spaces?
I went to my first academic conference as a woman with my new name. I was particularly nervous at a cocktail party. There are questions of how to be authoritatively professional without being thought of as shrill, being thought of as bolshie or unpleasantly assertive or obnoxious — various sorts of gendered fears that often get particularly charged in high-pressure, professional environments.
Trans women after transition have had not very much experience handling those expectations. If anything, the stakes are slightly higher because if our womanhood is discredited, then we will simply be treated as somebody who is insane.
I went to that party where I met a friend of mine feeling really nervous. But my friend was like, “I can see that you are nervous about this. But we are all nervous about this.” We are all feeling that nervousness, that anxiety. All women are told that they are inadequately a woman. Womanhood is not something that anyone ever does perfectly, or completely.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.
