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To Rescue or Research?:

What’s a Radical Queer Academic to Do?

by Shannon Wyss

I once heard an allegorical tale that goes something like this: There are two villages on the banks of a river. One day, the villagers downstream notice a baby floating in the water. Not surprisingly, they rescue the infant. The next day, two more babies float down the river. Again, the villagers take the babies out of the water. Over the ensuing days, more and more babies come floating by and, eventually, everyone in the village is involved in baby-rescue. The villagers know that they need to figure out what’s going on in the village upstream. However, they realize that if they send anyone to visit their neighbors, they’re going to lose baby rescuers, which means that some of the babies won’t get pulled out of the water and will float to their deaths. On the other hand, if they don’t send anyone upstream, they will never know what the problem is and will never be able to figure out how to stop the babies from floating downstream….I don’t know how this story ends, either because i just don’t recall the ending or because there is no ending: the illustrated dilemma is more important than what these supposedly-mythical villagers decided to do.

To my consternation, i’ve found myself in a vaguely analogous situation. Since August, i have been doing research for my MA thesis, which is on the peer relationships of out transgendered and genderqueer youth in US high schools. The research process has been extremely gratifying, educational, and awe-inspiring. I knew walking into it, however, that this project would not be easy. Being queer myself and almost as out as i can be, i know what goes on in the queer community and in our larger heterosexist society. And although i didn’t come out to myself or to anyone else until i was twenty, i had a wretched experience in high school, an experience which has fueled a lot of reading on the situations that queer teens face in school. I am passionate about transgender issues, as well, and came out to myself as genderqueer about a year ago. So i consider myself relatively well-informed and am under no illusions that out-of-the-closet trans and genderqueer youth have an easy time in high school.

However, knowing such things intellectually and politically is very different from sitting down with someone and listening to hir explain to me how ze dealt with constant and systematic harassment, name-calling, ostracism, and assault. The picture that is emerging from my research is not a pretty one. Of those twenty-three folks whose responses i have processed so far, ten lost friends as a result of coming out; only eight said they felt like they could be fully themselves at school; eighteen were pressured by their peers to dress or act differently; sixteen were called various anti-gay or anti-trans names; fifteen were teased or put down; twelve were physically assaulted; and five were raped, three of those more than once. Each has come up with an effective, if sometimes self-destructive, way of dealing with the violence ze faces each day. Listening to these stories and uncovering the amazing ways these youth strategized to make their high school experiences the best possible has been challenging, to say the least.

My emotions have run the gamut from sadness to anger to admiration to fury to gratitude. No one, no matter what hir difference, should have to deal with the situations that these youth face while in school. I am enraged that i live in a society where difference is seen as something to be feared; where some folks feel justified in manipulating others in order to feel more powerful themselves; where anyone who doesn’t quite "fit in" risks social ostracism or emotional torment; where people take out their insecurities and hatreds on the bodies of others; where some young people say that high school is not a place to learn but something to, quite literally, survive; and where still others feel that school is so dangerous that, in order to live, they must drop out and either go without a high school diploma or work for an equivalency degree. Yes, high school for me sucked. But i was lucky that the "only" thing i had to worry about was feeling like i was hated by almost everyone in my class. And what a sad commentary on our society it is that i have to feel grateful for that.

I know that the research I am doing is important. While there is at least some work on gay & lesbian youth in high schools, there is only one book that contains the phrase "transgendered youth" (Social Services with Transgendered Youth, ed., Gerald P. Mallon, Haworth Press, 1999). And the only journal articles focusing on these young people are psychiatric works that are more concerned with "curing" those "boys who want to be girls" than on accepting these youth where they’re at and exploring how they deal with their lives. We (as feminists, as academics, as queers, as high school survivors, as ethical people, as human beings) need information on what trans and genderqueer youth lives are like. And I am honored that my project will, in whatever small way, help get those data out there. There is no social change, no combating of injustice, no revolution without information.

At the same time, however, i am feeling exceedingly inadequate. For my work is not helping the trans and genderqueer youth in high school today. What i’m doing has no impact on those young people who are sitting at home right now, counting the hours until they have to face another day of name-calling or being ignored or dodging their peers’ spit or even living through another rape. I want to be there for the teens who are, at this very instant, experiencing the things that my informants have talked about. I want to be in the schools, stopping the harassment and ostracism and the emotional and physical violence. I want to help them come up with yet more ways to cope with the slings and arrows meted out by their prejudiced peers. I want to be a safe school staff member for queer youth to come to. I want to effectively punish those teens who perpetuate such violence against their gender-variant peers. I want to be doing "grassroots helping."

And yet i have no skills that would be needed in a situation like that. I’m not a teacher. I’m not a guidance counselor. I’m not a social worker. I’m not even in any high school buildings for any reason these days. What i am is intelligent, a solid researcher, a quick learner, a good writer, and an astute questioner with a penchant for exploring issues of individual and systematic inequality and hatred. So, in essence, i’ve already chosen my path: I’m a geeky graduate student who’s going up the river to see what’s wrong in the village upstream.

But while i’m doing that undeniably significant work, "babies" are getting by. There are innumerable trans and genderqueer youth whose lives i am not touching at all. And unfortunately, unlike if i was working on other issues that impact high school students (eating disorders, (heterosexual) suicide, drinking, drugs, dating, (hetero)sex, and innumerable other pressures that teens face), i don’t have the luxury of knowing that there are lots of people pulling the babies out of the river. For there is no larger societal knowledge of trans issues in high schools. Most folks (including entirely too many high school teachers and administrators) just go blithely on their way, assuming that the biggest gender pressures adolescents face in school revolve around heterosexual dating and intercourse. I am not part of a larger team working to improve trans and genderqueer youth’s lives. I sometimes feel like i am the team. And while this is certainly not completely true (there are undoubtedly a small number other adults in this country who are concerned enough about these young people to consider actually doing something about it), there are few enough people on the team that we all undoubtedly feel a little isolated. A lot isolated. In my case, totally isolated.

So i’m running upstream to get some information on why the babies are in the river. Eventually, i’ll be able to get some of that information back to the few folks downstream who are trying frantically to pull as many babies out of the river as they can – and, more importantly, to get that information to some of the babies still in the river, so that they can compare their experiences with others like themselves and be assured that they aren’t "the only ones." Yet I wonder: How many babies could i have saved if i would have chosen a different path? But if i had chosen that path, how many more babies would have ended up in the river in the first place? I am uncomfortable with both choices. But this choice is not one which i can avoid making because i only have so much time, money, skill, and energy.

How will this "story" end? I don’t know. Unlike the allegory, however, there are real people suffering real consequences because of the choices i’m making. And also unlike the allegory, this outcome is more important than the illustration of the dilemma itself. This conflict is not just some intellectual exercise, an immaterial or ethereal foray into gender-bending in high schools, or a story set up to make others think. Trans and genderqueer youth are daily feeling the impact on their minds, hearts, and bodies of the issues raised by this "tale." Someday, maybe i’ll be able to do some of that "grassroots helping" – being a mentor, sending copies of my thesis to as many places a i can afford, or making myself available as some sort of resource. Perhaps then i’ll be able to feel like i’m pulling some babies out of the river. Until that time, however, i sit uncomfortably at my desk, with my choice in one hand and my Mac’s mouse in the other, trying to gather as much information as i can about why the babies are ending up in the river at all, hoping that the long-term gain from my search will be worth the babies that are lost in the interim.

originally written 12/30/00; edited 1/19/01

Transgendered: A broad term used to encompass those people who feel that the gender label they were given at birth is either an inadequate or an inaccurate description of who they are. Return to text.

Genderqueer: A broad term used to encompass those who feel that their gender is somehow totally outside of the binary sex/gender system under which we currently live. Return to text.

Hir: Gender-neutral, third-person object pronoun. Pronounced "here." Return to text.

Ze: Gender-neutral, third-person subject pronoun. Similar to "s/he." Return to text.

Gay & Lesbian: I place these two words together with an ampersand between them to highlight the historical conflation of male homosexuality and lesbianism, as well as the all-too-common erasure of transgendered and bisexual lives. Return to text.

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