By Ambriah Underwood
At the 11th Annual DC Queer Studies Symposium held in Tawes Hall on April 13, students and community members learned the importance of LGBT history, including discussions from scholars and artists on the future of queer studies.
With over 15 types of concurrent sessions held throughout the morning, TRANS(form)ing Queer brought together students and administrators for an event lasting from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Participants sat in Tawes Hall, listening to panelists who discussed topics ranging from black studies to technology, and their intersectionality with transgender association.
Jamie Driscoll, a senior women’s, gender and sexuality studies major at American University, said that the program was “clearly growing” from the last year she went, noting that there were twice as many speakers this year.
JV Sapinoso, assistant director and undergraduate advisor in the Department of Women’s Studies, said that the number of people submitting panels and attending the symposium was increasing and “seems to be going strong.”
At the concurrent session called “Disciplinarity,” gender study scholars Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski and Kel Kroehle gave insight into their studies on transgender history and methodology.
In particular, they shed light on what they deem to be controversial research and measurement.
Kroehle said problematic studies of transgender people “rely on truth regimes that inevitably discipline the subject.”
Bychowski, lecturer and scholar at Case Western Reserve University, talked about gender dysphoria and transgender individuals throughout history, with a particular focus on medieval times.
Bychowski discussed Eleanor Rykener, a 14th-century transgender sex worker in London, whose arrest became a spectacle after prosecutors struggled to define the nature of her criminality.
Though identifying and presenting as a female, Bychowski said, people recognized Rykener by the name given to her at birth, John–which was her “dead name,” as Kroehle reiterated, or a birth name a transgender or transvestite gives up.
When historians continue to refer to Eleanor by her dead name, Bychowski said, they “unknow Eleanor to untrans John.”
“If Eleanor calls herself Eleanor, then do not call her John,” said Bychowski.
Bychowski said that cisgender researchers–those who relate their gender to their sex–should dig deeper into transgender histories and document their stories in a way that removes transphobic biases.
Bychowski said that it’s important that researchers work to diminish the exploitation of historical transgender figures, like Eleanor, rather than “not engage with us at all.”
Similarly, Kroehle said she is researching and engaging with LGBT youth in a study known as “Queering Measurement: Queer Youth and the Performative Force of Social Research Science.” Kroehle said she works with both numbers and personal data she obtains through interviews with members of the LGBT youth, approximately aged 18 to 25.
The analysis is in response to previous research surveys where Kroehle said many participants felt that the purpose of the studies “diverge[d] from their lived experiences.” Participants felt the questions of measurement in that study felt intrusive and limiting, Kroehle said, restricting their sexual and gender orientation to labels like heterosexual or homosexual, male or female.
Kroehle said that she wants future studies of the transgender experience in schooling to “illuminate queer young people” and provide a bastion of change.
Previously, there were a series of four speakers who came to speak at the university throughout the beginning of the semester, said Sapinoso, but “this event [was] the culmination.”
However, he said for this iteration of the event, all of the speakers came on one day and the sessions ended with two final sessions in Ulrich Recital Hall.