A Situation Like This
Posted by helenboyd – September 9, 2013
Here's a cool piece by Finn Enke of University of Wisconsin, Madison, inspired by Chelsea Manning's coming out as trans.
http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/2013/09/09/a-situation-like-this/ I Am a 'Situation Like This:' Names, Pronouns, and Learning from Chelsea Manning
As a trans person and educator, I am grateful to Chelsea Manning. She is not the only famous person to come out as trans, nor is she the first military person to do so. But because her coming out coincided with her internationally high-profile trial and her impending incarceration, she has provided an opportunity for institutions and communities to recognize transgender existence. As Socrates observed long ago, learning is often painful because learning requires us to change. Manning is making most of us have to work a little harder, finally.
Here's what's close to home for me, as an educator:
[...]
Finn is a 49 year-old trans person who has been Finn for a long time but recently spent $350.00 (so far) and 26 hours over a three-month period (so far) making that name legal. They got tired of people assuming their prior legal name was their "real" name and then imposing gender assumptions based on that name. As a professor at a university without a preferred name policy, it wasn't that Finn minded having to come out as trans to every new group of students or to administrators and colleagues; Finn had cashed in on class, race, and institutional privileges to make coming out possible and pedagogically important, even while knowing that most trans students, staff, and instructors are far more vulnerable to physical and institutional harm. Finn's birth name—a name that feels like someone else's—still lingers everywhere, including on books that they authored; it can't be a secret, and that's mostly ok.
Are we learning yet? Even after teaching transgender studies for twelve years, Finn received a new dose of trans education when attempting to legally change their name.
