Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid

Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity
by LJ Slovin
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$32.95 ISBN 9781779400505

To write the academic text Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity LJ Slovin (the Martha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto) undertook a year-long ethnographical study in a Vancouver high school to explore the experiences of gender-nonconforming youth, who, Slovin found, were “often overlooked in discussions about trans issues, in part due to policies created by well-meaning educators that inadvertently perpetuated a narrow definition of trans identity.”

Ethnography is the study of people in their own environment through methods including participant observation and face-to-face interviewing. Slovin, a non-binary researcher and Vanier Scholar, writes that in witnessing how six “gender-nonconforming youth navigated their genders … through different spaces and relationships at school,” they attended their grades 9-12 classes, “joined in during their extracurricular activities and clubs, ate lunch with them, attended their performances, and hung out” inside school and out, ie: in cafés.

Slovin’s work focused on “youth who were not regularly recognized by others as trans,” and these youth identified as “gay, queer, bisexual, pansexual, trans, gender nonconforming, genderfluid, and nonbinary.” However, Slovin discovered that the students they studied were not particularly interested in labels; rather, being “uncategorizable” was part of the point.

How did these teens come to be considered “trans,” and how did they “[negotiate] being misgendered?” How did they manage to “survive and thrive in school?” Slovin uses the word “labour” to describe the youths’ complex efforts re: managing their gender identity, and how this labour often went unnoticed while simultaneously also being “demanded and required of them.” Teacher, administrator and staff support was often observed, but it was “framed within an accommodations approach,” (“the dominant strategy for pursuing trans-inclusivity in Canadian schools”); was always reactive; and relied on the students being visibly trans.

Slovin argues that the accommodations approach presupposes that “trans identity” is “inherently risky,” and this belief is “an intentional strategy to argue for their protection in schools.” Slovin writes that education, even in liberal schools, “still aspired to socialize youth away from queerness.” The author deduced that trans youth had learned to care for themselves and each other, ie: by using “trapdoors” to escape and have safe places to exist in. These could be real, physical spaces, ie: a “tech booth,” or “fantastical spaces,” like “D&D campaigns”.

Students in Slovin’s study felt that their “progressive” high school simply paid lip service to initiatives like Pink Shirt Day. Students Eliza and Tamar campaigned for five years for “a multistall, gender-neutral bathroom.” The author argues that East City High—with its “‘Safe space’ stickers”—is not a “diverse and progressive school” and it possesses a “preoccupation with image and optics.”

What Slovin learned through their ethnographical experience is that trans youth are paving their own way, but if their teachers focused less on “risk and concern” for these students and embraced “fostering a celebration of trans and gender-nonconforming youth,” that journey would be a whole lot easier.

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