{"id":57269,"date":"2026-06-11T11:34:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T10:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.peterlang.com\/?post_type=article&p=57269"},"modified":"2026-06-11T11:34:03","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T10:34:03","slug":"re-envisioning-pride-month-letting-history-show-us-the-way","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.peterlang.com\/fr\/article\/re-envisioning-pride-month-letting-history-show-us-the-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-Envisioning Pride Month: Letting\u00a0history\u00a0show us the way\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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As part of the Peter Lang Pride Month celebrations, volume editors T.J.\u00a0Jourian<\/strong> and Chase Catalano<\/strong> continue the conversation.<\/h6>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t that long ago that we, along with two of our colleagues, decided we would co-edit Envisioning a Critical and Liberatory Approach to Trans and Queer Center(ed) Diversity Work<\/em><\/a> (published in 2025). Yet many of the chapter authors\u2019 professional and personal lives, including our own, feel worlds apart from \u2018back then.\u2019 US higher education had just begun sustaining the impacts of a swelling and multi-pronged \u2018anti-DEI\u2019 assault. The figurative ink had not yet set on senior administrators\u2019 statements of commitment to justice and equity in response to nationwide protests against police brutality following George Floyd\u2019s murder in May 2020, when the hollowness of those publicly promoted statements led to their quietly private annulment. Call it higher education\u2019s remake of Britney Spears\u2019 55-hour marriage to Jason Alexander. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These highly bureaucratic institutions often require countless unrelenting advocates and years of taskforces, reports, benchmarking, and assessments to permit basic adjustments to policies and processes that enable marginalized students, staff, and\/or faculty to breathe a touch easier. Yet, at the mere whisper of toothless executive orders and funding-cut threats, entire structures and organizational charts were upended. Commitments be damned and endowments untouched. Since then, several chapter authors have lost jobs and titles, left institutions and States for comparatively safer (i.e., less volatile) environments, and ditched careers they sought to or had dedicated their professional lives to. The festering anti-queer and anti-trans rhetoric coupled with institutional moves of capitulation\u2014which are very much present and addressed in the book\u2014have since taken hold more robustly, impacting trans staff and faculty\u2014especially those of color\u2014most significantly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Today, students, staff, and faculty are fighting to salvage what (little) resources and initiatives have become institutionalized or at least more available since then, while our visibility is weaponized against us and our young people in every aspect of social and public life.”<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The two of us are \u2018old enough\u2019 to recall navigating the invisibility of transness in higher education as students and<\/em> practitioners. A lot of our efforts were focused on alleviating ignorance and misinformation rather than addressing outright malice. To be clear, there was plenty of malice to go around; but it didn\u2019t dominate where we deployed our energy and time. By the time either of us were working on our dissertations (both variably focused on trans men and masculine college students\u2019 understandings of their manhood \/masculinity), there were but a few research-driven publications about trans college students (none on staff or faculty), most by cisgender scholars writing with cisgender readership in mind (LOTS of defining terms and cislation<\/a> of our illegible complexities), and flattening trans students into a one-dimensional aggregate.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, trans erasure on most campuses was less active. We were invisible mainly because most people didn\u2019t know about us, not because we were being intentionally eliminated<\/a>, as we are today. We hadn\u2019t yet been written into<\/em> the institution, so we created trans-inclusive housing and healthcare policies, replaced binary gender(ed) language with more expansive vocabulary, provided campus colleagues with the tools and skills to support all students, and were visible enough for trans students to find trans adults existing close by. Today, students, staff, and faculty are fighting to salvage what (little) resources and initiatives have become institutionalized or at least more available since then, while our visibility is weaponized against us and our young people in every aspect of social and public life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That colleges and universities are not bulwarks for liberation and marginalized populations is not new or news to most of us who have engaged in queer center(ed) work for even a moment. What is renewed is the level of fear, anxiety, unsafety, and instability trans people are grappling with today and the open mass coordination of that renewal across social institutions (government, media, religion, education, and the economy) and the populace at large, including within the \u2018LGB-without-the-T\u2019 spaces we helped create.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the book\u2019s concluding chapter, we built on Barbara Love\u2019s (2018) conception of liberatory consciousness and Charlene Carruthers\u2019 (2018) questions for those seeking clarity about their place in resistance work, to offer four questions of our own: <\/p>\n\n\n\n