ABSTRACT
Young people with complex gender identities enter school and other youth-serving agencies with gender identities they seem to already readily understand. These youth are highly attuned to how schooling practices mostly speak to binary gender identities and re-inscribe normative gender identity. Considering that access and recognition shape and inform identities, those with complex identities are positioned by their gendered relationality to school-based relationships. Their bodily awareness enables them to dislodge from the norms that many young people are vulnerable to inheriting and embodying. As they move back and forth between their lives in and out of school, their bodies generate different forms of literacy. Outside of school, their gender identities are always in conversation as they simultaneously question identity construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. When recognized through the eyes and/or words of another, their validation confers gender identity self-determination and this legitimization positions them as agents of literacy. Gender identities are complex and indeterminate and provide an opportunity to have a different relationship with the body expressed through dynamic manifestations.
