ABSTRACT
Dana Ahern offers an urgent exploration of whiteness in queer and trans pedagogy, drawing on the author’s experience as a white transgender instructor teaching trans studies in a progressive research university. Teaching transgender studies to groups of students who identified as antiracists and activists, Ahern discovered that they understood trans oppression primarily through the lens of gender, thus erasing the much greater rates of violence against trans people of color. Building on a genealogy of Black feminist pedagogical scholarship from bell hooks to Jennifer Nash, Ahern calls for a rearticulation of transgender studies in dialogue with critical race scholarship, and a move from a politics based on pain to coalitions that cultivate pleasure and possibility.
