A Conversation about Best Practices for Supporting Transgender Folks in Higher Education & Beyond

This special session, organized and run by Lisa Hager (University of Wisconsin, Waukesha), will be held on Saturday, June 24, 2017, 3:15-4:45, in the Incubator, Hyde Hall. Link to website

A central part of the ethos of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers Association (BWWA) has always been its feminist politics—both in the scholarship on women writers it supports and its commitment to the work and professionalization of graduate students. If we want to continue to build on this legacy, we must make the BWWA’s feminist politics a truly trans-inclusive feminist politics.

Consequently, as we celebrate the BWWA’s twenty-fifth anniversary here in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, it is our responsibility to acknowledge and witness the violence, be it legal, physical, or social, that has been done to transgender and gender non-forming North Carolinians as a result of HB2 and its recent problematic “repeal.” We must also use this conference as a space to educate ourselves on transgender and gender non-conforming identities and issues so that we can support the lives and activism of transgender and gender non-conforming people in our workplaces and communities.

To these ends, this workshop will include the following three parts:

• A basic introduction to transgender and gender non-conforming identities and key related concepts (please note: this portion of the session will assume no prior knowledge of these terms and concepts);
• A discussion of North Carolina’s HB2, the grassroots activism of local LGBTQ organizations around this issue, and the deeply problematic repeal of this law;
• A conversation about practical methods of welcoming LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender and gender non-conforming people, in higher education and our daily lives;
• The goal of this session is to begin a thoughtful and ongoing conversation about and foster activism around issues of gender identity and sexuality in the BWWA, our home institutions, our communities, and our families.

All are welcome!