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In this article, the authors investigate the mechanisms through which Gino's (2015) George constructs a window into experiences of transgender people that is instructive for would-be allies.
AS QUEER WOMEN living in the United States, we worry about our future in a country with anti-queer leaders at the helm. But as cisgender women, we also know from reading, listening to, and learning about the fears of our transgender and genderqueer friends, neighbors, and colleagues that our vulnerability to physical, structural, and psychic violence simply is not the same as that of transgender people. Add our White, able-bodied, and socioeconomically privileged identities alongside being cisgender, and we carry a remarkable degree of privilege in our lives, including our lives as readers, teachers, and university professors who are teacher educators. For these reasons, we have been thinking a great deal about the kind of work we can do on our own and in classrooms with young people to be productive allies (which we mean here as an active term along the lines of working in solidarity or being co-conspirators) of and with marginalized people, particularly in the current political climate.
As queer-identified people, we have long considered ourselves allies to the transgender community, but we also know from our own experiences in heteronormative spaces that verbal support of a traditionally marginalized community is not enough. As we are learning from Black public intellectuals such as the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, Alicia Garza (Move to End Violence, 2016), the current use of the word ally provides an easy out, helping those who want to appear aligned with people experiencing identity-based oppression or violence to do so "without having to actually engage in meaningful action or build meaningful relationships." As Garza explained, "Co-conspiracy is about what we do in action, not just in language" (see also Hackman, 2015; Love, 2019). We want to think about ways that cisgender educators, family members, and friends, including ourselves, can move beyond the label ally and into more productive ways of aligning ourselves with transgender people.
When it comes to being productive allies and co-conspirators with and for transgender people, we have been particularly drawn to George (Gino, 2015), perhaps the first mass-marketed, #OwnVoices novel with a young transgender...