Assigning emotional responsibility: young transgender and nonbinary people's negotiation of gender norms in school

Based on conversations with young trans and nonbinary people in Sweden, in this paper I will explore how assigning emotional responsibility to gender nonconforming students is a function of cisnormative structures in schools. In the conversations, participants discussed how adults in school could require emotional support in managing their ignorance regarding gender, and how students felt required to educate their schools in order to save other gender nonconforming people from experiencing the same patterns of exclusion. Students were also required to manage their own emotions without support. The sadness and frustration when they where actively excluded from intelligibility by teachers and teaching materials, the anxiety of not being supported by parents, the need to manage both other students’ and adults’ insecurities and hate. Participants also discussed how feelings of curiosity and safety where contained to queer youth groups or networks of friends.
I hope to find help in this exploration in Sara Ahmed’s analysis of emotions as a political category (2004), Muñoz’ insistence in the relevance of queer children’s present (and presence) in the now rather than as bearers of a negatable future (2007), Nordmarken’s discussion of microgressions (2014) and Kennedy’s understanding of trans young people’s agency in negotiating normative expectations of gender and of coming out.