This summer, Domaine Javier received an abruptly disheartening expulsion notice from California Baptist University (CBU). The private “Christian” university in Riverside informed the transgender 24-year-old woman from the Philippines that she was expelled for “committing or attempting to engage in fraud, or concealing identity” in university judicial processes, according to The Riverside Press-Enterprise. She never received the opportunity to start the nursing program at CBU, three blocks from her home.
Javier, who is biologically male, fraudulently (from CBU’s official perspective) checked the female box on her application form. Javier has identified as a female since she was a toddler. “That’s how I see myself,” she said. During a background check, CBU officials learned that Javier appeared on an April episode of MTV’s “True Life” controversially titled “I’m Passing as Someone I’m Not.” She declared on the show at one point, “I am a girl trapped in a guy’s body.”
When I first learned about Javier’s story, two interrelated but distinct questions arose. Did CBU discriminate against a transgender woman? Is higher education (and society at large) discriminating against transgender people by only providing the options of male or female on identity forms? I am leaning in the affirmative on both questions.
To the first question, one of the more provocative ideas I have learned in recent years from gender, feminist and queer scholars is that gender is a social construction, a performance. I mention this because I want to pose some more questions. What determines your gender: your biology or your socio-cultural performance? If there is a conflict there, as there is with transgender individuals, what should people identify as? Do they, should they have a choice?
According to CBU officials, people must choose their biological gender — otherwise they are “concealing identity.” But that directly assumes that biological identity usurps socio-cultural identity? Why is the biological superior? Why can they not be on two sides of the same coin, on the same plane? Why can socio-cultural identity not be deemed superior?
The construction of the term transgender places biological and socio-cultural identity at least on the same level (and some transgender people place the socio-cultural over the biology). CBU officials ethnocentrically made biology the chief determinant of Javier’s gender identity. In other words, CBU officials decided to impose their views (which is widespread and mainstream unfortunately) on transgender people instead of judging them and their identity from their perspective. That is how and why CBU can say to Javier that she lied, refusing to understand her transgender perspective. That is what racists have long done. That is what sexists have long done. That is what religious persecutors have long done. That is what homophobic people have long done — imposing ideas and ideals of your own race, gender, religion or sexuality onto another. It is discrimination in its classic form.
Fifty years ago, CBU officials would have probably unashamedly proclaimed that they did discriminate against her. But this is the 21 century, a political environment in which discriminators rarely show their cards, fervently resist the discriminatory label and find some other excuse to broadcast why the injustice occurred.
