The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Victory Briefs.
Sophie Blake is a trans LD debater from a small school who loves teaching and giving younger debaters access to opportunities, and coaches several small school or independent debaters. Sophie values the scholastic value of debate and encourages debaters to become authors and methodological activists both inside and outside of debate rounds. Sophie emphasizes diverse and creative argumentation, and an increased communal prioritization and student awareness of the implications of community practices then the competitive nature of debate as an activity. Don't hesitate to reach out to Sophie if you have questions about debate or need a friend in the debate community.
CW: Transphobia, Mental Health
Iscream into my lungs
asthey lift outward
flyinghigher
stillunheard
orrather unheeded
It’sa familiar sight: “the lecture hall, packed full of people, erupted withapplause as the timer from the 2ar went off. Within seconds, the front of theroom became saturated with swarms of coaches and competitors.” However, withanalysis you recognize these debaters are all “males”, and notice the women areleft in the audience.[1]
Thefirst question is “What is wrong with this image?” Why weren’t women there tojoin the men.
Nextcomes: what is wrong with that paragraph? What happens to the trans people whoare male-presenting, to pass in their communities, can’t or don’t want totransition, etc.? Are they assumed men?
Whathappens to the trans[2] persontapping on the glass outside of the room? Do they remain unheard, unnoticed?
Perlman’sarticle talks about how the bro culture permits constant acts of sexism, whichresults in exclusion of womxn. While this is true, I would maintain there is asimilar cis culture that perpetuates microaggressive transphobia.
However,these concerns remain unheard from the rest of the community. Lindsey describescis womxn as being in the back of the room. However, drawing from thatmetaphor, trans people aren’t even in that room in the first place. In order toreceive conscious thought, to not have our pronouns assumed, to have a place tosurvive in the first place, we need to spread our voices. Without growing support,trans individuals’ plights are ignored.
Transpeople are currently invisible in the debate community because (1) their voicesare silenced by current conceptions of debate as a “Competitive Activity” thatignore accessibility, (2) microaggressive discourse makes the space unsafe, anddiscourages trans participation, (3) cisnormative feminist movements ignore andincrease several trans-specific problems within debate. To prove this, thisarticle will outline and analyze these issues through specific examples, andprovide solutions.
Silence!This Activity is Competitive!
Conventionaldebate is fundamentally hierarchical, there is an economy of ballots, yourequire a certain number of ballots to get to outrounds. You pay to go totournaments to get more ballots. Debaters and their arguments earn prestigebased on how far they get in tournaments and how many bids they collect.Coaches advertise their career bids, and the number of bids they’ve coacheddebaters to receive, in order to get hired. This falls under the label“Competitive Activity.” However, people use this label to justify severalthings that actively harm debate being a competitive activity. If debate beinga good competitive activity was the goal, structural fairness would becomeincredibly important to avoid certain teams dominating that competitiveactivity and crowding out talented debaters from new schools or deviantidentity groups. However, what instead follows is debaters separating fairnessinto procedural and structural and prioritizing the former to win theorydebates.
WhileResource Disparities is an issue, it isn’t the focus. This is just an exampleof how ballots explicitly and implicitly endorse certain norms. Whenever youvote for a theory shell that frames the round as only caring about proceduralfairness, even if you intentionally only desire to endorse Conditionality bad,you implicitly endorse framing fairness without accounting for structuralfairness. A more egregious example I’ve come across is when someone wins adebate on the flow despite saying problematic slurs and misgendering theiropponent. Sure, the judge votes them up because they won the disadvantage, butthat judge is also allowing that behavior, making the activity less accessible.
Thisover time results in a buildup of implicitly and explicitly endorsed norms thatmake trans debaters invisible. We trans people aren’t even considered asexisting in the debate space, because we don’t have enough representationgenerally or with ballots. This materializes in community norms and eventournament rules being exclusionary to trans people. For example, disclosuretheory has become almost an undisputed rule, and open source disclosure seemsto be on its way to becoming the same. This is because of judges who vote forthese theory arguments, while ignoring the consequences of dueer[3] outingthrough open source disclosure, even when it’s brought up in round. Even worseis tournament organizers, who sometimes even frame their tournament’s asprogressive and pro-LGBTQ+, are making open source of narratives andperformances a rule. I have contacted several of these tournaments asking abouttheir disclosure policies to avoid critical information being posted online,but never received a response. This forces pers to publicly out perselves inorder to compete at these tournaments, and not doing so denies them morealready limited opportunities to achieve success in this “Competitive Activity”in the form of a bid. Also, this results in a chilling effect on performancesthat call out problematic actions or actors within the community.
What Happens to the Few Trans Debaters in our Debate Communities?
Asdebaters continue to conflate women with female and man with male inside andoutside of rounds, this discourse reifies a gender binary, that erases theexistence of transgender debaters. The implication is, you can’t be a womxn ifyou were born as a male-passing and you can’t be a man if you were born asfemale passing. Not only does this completely encode over the existence ofintersex, non-binary, and multi-gender people[4],but also helps reinforce toxic notions in society writ large that contribute tointernalized gender dysphoria and self-loathing.
The‘good debater’ problem [5]reifiesthis cycle, because not only are trans folx left with few ‘good debaters’ astrans role models, but status quo “good debater” behavior informs other cisdebaters to adopt the same transphobic microaggressions they never had toaccount for. Lack of compassion or realization of misgendering only continuesto permeate the community.
Forexample, Judges often put on their paradigm that racist, sexist, homophobicarguments etc. are an instant loss. However, despite this, I and other transdebaters who call their opponents out on misgendering, have recognized lots ofjudges have odd misgendering brightlines that result in the judge dismissingit, is two times too many? Five? Ten? Additionally, many cis debaters use theirin round or after round apology to shift the guilt. I’ve been told by myopponent’s teammate that I should feel guilty for making per cry by calling per[3] outfor misgendering me.
Toadd on to my previous criticism of how debate being a “Competitive Activity” isleveraged, I also have a criticism of how tabula rasa is framed by judges. Thisisn’t to say having a judge attempt to be unbiased from their own opinionsabout politics or which side of the resolution is true is a bad thing. However,the way Tech>Truth is leveraged repeatedly doesn’t lead to actual productionof good norms. The classic example being, better theory debaters can readextremely abusive positions and destroy novices. But more importantly,positions like discourse criticisms should require using your own philosophy tonot vote for debaters who said R***** because they win 1ar font size theory.Before judges’ default to philosophical notions like pain being bad on a utilflow, or fairness is important because everyone will quit debate over a singleconditional counterplan, they should bring their paradigm as an educator intothe round. That means that any microaggressive behavior should be dealt withfirst because it can actively harm the other debater through verbal violence,make the space toxic and less accessible, and prevent debate from becoming asafe competitive environment for the rest of their lives. When these concernsare ignored for the sake of a “Competitive Activity,” that pedagogicallyjustifies doing anything for the ballot, and thus behaviors as egregious asdebaters blackmailing their opponents. In fact, under status quo paradigms, itis competitively advisable to intentionally misgender your opponent in front ofa “tab” judge to throw them off. Judges have a responsibility to promote a safeand equal space beyond anything else, as a prerequisite to have a debate.Because of this, judges should be much more receptive to theoretical,philosophical, or Kritikal arguments that deal with accessibility, survivalstrategies, and discourse relative to in-round procedural questions, orsubstance arguments.
Allof these culminating factors result in a culture where the trans womxn neveraccesses the debate room as a debater; we are always at least one foot out ofthe room. However, not only is the trans womxn not in the debate room itself,these pedagogical choices also inform debate’s feminist movements. Whichresults in the disconnect this article reveals.
Ona recent tournament weekend that was heralded as a big win for gender equality,I was dealing with one of my worst weekends in the activity. 6 opponentsmisgendered me a total of around 200 times, one achieving a new record of 72times in 3 minutes at the same tournament. How could we have such a differencein experience?
StatisticalExclusion
Hereare two studies that could potentially provide an answer.
1. http://www.vbriefly.com//2016/05/12/gendergapshin/
“Icollected my data from tabroom.com andincluded 24 bid tournaments from the 2015–2016 season. I will continue to addmore tournaments and possible more variables to my data set. I recorded schoolnames, debater’s names, pre-elimination records, elimination records, andspeaker-points. I was able to generate a list of genders from camp attendancesheets, Facebook, and websites that determine gender from names.
Igenerated this first graph by plotting seed frequency by gender. Thisgraph shows that males consistently have better seeding than females, as theblue line, which represents males, is more towards the left than the red line,which represents females. Based on this graph alone, we can extrapolate thatmale debaters perform better than female debaters.”
Notonly does this study conflate girls with females and boys with males to thedetriment of transgender humans but data is collected based on determininggender from name only. This is not only a bad practice for determining genderof cis people–i.e. the author herself didn’t know where to put Jordan — but isincredibly problematic when applied to trans people who often retain names thatdo not match their gender identities.
“SinceTabroom allows but does not require coaches to indicate the gender of debatersor judges, about 21% of observations for debaters and 50% for judges areinitially missing gender labels. I adopt three strategies to assign genders tomissing observations. First, I use 1990 Census data containing about 5,500common baby names. The Census data corresponds to people who were 25 years oldin 2015, which is a reasonable approximation for judges (who are often collegeor graduate students) as well as debaters. In cases where the same name appearsin both the male and female Census lists, I assign the more common genderassociated with the name. Second, I merge the Tabroom data with a list ofcommon names of South Asian origin I found on Github, a website whereprogrammers and researchers can share code and datasets. Third, I manually assigngender in what I believe are clear-cut cases [6].After the three procedures, 99% of debaters and 96% of judges have assignedgenders. The vast majority of the improvement is due to the official Censusdata.”
Weagain encounter the common theme of conflating sex and gender, and it’s thesame problematic study route based on names and Census predictions. None ofwhich is surprising because they were related studies, but disappointing sincethey are the only major study of gender disparities in high school LincolnDouglas that I’ve found. After looking a little closer though, you find thefirst footnote.
“Inthis paper, gender refers most closely to gender identity. See footnote 1 ofthe full paper for a more detailed explanation of the construction of thegender variable.”
Onlyfor the first footnote to say the following:
“Thedata does not distinguish between biological sex and gender identity. It isprobably safe to interpret summary statistics as applicable to either a“biological sex gap” or a “gender gap” given the small size of the populationwhose biological sex and gender identity differ, but there is no way to knowthis with certainty. Moreover, I exclude observations where gender is labeled“Other” due to concerns about reporting accuracy and sample size.”
Inother words: the research says sex and gender is the same, but the discussionof the “gender gap” still refers to gender identity, and it’s probably safe tosay that none of the non-binary or male passing trans folx gender experienceschange discussions of gender. Regardless it’s hard to study gay people.
Whilethis interpretation might seem a bit harsh, it’s clear that there is absolutelyno desire to paint a picture that includes trans womxn, given that the entirefootnote is about justifying how it wouldn’t scew the overall results of ciswomxn that much because of how insignificant trans womxn are to the data pool.
It’snearly impossible to empirically analyze discrimination against trans debatersbecause we barely exist in the activity: trans debaters’ numbers rapidlydwindle from harassment, and few of us are out as trans. But it is far moreproblematic to conclude, (as several cis people have encouraged me andthemselves too), that there aren’t also many others closeted or not whoexperience violence for their trans identities in debate just as I do. Usingnumbers as an excuse for a lack of consideration is an attempt to gaslighttrans debaters to avoid cis guilt.
CisnormativeFeminist Movements
Asshown, cis feminist movements in debate often lack an understanding ormotivation to deal with trans specific problems. However, some feministmovements in debate become not just unaligned with trans goals, but directlyharmful when they endorse toxic ideas around passing. I previously criticizedinterchanging male=man and female=women, but when this distinction is not madeby ladable feminists within the debate community and progressive groups andinstitutions, the result is not just feminist movements in the debate spacerecreating the same toxicity. In fact, when progressive institutions performacts of gendered violence this can result in a feeling of validation ofinternalized trauma.
Forexample, when I find a website for womxn in debate, and see thisinterchangeable use, I immediately reach out to members I’m acquainted with tosee if it’s a safe space for trans people. Someone still questioning theirgender identity or new to the community, might internalize that if progressiveinstitutions agree male=man, then they must not be trans. Even if theyrecognize this as a microaggression, they are likely to see this organizationand potentially debate as unsafe. In fact, if it wasn’t for me knowing andcontacting one of the students on their staff to ask about the environment,there are several instances where I would not have worked with theseorganizations.
Similarly,the way cis Feminist Kritikal Affirmatives are often performed in the debatespace is problematic. Saying the word trans womxn twice in the 1AC while notreading a single trans author or talking about how the 1AC affects trans womxnin any distinct way besides “gender equality,” isn’t enough to say yourfeminism is intersectional or supports trans womxn. Increasingly debaters havejust been sprinkling trans tokenism [7] intheir 1ACs for the sake of a 1AR permutation. In general, these kinds ofintersectionality perms should be held to a higher standard, because if thisblippy intersectionality [8]isn’trewarded with ballots, it will stop being strategic, and people will readKritikal affirmatives that consider specific experiences. Alternatives likeframing the aff as a transfeminist aff [9] basedon solving trans issues with intersectional spillover or an AC thatacknowledges that it works for cis womxn specifically are much better.
Thistrans tokenism by debaters in round, and cis feminist institutions isincredibly harmful. It presents the illusion of trans issue’s being dealt with,and prevents creation of trans-inclusive organizations with a similar purpose.
Solutions
However,despite all this we shouldn’t give up on our ability to recreate this “debatespace”.
Eventhough ideally adult members in the community would take the lead in fixingthese issues, they haven’t and many likely won’t until it picks up momentum.However, trans students are uniquely positioned to turn the often problematic“good debater” modelling on its head. Rather than justifying good debatersgetting away with bad behavior, trans debaters should fight to acquire this platformin order to act as trans models and speak out to change the community.
Currentdebaters and first year outs are also uniquely significant because of ourcurrent positionality within the community. more debaters should write articlesabout their experiences in debate to promote discussion and create newdebate-specific evidence the community can use. This is uniquely importantbecause when doing research for writing this there were only 7 articles aboutwomxn in Lincoln Douglas debate with two explicitly conflating gender andbiological sex. Only two mentioned trans womxn, and SunHee Simon’s was the onlyone that outlined potential solutions.
Inorder to avoid microaggressions we need to make all debaters aware of theirdiscourse. We should place specific focus on the creation of new transfeministmovements. Trans role models are key to showing trans people that they cansurvive and thrive in this space, as well as forcing cis people to acknowledgethe presence of trans debaters to avoid transphobic practices and cut downmicroaggressions. While these movements should be predominantly led by transmodels due to their awareness and understanding of microaggressions, I think wecan and must use established feminist organizations.
Thiswould entail 1. Getting rid of cisnormative discourse such as conflation ofgender and sex, inside and outside of debate rounds. 2. Creating spacesexplicitly for non-cis men as opposed to explicitly for cis women. This can bea way to reframe existing feminist movements in debate. 3. Have at leastpartially trans leadership of these programs, and have all the leadership beexplicitly pro-trans, embracing everyone gender deviant, regardless of theirorigin. Making sure trans voices are guiding the movement is a necessary step toavoid becoming an ad campaign for cis institutions.
Despiterecognizing the risks of intersectionality there are two reasons why I thinkthis approach is valid 1. Trans womxn debaters can’t be crowded out of feministdebate spaces much more than they already are, so adding cis womxn to ourmovement won’t make the situation any worse. 2. Due to risks of outing and thestatus quo silencing of trans identities in the debate space building aninfluential collation between only trans identities that could reshape largeinstitutions would be impossible, especially if cis women work against ourmovement.
Inaddition to increasing trans representation in these communities, people,especially those in progressive feminist institutions, should become moreconscious of per’s gendered language. Interacting with trans individuals canhelp with this, but also recognizing the impact of words, and taking 10 moreminutes to go through your website and correct microaggressions, or reading anarticle about how trans womxn are affected by therapy confidentiality.
Judges:Resulting from my previous criticism of Tabula Rasa the flow should not blindyou to the impact of your ballots. Many are likely to object that this model isidealistic for debaters to not prioritize the ballot above the accessibility ofthe invisible other. However, if you reframe the “role of the ballot” (if youwill) judges should stop giving the ballot to implicitly (or explicitly)endorsing anti-dueerness, racism, sexism etc. That doesn’t mean you have to throwout your “vote for the better debater” paradigm either, but like you wouldn’tconsider a debater who blackmails their opponent with outing a good debater,this framework just provides you even more reason to consider concerns ofaccessibility and structural fairness. Was the person without a coach getmisgendered several times, but still managed to exempt an independent voteragainst their opponent whose coaches wrote out the 1AR and 2AR a betterdebater, even if they dropped the 7th procedural fairness justification ontheir flow while freaking out?
Anymisgendering not followed by an immediate correction within the next 3–5seconds[10] shouldbe enough to warrant a ballot, but more than 5 regardless of immediatecorrection is also too far, because yes people can make a mistake with pronounsbut immediate correction isn’t difficult (if it is then don’t speak at 400WPM), nor is watching oneself for the remainder of the speech/round after asingle mistake, especially when that single instance can haunt a debater for 30minutes or even days, (I myself have the toxic habit of beginning a tallyingcount during their speech, which often leads to me missing arguments because Ionly hear the pronouns). Even if people can’t adapt to someone’s neologism i.e.if they have a disability that makes it impossible to do so, they should trainthemselves to do speeches through saying my opponent, or the aff/neg and lettheir opponent know that they have a speaking or focus accommodation before theround to lessen the impact. Also, if trans debaters feel comfortable doing so,I would advise shouting your gender pronoun [11]wheneverpers misgender you, it doesn’t speak over their speech besides the wrongpronoun, and allows pers to recognize and correct perselves.
Ipreviously argued that cis debaters shouldn’t try to shift guilt to the transpeople they misgender by pressuring the trans debater to accept their apology.However, this doesn’t mean they should gaslight the trans debater and pretendthey never misgendered per. This also isn’t to say that cis people should notfeel guilty for misgendering either. The best response I’ve encountered, is tosincerely apologize, without any snide comments that shift blame, notpretending it didn’t happen, and then regardless of the trans person’sresponse, reflecting on what you did, followed by practicing to not do itagain.
Coaches: 1. Don’t out your student, control information that goes to parents and other students as the dueer student requests, similarly don’t treat them weirdly around other students or they will catch on. 2. Check students’ behavior, encourage them to use neologisms i.e. ze, per, xe to refer to everyone not just the dueer student or students to avoid misgendering closeted students. This also means stopping them from using slurs like f***** to refer to dueer people and monitoring their behavior in rounds against debaters from other schools. And 3. stand up for your students in and out of round. Most importantly stand up to other adults, whether this be the head coach of another school whose debater just engaged in that behavior, it is rare for a coach to be confronted on their behavior because of potential drama leading to losses however that resistance is the only way to unseat these practices.
Tournament organizers: uni-sex bathrooms are always a plus, even if the school doesn’t have one, I would recommend designating a teacher’s restroom as a nonbinary bathroom. There’re few things in debate more emotionally frustrating and invalidating then being misgendered 100 times and then being forced to use a cis bathroom. Don’t make policies that force debaters to out themselves, reach out to trans debaters in the community when implementing a new policy, and listen to pers concerns to modify your policy such that it’s not exclusionary, right now the open source policy is the biggest concern but there have been and will continue to be others I’m sure.
Camps: Place more focus on arguments and diverse groups who don’t have representation in the debate space, as opposed to those that are already constantly sparking conversation and debate, not to say those other categories important, but it is sad to see that stuff like ableism and trans experiences in debate rarely receive discussion because they are by rule put last on the docket.
Toall the trans debaters out there, the advice I was granted could not be truerin my experiences. Even though it can assist in spreading trans voices, don’tforce yourself to do performance debate if you don’t feel comfortable doing so.Even if it’s only way for you to survive in debate, it’s not something thatshould be taken lightly. Performance regarding trans identity, will be adouble-edged sword. You will face misgendering and microaggressions at asimilar or greater rate than when closeted, you will encounter slurs, and allmanner of human selfishness, exploring how many ways debaters can tell you yourpain doesn’t matter. Yet you will find a voice, and be able to speak outagainst these instances, and for that voice, my hands bleeding, I’d gladly gripthe sword again.
Descendingnow
Ihear the calling
Ofhundreds of my kin
Flyinghigher still
Makingtheir voices heard.
Othernotes:
Womenwas intentionally used in a few points of the article when referring to ciswomen only from the perspective of a gender essentialist, womxn is farpreferable to be used for all womxn including cis womxn and an example of ashift in language this articulate endorses.
Irecognize that some people still find the term “queer” unpalatable, I’m notusing it or dueer as a slur but rather a reclamation and synonym for alldeviant genders, sexes, and sexualities as in Kritikal theory.
Irecommend reading Lindsey Perlman’s article if you haven’t already because itkind of acts as a precursor to this one.
Nooffense is meant to any particular person, I have no idea how this article willbe received, given that people get into flame wars over disclosure on Facebook,but I need to post it for other trans debaters regardless.
Footnotes:
[1] Animitation and re-analysis of the intro to Lindsey Perlman’s article “Fightingfor a Place at the Front,” heavily paraphrased even in the none-quoted parts.
[2] I’mnot going to scientifically justify the existence of trans people in thisarticle, go find that elsewhere.
[3] Standsfor disabled kweer and acts as a further elaboration and criticism on “FROM“QUARE” TO “KWEER”: TOWARDS A QUEER ASIAN AMERICANCRITIQUE”, I’ll likely writean article on it in the future so I won’t elaborate beyond that for now.
[4] https://medium.com/@chriscoles_66854/against-biology-against-the-sexed-body-gender-compulsory-heterosexuality-and-the-molecular-8121f0b04ad5 Iagree with a majority of this article in its criticism of biological sex, yetsince most people who are unfamiliar with dueer theory, would have difficultyaccessing an alternate expression without first reading Coles’ article, I willstill use the term.
[5] Ifanyone desires further explanation please leave a comment. There have beenother articles attacking the idea of the ‘good debater’ being someone who winslots of rounds, so I didn’t want to re-invent the wheel and dilute the focus ofmy article.
[6] Notgendered pronoun that replaces person. You can google the conjugation. One ofthe two main pronouns (along with they) I’ve seen other trans people prefer. Ialternate between the two in this article.
[7] Thisalso happens commonly with race.
[8] Thisisn’t to say intersectional affs are bad, but rather those affs have aresponsibility to address each group they claim under their banner during theirspeech individual, and/or use an author’s prior analysis and defend thatspecific author’s intersectionality.
[9] Thisaff can be potentially problematic for cis womxn, I would recommend readingtrans authors who talk about intersectionality, and contacting trans debatersabout it.
[10] I would recommend this article by SunHee Simon https://www.vbriefly.com//2018/01/26/community-resolution-4-gender-in-debate-by-sunhee-simon/#_ftn3~QLSMD, which describes ways to deal with pronouns on an individual level.
[11] Allof this assumes you exchanged pronouns and triggers at the beginning of theround, which is a good norm if you are comfortable doing so.
