Gender Minorities Aotearoa is offering a free online course, designed to increase your knowledge of historic and contemporary issues regarding feminism and transgender people, and to improve your transgender inclusive intersectional feminist praxis. It is designed for people who are relatively fluent in feminism, and already have a 101 understanding of transgender issues.
It was developed through an intersectional feminist lens, by a transgender team that included transfeminine, transmasculine, non-binary, indigenous Māori, neurodiverse, disabled, and working class representation.
This course takes around 60 minutes to complete, and is broken into 5 sessions. You can stop at any time and continue later by logging in again. Some chapters have additional reading materials linked – these are not included in the time allocation.
By the end of chapter 1. you will be able to:
- 1. Differentiate between gender, sex characteristics, and sex assigned at birth.
- 2. Talk about impact of colonisation on understandings of sex and gender.
By the end of chapter 2. you will be able to:
- 1. Understand the impact of eurocentric heteropatriarchal sexology on transgender narratives.
- 2. Understand the history of enforced heteronormative sexuality in trans healthcare.
- 3. Recognise the sexualisation of transgender women through medicalisation and pathologisation.
- 4. Recognise the abusive nature of enforcing an arbitrary gender without an infants consent.
By the end of chapter 3. you will be able to:
- 1. Recognise the repression of transgender people in Nazi Germany.
- 2. Recognise similarities between historic fascism and contemporary repressive regimes.
- 3. Identify psudo-feminist and fundamentalist religious right alliances.
- 4. Understand the history of Radical Feminism and inclusivity in relation to transgender women.
- 5. Talk about why the term “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism” or “TERF” was developed.
- 6. Identify impacts of TERF campaigns on public policy.
- 7. Discuss various online and offline tactics of TERF campaigners, and the impacts of these.
- 8. Identify reasoning behind the framing of anti-trans propaganda as “transgender debate”.
By the end of chapter 4. you will be able to:
- 1. Recognise key components of transmisogyny.
- 2. Talk about the transmisogynist double bind.
- 3. Identify the stereotypes behind transmisogynist prejudice.
- 4. Discuss why theories of “male socialisation” are inaccurate.
By the end of chapter 5. you will be able to:
- 1. Identify examples of transgender intersectional feminist praxis.
- 2. Recognise the exclusion of transgender narratives from contemporary feminist discourses.
- 3. Identify a Black lesbian feminist separatist position on biological essentialism.
- 4. Discuss key strategies for an intersectional feminist praxis of transgender inclusivity.
- 5. Identify areas of transgender marginalisation to address in gendered oppression discourse.
- 6. Identify key concepts in creating trans-inclusive gendered spaces.
- 7. Discuss core concepts in building safer spaces or diversity and inclusion policies.
Content Warning: this course discusses transgender histories, including forced surgeries, childhood sexual assault, concentration camps, the death penalty, and sexual violence.