“Let’s Be Trans”

This chapter examines how the youth of Spectrum are forming gender identities in the context of transgender phenomena, a paradigm shift in the way gender is represented, understood, and explained. As a space where genderqueerness is accepted and embraced, Spectrum is a kind of queer utopia. At Spectrum young people are allowed to feel ambivalence about their gender and can play with pronouns, gender expression, and identity. For those queer young people whose gender expression and identity is ambiguous, meaning that what they look like challenges mainstream society’s notions of what a boy or a girl is, Spectrum may be the first place they feel the liberation of not having to be one or the other. Spectrum youth are learning to complicate gender, be aware of the role gender attribution plays in our interactions with each other, and forge resistance to the entrenched gender binary.