After King: Responsibility for Queer and Trans Expressions

In this article, Adam Greteman considers the murder of Lawrence/Latisha King by Brandon McInerney in February 2008. Greteman turns to this case, a decade after it occurred, because it raises a number of issues regarding our evolving understandings of genders, sexualities, and the risks of encountering such differences in the space of school in the twenty‐first century. Greteman argues that we live in a moment where queer and trans youth are coming out and becoming queer and trans earlier and, in various ways, expanding our understanding of genders and sexualities, and also illustrating the complex responsibilities that schools — in the form of teachers, administrators, and students — have toward these forms of becoming. He explores the limits of a liability model of responsibility and the need for contemplating responsibility more broadly as it encounters systemic forms of injustice (for example, transphobia, homophobia, and white supremacy) in the classroom. If queer and trans youth have more access to resources, protections, and representations in the late 2010s, how do those in schools — students, teachers, staff, and administrators — engage the tensions that can arise between queer and trans expressions and expressions opposed to queerness and transness? And how do schools continue to take up their collective responsibilities for the lives of students who are becoming in the midst of systemic injustice?