Conference on College Composition and Communication, February 2023
In response to the recent legislative onslaught targeting LGBTQIA+ communities, and to federal inaction, the CCCC Executive Council convened an LGBTQIA+ Task Force focusing on methods for supporting LGBTQIA+ people in our professional spaces. Given the climate of hostility targeting trans and queer people, we remind our colleagues that there is no neutral stance. Passivity in the face of violence is still violence.
As CCCC works to combat white supremacy [1], create accessible spaces [2], demand Black linguistic justice [3], and commit to “the work of antiracist change-making [4], [4]” this work is incomplete without addressing the transphobia and queerphobia inherent to white supremacy. Queer of color, trans of color, and crip scholars have proven that dominant conceptions of gender and sexuality were built on and built for white supremacy and have been used to exclude, dehumanize, and persecute Black, Indigenous, and other people of color regardless of gender identity and/or sexual orientation (Leonardo and Porter; Pritchard, “For Colored Kids”; Chavez; Martin and Battles; Kearl; Patterson and Hsu; Driskill).