PROFESSOR IN DRAG | PAGE 1, 2, 3
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Later, over coffee, Gilbert meets with me to discuss the video that recorded Miqqi's classroom appearance. Confident, jovial and intense, he wants me to know that his students are impressed that he's willing to share himself with them. Lately he's been sharing himself with more than students: Print stories and TV pieces on Gilbert have appeared in the mainstream media during the past year. The self-outing was intentional -- Gilbert believes that if you have tenure, you ought to say what's unpopular, especially if you're part of a marginalized group.

"I have the obligation to expose myself as transgendered in order that others, for whom the risk might be greater, can also do so," he says.

Gilbert is part of a wave of gender-bending academics who put their bodies on the line. That once meant facing a phalanx of cops because you wanted to help stop the Vietnam War or Southern racism. But in the world of paradigm-rocking academia, the focus of revolutionary energies has irrevocably changed. While once campus radicals addressed explicitly political and civil rights issues -- racism, the widening gap between rich and poor, homelessness or America's military adventures -- now they often battle on behalf of "the body" and the elusive experience of inhabiting a sexual persona.

Born of postmodernism's disillusionment with scholarly detachment, the contemporary study of sexuality allows scholars to become players rather than simply distant observers or temporary tourists. Michel Foucault became both celebrated and notorious for his participation in San Francisco's gay bathhouse culture. Judith Haberstam, a wiry, suit-wearing, butch theorist at the University of California at San Diego, offers both a visual and conceptual understanding of gender fluidity. As Michael/Miqqi sums it up: "I'm living it, not just writing about it. I'm in the first person."

By teaching his class en femme, Gilbert becomes a walking illustration of one of the tenets that underpins much of his scholarship: Gender is just a construct propped up by deeply imbedded conditioning. And what is constructed can be deconstructed; the fact that you're born one sex shouldn't limit your freedom to cross over into another. His Miqqi outings are as political as they are pedagogical. Cross-dressers are often ignored, he contends, living in the shadow of surgically altered transsexuals or flamboyant drag queens. To bolster courage and self-esteem among his kind, he edits a magazine called the Monarch: Canada's Transgender Reader and organizes support groups.

If all this sounds a little fringy, it's important to remember that Gilbert is not a recent product of an obscure postmodern-leaning school. He has strong establishment credentials: tenure, a C.V. heavy with publications in both traditional and trendy academic journals and more than 25 years of university teaching. After getting a Ph.D. at Ontario's University of Waterloo, and joining the philosophy department of York University in 1975, Gilbert specialized in critical reasoning. His first book, "How To Win an Argument" (now reprinted by John Wiley), was published in 1979. Since then, he has written two novels, one of which, "The Office Party," a psychological drama about a man who takes his co-workers hostages and has no demands, was made into a film in Canada in 1988 called "Hostile Takeover."

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Arguing like a man and feeling like a woman