September 6, 2023
The year 2023 may still be in its third quarter, but it has already proven to be a devastating legislative year for transgender people in the United States. According to Trans Legislation Tracker, at least 566 bills intended to impact access to healthcare, education, and student athletics have been introduced in state legislatures this year. Many of these bills target transgender youth and procedures in K-12 schools. Take Arizona SB1001, which states that no school employee may refer to a student using a pronoun “that differs from the pronoun that aligns with a student’s biological sex” without written parental consent. Or consider Arizona HB1700 (What’s going on, Arizona?) which bans books from school classrooms and libraries that discuss gender fluidity or even explore the idea of using gendered pronouns—concepts its authors liken, bewilderingly, to “groom[ing] children into normalizing pedophilia.” Anyone who is paying attention knows it’s a dark time for trans youth.
Outside of legislative sessions, attacks on trans youth and those who support them are perpetuated in harmful, biased media reporting. In February of this year, close to 1,000 New York Times contributors signed an open letter to the newspaper in protest of its “poor editorial judgment” in reporting on transgender people. In their letter the signatories highlighted, among other offenses, at least “15,000 words of front-page Times coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children” in the eight months between June 2022 and the letter’s publication, including a long-form article by a known transphobic journalist that has since been used in a Texas court to discriminate against trans kids. Clearly, the firestorm of anti-trans sentiment has taken particular aim at trans and gender-nonconforming youth, and educators who would seek to support and affirm them.
K-12 schools and educators therefore find themselves navigating two challenges: an increasingly visible and vocal population of trans and gender-nonconforming students who need support and protection, and a social and political climate hostile to transgender people and trans youth in particular. It is paramount that schools consider their vital role in helping students and families navigate gender identity and its representation in law and media, just as schools must consider their responsibility in all facets of child and adolescent cognitive and psychosocial development. Moreover, it is crucial that schools approach discussions of gender identity with compassion, in a manner that centers the experiences of vulnerable trans students, and in such a way that remains within the boundaries of appropriate educator involvement in child and adolescent development. Schools must be supportive and inclusive of trans students while also leaving decisions about medical care and transition to the discretion of students, families, and healthcare providers.
The Current Landscape
Unfortunately, some of the work that has been done ostensibly to support children, adolescents, and the adults who care for them in schools reinforces and extends transphobic harm. In her recent Intrepid Ed News article entitled “Do No Harm: Navigating Gender Identity Theory in School,” Josie Holford expresses her concerns about “gender identity ideology,” arguing that expanding notions of sex and gender to include concepts of gender fluidity and trans identity are harmful to young people’s bodies and minds.
Holford’s article samples from many of transphobic reporting’s greatest hits. It cherry-picks arguments from a vocal minority of healthcare professionals who have concerns about access to gender-affirming care for trans youth, such as anti-trans activist Miriam Grossman. The study Holford claims is “the best current research we have available in the English-speaking world” is an independent review specific to a single-gender clinic in the UK—a country renowned for its transphobic policy-making and political rhetoric. While Holford suggests the study’s author, who is the former president of the UK’s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, is wary about the impact of using affirming language for gender-questioning youth, the study is in fact patently devoted to respectful and validating care for trans youth.
Holford’s article also distances transgender activists from the rest of the LGB(T)Q acronym in a somewhat offensive manner. It suggests that transgender people are “cuckoos laying eggs in the LGB nest,” furthering the well-documented erasure of transgender activists from LGBTQIA+ discourse despite their historical primacy in advancing civil rights for all LGBTQIA+ people. Her writing suggests that transgender people are a threat to women’s safety and legal rights—a common but baseless argument used in anti-trans legislation to vilify trans women in particular. The article even takes the inherently transphobic position that “the reality is: a boy is a boy” and that suggesting otherwise “puts the idea into children’s heads that they can change sex.” Even within the fold of traditional transphobic rhetoric, this is a stunningly reductive statement and one that—despite anyone’s personal beliefs to the contrary—is factually untrue. The result is that this piece purportedly written in defense of developing children and adolescents does stem from a firmly held and inflexible position, much like the one she claims those peddling ‘gender ideology theory’ carry in our own work.
The reality of transgender experience and the well-researched benefits of providing gender-affirming care for youth is well-documented. Nearly all major medical organizations in the United States, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the Endocrine Society, and others, have released statements supporting treatment for transgender youth as medically necessary and evidence-based. Despite Holford and others’ claims that children and adolescents can be subjected to “experimental drugs, cross-sex hormones, and life-altering surgeries,” AAP and Endocrine Society guidelines clearly outline stages for consensual, developmentally appropriate care. As Joshua Safer, a co-author of the Endocrine Society’s transgender care guidelines and executive director of the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, told Scientific American, “The gender-affirming approach is not some railroad of people to hormones and surgery…it is talking and watching and being conservative.”
Simply put: no one is performing life-altering surgeries on children, and the available research suggests that trans people have lower rates of suicide, social isolation, and poor educational outcomes when they are heard, supported, and validated. According to a study at the Williams Institute, 30% of transgender youth attempted suicide in 2016 alone, but “studies have found that certain experiences, like family and social support, are associated with reduced prevalence of suicide thoughts and attempts.” For most educators, hearing that evidence suggests further equity, safety, and health are assured by affirming trans students would be enough.
Gender Identity and the Role of K-12 Schools
A different article could spend more time enumerating the many reasons why gender-affirming care and support for children and adolescents is important and life-saving—in fact, many articles already have. But as educators, we are crucially not in the position of making recommendations about healthcare or gender identity to our students. Our primary role, as is always the case, is to provide the environment our students need to learn and grow. What concerns me about Holford’s article and similar lines of argumentation are not only that they rely on transphobic rhetoric, but that they make a disturbing assumption about how educators are discussing gender identity in educational settings. Namely, Holford suggests that teachers and other school personnel are actively steering conversations with students about their gender identities.
In the conclusion to her article, Holford asks, “Should we be suggesting to children that they may be born in the wrong body? If not, how do you think that should be addressed?” Similarly, she questions, “Are children who do not fit within the norms of sex-stereotyped behavior considered “trans? If so, are you OK with that? If not, how do you think this should be addressed?”
My answer is this: no one should be suggesting to students that they may be born in the wrong body, and neither should they counter this narrative if students offer it about themselves. And while I do not believe it is the case that children who defy the norms of sex-stereotyped behavior are “considered ‘trans,’” I would assert that no one other than the individual child, teen, or person in question should be in the position of labeling another person’s gender identity for them—not as transgender and not as cisgender. To do so is not only an overstep of nearly every school or district’s protocol around appropriate educator-student dialogue but a fundamental violation of privacy and students’ rights. In a climate that is eager to strip students—particularly trans students—of their rights and sovereignty, perhaps the greatest harm we can do as adults is to prescribe their identities for them as they are still forming.
Further, we should not put ourselves in the position of determining for our students and their families how they should navigate questions of identity or how they should interface with medical practitioners. These subjects are simply (and thankfully!) outside the realm of most of our job descriptions. While gender identity is clearly a subject that has captured interest and attention, and it makes sense that educators would grapple with how to approach gender-identity conversations with students, it is important to remember that our primary roles are to provide safe, developmentally appropriate, pedagogically rich environments for all students—trans or cis—to learn. So, what should educators do?
Despite common principles, each school, educator, and pedagogical philosophy will offer different answers about the goals of any one educational program. Still, the necessity of providing appropriate conditions for learning is arguably the most common among them. So how do we determine what conditions, with respect to gender identity awareness, are most conducive to student learning?
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) practitioners in schools often reference Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in making the case for robust K-12 DEIB programming, citing, in particular, the level devoted to love and belonging. Once students have access to basic physiological and safety needs (which, by the way, are not a given for many trans-identified students and other or intersecting marginalized student groups) feeling a sense of belonging and inclusion in one’s community is central to students’ learning, self-esteem, and self-actualization. What are some tangible ways to ensure feelings of inclusion and belonging for trans students or students who are questioning their gender identities?
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Listen to students and believe them when they describe their experiences
Individuals are, ultimately, the most trusted experts on their own lived experiences and gendered selves. Whether students are cis, trans, or questioning, they should be in the driver’s seat when it comes to self-determination and self-actualization. Educators should neither provide labels for students or negate self-assigned labels—though they can assist students in developing clearer language for talking about their experiences and speaking inclusively about others.
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Practice inclusive language and community-building
When we ask students and colleagues to self-identify with their chosen names and pronouns, we are making space for them to show up in learning spaces as their authentic selves. Doing so is not a radical act or one that will somehow ‘turn students trans’; rather, it is the bare minimum for creating an inclusive environment in which people can be referred to appropriately. We should not be asking students how they identify—this is for them to share. 9-12 schools committed to equity for trans students also commonly host specific affinity spaces for trans-identifying people distinct from existing LGBTQIA+ affinity and alliance spaces, recognizing that joy, agency, and inclusion can arise when trans students are allowed to freely share their experiences with others without risk of judgment or criticism.
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Engage with discretion, and as-needed, around identity-based disclosures
It is an infringement of student privacy and agency to needlessly disclose information about students’ identities (including self-selected names, pronoun use that differs from pronoun use at home, or reflections about one’s gender identity) with parents and guardians without a student’s consent. This is not to suggest that educators are responsible for ‘keeping secrets,’ but rather that we use appropriate discretion about what to share, and when. As educators, we learn many things about our students in their progression through school that we choose not to share—for a variety of reasons—with parents and guardians. It is normal and age-appropriate for students to experiment with pronoun usage and gender self-identification, and potentially quite harmful for that information to be shared with guardians (unless, of course, it falls under the category of mandated reporting).
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Allow for age-appropriate development and freedom of expression
Holford is correct in her assessment that schools should resist reinforcing narrow sex stereotypes and make space for variance within gender expression that does not necessarily indicate a trans identity. However, gender theory is the body of thought responsible for allowing the cognitive and social space for people to experiment with gender presentation and identity. Ideas about gender exist in our world—it is not those of us asking exploratory questions about ourselves or others who are reinforcing gender roles and norms. Rather, we are making additional space to expand beyond them.
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Recognize that we are in a dangerously anti-trans moment
It is an appropriate moment to exhibit caution about how we care for trans students and students exploring their gender identities—trans students are in danger across our country. Educators truly committed to the work of supporting students as they navigate adolescence should approach discussions of gender with curiosity, compassion, and care. If, as Holford suggests, we choose to “educate ourselves”—and in doing so we choose to learn from trans students themselves and not pundits who would seek to dehumanize them—we will learn that the nature of selfhood these students are exploring is really the same as all children and adolescents are trying to find at all times: a way to feel safe, secure, and authentic in the world.
KB Kinkel is a member of the English Department at The Cambridge School of Weston (MA).
