Privacy for all students? Talking about and around trans students in “public”

ABSTRACT

This paper places under examination the arguments used to fight against school policies and legislation intended to guarantee and protect the rights of trans students. That is, the paper's central investigation works to uncover the regimes of truth about children, gender, race and privacy implicit in the methods employed by activists who seek to counter the expansion of rights for trans students. Using critical discourse and document analyses influenced by queer theories and Critical Race Theory, this paper examines the group Privacy for All Students and the arguments it makes in campaign documents against California State Assembly Bill 1266 – the statewide trans students’ right law passed in 2013. First, this paper unpacks the intertwined constructions of children before moving to an examination of how notions of innocence are founded by gendered, sexual, and racial regimes of truth. Then, it explores how the foundational logics of the public sphere make possible for PFAS to address their arguments about children and innocence to “the public” and suggest why close, critical readings of the seemingly implicit ways of knowing and thinking about gender, race, and privacy in their documents are important towards ensuring trans students have a place in school.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum studies
• gender issues in education
• educational theory
• whiteness studies
• trans youth studies

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Mona Gleason and Lisa Loutzenheiser for their guidance during the development of this article and Anne Hales for feedback on an earlier draft. Additionally, I am grateful to the reviewers for their valuable comments and to the editors for their support throughout the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Frohard-Dourlent (2016) for further analysis on the Vancouver case, including an important synthesis and critique about how the racialization of the group against the new student policy was taken up in complicated ways that problematically pitted concerns of communities of color as antagonistic to trans and gender non-conforming students.

2. Here, and throughout, I use they/them/their as a singular, non-gendered pronoun to refer to someone in the abstract or when their gender identity and/or preferred pronouns are unknown. I do so to work against the implicit linguistic necessity to gender bodies at all times, a force that concurrently marginalizes and gender non-conforming trans bodies (see http://theyismypronoun.tumblr.com/).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sam Stiegler

Sam Stiegler is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the everyday experiences of trans, genderqueer, and queer youth. His work has been published in Pedagogy, Culture & Society, The Journal of LGBT Youth, Journal of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies, and by Rethinking Schools.