Contested spaces: trans-inclusive school policies and parental sovereignty in Canada

ABSTRACT

This article analyses five public consultation meetings about revisions to an LGBTQ-related school board policy on unceded Coast Salish territory in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. These meetings focused largely on the new provision that students in publicly funded schools be allowed to use the washroom that corresponds with their gender identity. Almost all of the objections to the policy revisions were articulated by parents of non-queer, or not openly queer students. We found that these parental concerns centred around two perennial issues in Canadian educational studies; namely, how schools regulate students’ gender identities and expressions, and the role of the state in publicly funded schooling. We conclude by drawing upon emerging literature on best practices for trans youth in schools to offer alternative visions for how these issues can be better addressed with the public, and parents in particular.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy studies
• LGBT youth
• transgender
• washroom use
• queer theory
• school counsellors' parental rights
• embodiment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Lindsay Herriot is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria.

David P. Burns is a faculty member and university senator at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Betty Yeung is a Master's student in the Counselling Psychology program at the University of Ottawa.

Notes

1. ‘Trans*: an umbrella term that can be used to describe people whose gender identity and/or gender expression differs from what they were assigned at birth’ (Vancouver School Board 2014, 13). While recognizing the inherent tensions of collapsing a plurality of identities into a single term, in the interests of readability and cohesion, we will be using trans, without an asterisk in this paper to refer to a broad array of gender non-conforming identities including but not limited to, gender fluid, gender queer, gender non-conforming, pangender, bigender, all gender, agender, transgender, transsexual, etc. Following Gabriel (2014), we eschew the asterisk because it adds caveats and qualifications to ‘trans,’ which is itself the umbrella term.