Transitioning in elementary school: parent advocacy and teacher allyship

Abstract

This paper examines how parent advocacy and teacher allyship played an important role in supporting six-year-old Violet Addley’s (a pseudonym) gender transition in elementary school. We first met the Addley family in the spring of 2015 when we interviewed them for a research study on the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) families in Ontario schools. The goals of the study are to interview LGBTQ families about issues that come up at school, document how families have worked with schools to create safer and more respectful classrooms for their children, and share the families’ interviews with teachers and principals so they can begin to think about the ways they can best work with LGBTQ parents and their children. Our paper also discusses what a group of teachers learned about parent advocacy and teacher allyship from their engagement with the Addley family interviews.

Keywords:

• Transgender children
• transitioning in school
• parent advocacy
• teacher allyship

Notes

1. The names of each member of the Addley family in this paper are pseudonyms chosen by the Addley family. Ms Richards, the name of Violet Addley’s teacher, is also a pseudonym.

2. The research team secured ethics approval to conduct the video interview from the University of Toronto in April 2014 and are only interviewing LGBTQ families who are already ‘out’ in their communities in order to ensure their participation will be safe for themselves and their children. The ethics approval is reviewed and renewed annually by the University of Toronto to ensure participation in our study continues to be safe for the families we interview. When recruiting participants for the study we are striving for ethnic, racial, class and gender diversity among the families. We are also striving for diversity in family formation. All participants have the option of having their images and voices blurred before their video interviews are shared on the website.

3. The research team conducted three interviews with the Addley family: one with the Addley parents, one with Violet, and one with Violet’s siblings.

4. In August 2016 Austen Koecher secured ethics approval to use excerpts from the teachers’ final assignments for her doctoral thesis on teacher engagement with the video interviews. The approval also allows Austen and the rest of the team to use excerpts from the students’ final assignments for publication in academic and professional journals. Not all of the teachers in our class gave us approval to use their assignments in our writing. In this article, we are only using the work of the teachers who have given us permission to do so.

5. A third final assignment option provided a more traditional option. It asked teachers to write a critical essay on two course readings or supplementary readings.

6. In Latin, the prefix ‘trans’ means ‘the other side of’ while ‘cis’ means ‘the same side of’.

7. See Pendleton Jiménez (2006) children’s book Are you a boy or a girl? and their animated film Taylor et al.’s (2008) Tomboy for two excellent resources for talking about gender identity in elementary school.