‘I don’t care what’s under your clothes’: the discursive positioning of educators working with trans and gender-nonconforming students

Abstract

This paper examines the meanings educators produce about their experiences working with trans and gender-nonconforming students, and the effects of this discursive process. In this paper, I draw on 62 interviews with school staff conducted in British Columbia to examine how educators understand their role in an institutional context (a school) that is shaped by systems of power that legitimise and enforce sexual and gender conformity. By drawing on the dominant narratives available to them, educators recounted their experiences through discursive resources that tend to distance them from the institutional systems of power they were operating within. Four specific discursive resources through which the educators’ experiences became intelligible are described: (1) relying on bullying discourses, (2) framing themselves as open-minded individuals, (3) emphasising external institutional obstacles and (4) acknowledging their complicity in systems of power. Through these discursive framings, the role that educators themselves play in shaping the field of legibility and legitimacy in schools is downplayed, thus limiting the potential to resist and displace existing systems of power and generate systemic transformations.

Keywords:

• educators
• trans students
• gender nonconformity
• sexuality
• gender
• schools

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge all the educators who shared their stories with me and work tirelessly within a complicated institution to welcome all young people in their schools and classrooms. I am also grateful for the anonymous reviewers for their thorough and invaluable feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Guidelines for BC teachers as well as recent court cases encourage classroom content that is inclusive of sexual and gender diversity (BCTF n.d.; BC Ministry of Education 2008; Meyer 2010).

^2. All names used are pseudonyms.