Supporting transgender students in schools: beyond an individualist approach to trans inclusion in the education system

ABSTRACT

In this article, we provide theoretically informed empirical insights into administrative and pedagogical approaches to supporting transgender students in schools which rely on a fundamental rationality of individualisation and rights. We draw on trans epistemological frameworks and political theories that address the limits of liberal individualism to provide insights into how transgender inclusion and recognition are conceived and enacted in one particular school in Ontario. Our case study contributes to an emerging body of research that documents the viewpoints of educators in response to the increasing visibility of trans youth in schools and a growing awareness of their experiences which have highlighted the institutional and systemic barriers continuing to impact on the provision of support for transgender students in the education system. Overall, the case study serves as an illustrative exemplification of the problematic of trans inclusion when it is driven by a logics of liberal individualism and rights that fail to address broader forces of cisnormativity and cisgenderism.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgender students
• transgender inclusion
• cisnormativity
• cisgenderism
• trans education
• gender diversity and schooling

Introduction

In this article, we reflect on the limits of an individualist approach to supporting transgender affirmative education and policy mobilisation in schools that requires the embodied presence and visibility of the transgender student as a basis for ensuring their recognisability. We draw on case study research with educators in one school community in Ontario to provide some critical insights into such a demand for trans¹ recognition in that it exposes the systematic erasure and invisibilization of trans youth in schools, and eschews the necessity of addressing the institutionalisation of cisgenderism and cisnormativity in the education system. Lennon and Mistler (2014) define cisgenderism as “the cultural and systemic ideology that denies, denigrates or pathologizes self-identified gender identities that do not align with assigned gender at birth, as well as resulting behavior, expression and community” (p. 63), while Frohard-Dourlent (2016a) explains cisnormativity as “the belief that gender is a binary category that naturally flows from one’s sex assigned at birth” (p. 4). Our purpose is to explicate and expose how trans intelligibility is structured by the terms of cisnormative governance in the form of administrative enactment² of policies and pedagogical interventions which rely on a fundamental logics of accommodation that is invested in securing the individual rights of the trans student at the expense of addressing the structural inequalities at play in sustaining the erasure of trans personhood in school communities in the first place. In fact, our findings highlight that while trans visibility opens up a pedagogical space for teachers at this particular school to challenge restrictive gender binary constructs (Luecke, 2018), it does not necessarily lead to a critical interrogation of cisnormativity and its effects with respect to enhancing students’ understanding of trans intelligibility and gender expansiveness (Ehrensaft, 2016; Human Rights Campaign Foundation and Gender Spectrum, 2014; Pyne, 2014).

Our study contributes to an emerging body of research in the field which focuses on educator knowledge of and attitudes towards issues of gender diversity in schools (Frohard-Dourlent, 2016b, 2018; Mangin, 2019; Payne & Smith, 2014) and school-based interventions (Goldstein, 2019; Luecke, 2011, 2018; Smith & Payne, 2016; Ullman, 2017). These works collectively highlight a significant lack of critical reflection and outright resistance to challenging narratives that maintain staff and school as neutral or supportive when working with trans students who interrupt the unchallenged cisnormativity of the education system. Such a resistance ignores Keenan’s (2017) call for a critical trans pedagogy that promotes an “unscripting and [that] must necessarily support children in constructing new knowledge” (p. 538) that allows them to “deeply examine how our current gender system confines us all and how that interacts with other systems, like race, class, and ability” (p. 553). And yet, Bartholomaeus and Riggs (2017) report that there is indeed a reluctance on behalf of educators to “engage in gender affirming pedagogy … instead choosing to focus specifically on the safety and learning of individual transgender students” (pp. 128–129). Frohard-Dourlent (2018), for example, asks: “What student did not have to advocate for themselves because schools are already set up to recognize them?” (p. 339), and indeed, in virtually all of these studies, trans visibility is contingent upon a student being required to declare their identity. Our research provides more specific and detailed case analysis of this problematic as well as novel insights into its administrative and pedagogical manifestation by drawing on trans epistemological frameworks and political theories that are informed by critiques of individualism and human rights. This “theoretically enhanced explanation” (Anyon, 2009, p. 4) marks our distinctive contribution to generating knowledge about how trans intelligibility is mediated and limited in its specificity and particularity via the individualist logics driving policy enactment and curricular interventions that are incited in response to the obligatory visibility of a trans student.

Transgender-informed theoretical frameworks and a critical framing of liberal individualism

Our study is informed by a critical trans politics that calls for a need to “analyze how power operates beyond the individual discrimination model” and what legal trans scholar, Dean Spade (2015) refers to as “liberal and rights-based frameworks” (pp. 50–51). Spade argues for the need to rethink the “power and systems of meaning” that are embedded in traditional legal (and by extension policy) frameworks of discrimination and equality. He explicates how such frameworks invoke a mode of individualism that ultimately obscures the structural forces which contribute to trans marginalisation and vulnerability in the first place (Spade, 2015), with consequences for survivability and “producing the conditions for a viable life” (Butler, 2004, p. 12). Rather, Spade (2015) calls for “a way of thinking about power based on an analysis of the distribution of life chances [for trans people] … how the administration of life chances through traditional gender categories produces trans vulnerability to premature death” (p. 15). Sara Ahmed (2016), for example, writes of unmarked cis privilege which eschews a consideration of the reality of “the relentless nature of harassment against trans people” (p. 28) that is experienced as a “hammering away at our being” and, hence, the “very categories through which [trans] personhood is made meaningful” (p. 22). She draws attention to questions of liveability for trans women specifically in this respect which help to expose the hammering effects of cisgenderism and cisnormativity: “If you do not constantly have your legitimacy thrown into question, if you are not asked whether you are a woman, constantly, repeatedly, if you do not have the door shut in your face when you try to enter the room, then you do not have to pass through ‘woman’ in the same way” (p. 32).

However, Namaste (2000) also directs attention to the ways in which trans people are erased through different theoretical paradigms in the form of ciscentric knowledge production and “in the daily work of administration” (p. 4). This is why questions of what Fricker (2007) refers to as hermeneutic injustice are central to investigating how trans intelligibility is addressed in schools and specifically in classrooms through the enactment of the curriculum (Martino & Cumming-Potvin, 2016, 2018, 2019; Barnes & Carlile, 2018; Carlile & Paechter, 2018). As such, it is important to investigate the “whole engine of collective social meaning [which is] geared to keeping [certain] obscured experiences out of sight” (Fricker, 2007, p. 53), and which hampers the fostering of interpretive capacities for identifying the impact of cisnormativity and cisgenderism in sustaining trans erasure. As we highlight in this article, the articulation of trans visibility and recognition through the administrative mobilisation and deployment of trans inclusive policies in schools does not necessarily ensure or result in a more gender expansive education, and, hence, a systemic redressing of the sort of hammering effects for trans people that Ahmed identifies.

We also draw on Wendy Brown’s work which provides a critical framing of liberal individualism and the extent to which it is embedded in “a humanist discourse of universal personhood” (Brown, 1995, p. 96) that “leaves injurious social, political, and economic powers unremarked and untouched” (p. 85). She explicates how a rights based approach to redressing inequities in order “to secure formal emancipation for individuals stigmatized, traumatized, and subordinated by particular social identities” (p. 97) is driven by a liberal humanist rationality that treats the law and the State “as neutral arbiters of injury rather than as themselves invested with the power to injure” (p. 27). It is this requirement of the individual trans student in school to become visible in order to secure their right to be recognised that helps us to understand how resorting simply to legal and policy frames as an emancipatory force for ensuring trans inclusion fails to address the school system’s implication in supporting cisnormativity and cisgenderism. Brown (1995) argues, for example, that “the liberatory or egalitarian face of rights … claim distance from specific political contexts and historical vicissitudes, and they necessarily participate in a discourse of enduring universality rather than provisionality or partiality” (p. 97). As we illustrate in this article, this universalist logics of rights is implicated in a discourse of trans inclusion and individualism which ultimately relies on liberal notions of humanism and equality. The result is an over-reliance on ensuring individual rights through appeals to a discourse of accommodation (see Omercajic & Martino, 2020). Hence, our analytic focus is directed to addressing critical questions of trans recognition and visibility that are governed by the limits of such humanist discourses. In this respect we draw necessary attention to “how trans and gender non-conforming vulnerability is produced” (Spade, 2015, p. 68) in the education system and the extent to which it is being addressed to foster what Connell (2009) refers to as gender democratisation. The latter encompasses embracing a reform agenda that is concerned not so much to erase or abolish gender but to “equalize gender orders” which requires attending to cisnormative power relations that are invested in the administration and regulation of gendered bodies.

Such an analytic framing leads to an examination of administrative governance and pedagogical interventions to address trans inclusivity and gender expansive education in schools. For example, we interrogate the logics behind the support for trans recognition in one particular school, and how it is officially administered through policy mobilisation that ultimately results in a failure to challenge the disciplinary norms that sustain cisnormativity and cisgenderism in the education system. In investigating the implications for fostering gender expansive education in schools, we also look to trans scholars specifically who provide insights into “the work that must be done to create classrooms that truly integrate trans lives into current curricula and classrooms” (Courvant, 2011, p. 26). However, Beauchamp and D’Harlingue (2012) caution that such a reliance on trans embodied visibility may result in “transgender bodies becom[ing] abstracted figures of exception, tools for teaching against biological essentialism and the sex-gender binary” (p. 38) (see also Airton, 2019; Malatino, 2015).

It is in this sense that Brown’s (2005) concerns about the problem of opening up public spaces for the “expression” and “voice” of marginalised people are important considerations. For example, she claims that there are “different kinds of articulation” behind calls for voice and representation which rely on fallacious assumptions about the political ramifications of “breaking silence”: “When silence is broken by speech, new silences are fabricated and enforced; when speech ends, the ensuing silence carries meaning that can only be metaphorized by speech, thus producing the conviction that silence speaks” (p. 83). Brown does not dismiss the need for exposing “the silences in dominant discourses” and its insurrectionary potential (p. 84), but wants us to reflect on the fact that silence always accompanies the articulation of any discourse, and that mere expression of voice and representation may result in further subjugation and surveillance of marginalised people thereby “instigating the further regulation of those lives while depoliticizing their conditions” (p. 85). It is Brown’s (2005) problematising of equating “freedom with voice and visibility”, and its underlying assumption that recognition is unproblematic when spaces are opened up to speak and to be represented, that we found useful in helping us to think through questions of trans visibility as they are articulated and addressed in schools. For as Brown (2005) points out, creating spaces for breaking silences and, hence, for allowing for recognition does not mean that the material effects of power with its regulatory potential will be addressed or necessarily have emancipatory outcomes: “The production of a new public or institutional discourse may bring otherness violently into being as it brings a designated subject respectively into abjection, censure or regulation” (p. 86). Such frameworks provided us with a critical lens for examining trans recognition and visibility in school communities, particularly with respect to learning more about how it is dealt with administratively and pedagogically. Ultimately, such framing of the politics of recognition directed us to thinking about the sort of silences that accompany a commitment to supporting trans visibility in schools.

About the study

This article is based on research drawn from a larger international study by the authors which is concerned to investigate policies and practices in schools that support transgender youth and gender expansive education. The larger study investigates the Ontario policy context, where we have received and conducted preliminary analyses of over 1,000 surveys completed by teachers and administrators who answered questions regarding their impressions of the enactment of trans-affirmative policies within their respective school districts. This expansive survey data preliminarily highlights a broader and specific problem pertaining to trans-affirmative policy enactment and a significant disparity in the policy-practice nexus that teachers have spoken to across the province. In fact, our research needs to be understood within what Martino et al. (2019) identify as a specific policyscape in Ontario, where there is history of trans activism that has contributed to the development of legislative and policy frameworks which highlight the necessity of addressing anti-discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression. These researchers argue that such legislation is “enshrined discursively in a narrative of human rights, which is central to a distinctive mode of governance and the performance of a policy narrative of anti-discrimination that is specific to the Ontario policyscape” (p. 312).

Given this specific policy context and concerns about policy enactment across the province, we deploy case study methodology in order to generate more in-depth knowledge about how educators in a specific school community are addressing trans inclusion and gender diversity and the role of the board’s trans-affirmative policy in this administrative and pedagogical process. It is the particularity of this specific illustrative case regarding how educators within one school respond to a trans student’s desire to socially transition that allows us to reflect more broadly on the enactment of trans inclusion and its limits. Patton (2002), for example, argues that cases “selected purposefully … permit inquiry into and understanding of a phenomenon in depth” (p. 46). In this sense, we conceive of our “concentrated inquiry” as an instrumental case study, which, in its particularity, is concerned “mainly to provide insight into an issue or to redraw a generalization” about administrative and pedagogical approaches to addressing trans inclusion that rely on a fundamental logics of accommodation and individual rights (Stake, 2005, pp. 444–445). We employ qualitative interviews with educators conducted in one urban elementary public school in Ontario as a source for generating knowledge about the measures they had collaboratively undertaken when a trans student sought to socially transition.³ The school is comprised of 650 K-8 students and is located in an upper-middle class neighbourhood where the majority of the population is white. All three participants that we interviewed were also white. It is similar to other schools in the district based on the size of its student population and a predominantly white population.⁴

Snowball sampling allowed for “information-rich cases for study in depth” (Patton, 2002, p. 46) which began with the school principal who, motivated by a commitment to equity, responded to a call from the equity officer at their school board to participate in this study. She had over 30 years of experience as an educator within the school board in question. Inspired by the principal’s interest, three cisgender female teachers – a grade 5/6 teacher, a special education resource teacher (SERT), and a kindergarten teacher – involved in supporting two trans students also eagerly agreed to be interviewed and were willing to reflect on and share their experiences at the school. Ultimately, we chose to focus on the interviews of the Grade 5/6 and SERT teachers who worked together with support from the principal to support a trans student in their classroom. This decision enabled us to devote space to a more detailed, triangulated and particularised analysis of the enactment of trans inclusion, and its administrative and pedagogical governance at this specific school. Given the central role played by the principal in both her administrative capacity and the pedagogical support she provided to the two teachers concerned and which they acknowledged, her account was considered invaluable and pivotal to generating knowledge about the logics and rationale driving the articulation and administrative governance of trans inclusion at the school. Each interview (lasting approximately 60 minutes) followed a “general interview guide” (Patton, 2002, p. 342) that focused on specific themes, while also allowing for conversational questioning. In doing so, we inquired about their understandings of and approaches to addressing trans inclusion and gender diversity at their school. Participants were asked to reflect on policies in place, what supports they provided to the student, the rationale for these decisions, and their perceived effects for the trans student and for addressing gender diversity more broadly in the school community.

We approached the analysis of the data by reading all three interview transcripts multiple times and selecting important quotes given our central research question: how are schools supporting transgender students and gender diversity? There was some investigator triangulation in that the second and third authors also analysed the data in light of the theory and relevant literature that we cite in this article, and which was discussed in subsequent meetings (Evers & Van Staa, 2010). The role of critical social theory throughout all stages of the research process needs to be acknowledged as central to our overall framing of the case and how we approached the data analysis with respect to key concepts that not only helped to clarify the nature of the problem under investigation, but also the emerging focus on liberal individualism that was embodied by the principal’s embrace of trans inclusion which led us to the work of Wendy Brown subsequent to generating the data (Rule & John, 2015). In this respect we concur with Anyon (2009) who conceives of the enactment of critical social research in its concern with “weav[ing] … micro theoretical analyses into [an] exposition of macro structures” (p. 6) as a process of “mutual interrogation of data and theory [that] occurs as field work proceeds” (p. 12).

Discussion and analysis

The “out” trans student as a catalyst for necessitating trans inclusion

Jane has 17 years of teaching experience. She taught internationally and returned in 2010 to teach in the Ontario public school system. At the time of the interview, she had been teaching at Duxbury Public school for 2 years and was the Special Education Resource Teacher for students in Grades 6–8 (aged 10–13), having been a Grade 6 homeroom teacher the year before. In addition, Jane teaches in kindergarten, Grade 4 Art, Grades 7 and 8 Drama and Physical Education in Grades 6 and 7. Caroline, a grade 5–6 teacher returning from a 4-year maternity leave, sought out Jane’s support when a student in her class began a social transition:

So, we had to deal with that and take the class through that … it was kind of one of those where my hands just went up and, I was like, “Okay. So, who’s going to help me, because, I haven’t been here in four years and, I have no idea what to do, or what to say or, how to approach this”.

Caroline certainly felt unprepared and at a loss with how to appropriately support the student, especially given her lack of training and knowledge about gender expansiveness and trans informed understandings of personhood (Human Rights Campaign Foundation and Gender Spectrum, 2014). In fact, it was the actual presence of this “out” trans student that served as a catalyst for these teachers’ own professional learning and development. As Payne and Smith (2014) point out, “increased visibility of transgender children requires elementary school professionals to take on issues of gender identity, sex and sexuality which are considered taboo in elementary school spaces”, and which often incites feelings of anxiety and destabilisation (p. 418).

It was evident that Caroline and Jane, with the support of their principal, had been able to navigate a situation for which they felt they had neither the knowledge nor the expertise to deal with. The coming out and visible presence of a trans student, in fact, caused a degree of dissonance and disequilibrium for these teachers, highlighting the gap between trans affirmative policies, which had been introduced at this particular school board in 2012, the same year that the Ontario Human Rights Commission had officially designated gender identity and gender expression as protected grounds for anti-discrimination (Ontario Human Rights Commission [OHRC], 2012). In fact, it was the demand for recognition by trans students and their parents that necessitated the need for such education about gender diversity, and which led to the actual policies being sought out and enacted at this school in the first place. In short, the pedagogical necessity for trans legibility only comes into being in this particular school through the parents’ request and the “out” trans student who are required to call for such recognition through appeals to a discourse of accommodation (see Omercajic and Martino, 2020; Luecke, 2011). As DePalma (2013) points out, “self-presentation and self-disclosure” (p. 9) raise questions about the intelligibility and admissibility of trans bodies in schools, and highlight Namaste’s (2000) concerns about the erasure of trans people, and how they are made invisible in institutions and “the daily work of administration” (p. 4). For example, while Jane notes a difference in the policy environment and school climate after returning to Canada in 2010, following 7 years abroad, she mentions only issues of “gay” visibility in terms of the LGBT friendly posters throughout the school, and the raising of the “rainbow flag” on the International Day of Pink, which she “had never experienced before”, and that she attributes to the amazing principal who is “just so supportive and inclusive”.

When asked specifically about her own experience of addressing this question of gender diversity, Jane claimed that she “just sees a student as a student” and does not “necessarily pay attention to the whole gender thing”. This liberal embrace of gender blindness appears to have been influenced by her own experience with a trans student at the school:

It’s hard, you know? And I was just having this conversation with someone the other day … we were talking about that [trans] student and then we started talking about other students and it’s interesting because I don’t really like see boys and girls. I see kids.

This specific erasure of gender identity warrants further examination in light of the whole question of trans embodied visibility that both teachers go on to explain in the interview in recounting their experiences with this Grade 5 student. For Caroline, the self-declared social transition of the trans student was an unexpected event, and one which she had not anticipated. On her student’s seemingly sudden change in pronouns and physical appearance, Caroline reflects:

It was kind of like, “Oh, okay. Great. If that’s what you want to do.” But how does that affect the class? The parents? … I just didn’t know what to do.

She was immediately fearful and concerned with the response of the other students and their parents, which highlights the impact of the institutionalisation of cisnormativity in the school system, and helps to explain why the visibility of a trans student is considered to be such a remarkable or anomalous phenomenon, resulting in no prior space for avowing and acknowledging the existence and affirmation of trans and nonbinary youth. Furthermore, such a response eschews the reality of the existence of trans and nonbinary youth already in the school community, but who are not “out”. As Lane (2009) argues, such an education would open the way to “seeing all gender variance as a healthy part of human variation” (p. 151).

In fact, accommodating the visible trans student with respect to washroom access was the catalyst for compelling Grade 8 teachers in the previous year to confront the cisgenderist and cisnormative limits of embodied spatiality at the school. The failings of such an individualist logic of accommodation are apparent in Caroline’s experience in supporting her student:

There was a Grade 8 student that we had that was trans before, so that may have opened up the intermediate teachers to be more aware. But even when I was going through this last year, there were a lot of teachers that were, “Well, what are you doing? What do I need to know?” because, they were using the all-gender washrooms, instead of the boy’s or girl’s bathroom. So, we needed to know that when they go change for gym, this is an acceptable procedure that they’re in this area, instead of somewhere else where they should be.

Despite the visibility of an “out” trans student having already disrupted the familiar and taken for granted cisnormative binary system, particularly with respect to washroom access, educators were still at a loss for how to address gender diversity in their classrooms and to support the student in question. Clearly, the demand for recognition initiated by the Grade 8 trans student and their parent did not translate into a commitment to expanding trans affirmative awareness and education at other grade levels. It is in this sense that trans visibility, which is contingent on a student being “out” and, in this case, parent intervention, throws into relief the institutionalisation of cisnormativity with its normalising effects of trans erasure. Apparently, it is only when the trans student appears that the need to address gender diversity and to enact trans inclusion arises. In fact, as research by Slesaransky-Poe et al. (2013) reveals, it is the sustained efforts of the parents of a gender nonconforming child, one of whom is a teacher educator with specific knowledge of gender diversity, that are a significant factor in supporting professional development for teachers with respect to advocating for gender expansive and what Luecke (2018) refers to as gender facilitative education.

In short, a commitment to a more gender complex approach, which involves all students challenging gender category oppression and gender transgression oppression in working towards the realisation of gender democratisation in the education system did not appear to be the result of enacting trans inclusion at the school (Connell, 2009; Rands, 2009, p. 429). As such trans intelligibility and gender expansiveness need to be considered alongside a broader integrated approach to gender democratisation which entails a commitment to helping all students to examine the disciplinary effects of gender norms in their capacity to regulate the enactment of “legible and livable types of subjectivity” that also highlights the problem of “a gender blind” approach (Malatino, 2015, p. 405). Rather, what our case study research highlights is that an individualist approach, which centres on the necessity of accommodation on the basis of the naming and public identification of the trans student, does not lead necessarily to addressing the cis(sys)temic barriers preventing such trans recognisability and intelligibility in the first place, not to mention the prevalence of transphobia and microaggressions that are enacted against gender diverse youth in schools on a daily basis (Greytak et al., 2009; Kosciw et al., 2018; Sinclair-Palm, 2017; Taylor & Peter, 2011; Travers, 2018; Wyss, 2004; Youth Gender Action Project, 2009). In fact, Malatino (2015) argues for the “imperative to be pedagogically attentive to gender diversity” (407), which avoids this problematic liberal pluralist and reactive approach to exceptionalizing the trans person, the effect of which is to enforce “the supposed alterity of trans experience” (pp. 404–405).

This problematic of trans recognition and trans exceptionalism, which contributes to a failure to address the systemic forces of cisgenderism and cisnormativitity, is further highlighted when Jane goes on to talk about another trans child in kindergarten at the school. She contrasts the latter child’s trans identification in this grade with the circumstance of the grade 5 trans student announcing their gender transitioning:

We also have a student from kindergarten to grade 1 but that’s different because the student was here as a girl, not a boy and so all of her peers know her as a girl. Whereas this student has been a girl up until grade 5 and all of her peers know her as a girl but is wanting to identify as a boy and that’s an interesting age as well.

The trans student in kindergarten does not pose the same sort of disruption apparently because her transition has occurred prior to arriving at the school. The fact that she is readily recognisable “as a girl” does not create the same sort of destabilising conditions. For example, DePalma (2013) points out “issues of self-disclosure” can incite “tensions around which sorts of bodies might be admissible and intelligible” (p. 9). Facilitating the grade 5 student’s transition became the concern for Jane and Caroline who worked together to address it through the pedagogical space of the health curriculum. In this sense, it is the visibility of an “out” trans student that disrupts the familiar and taken for granted cisnormative binary system for structuring relationality in schools, thus necessitating an out trans student to serve as a kind of “sacrificial lamb” in order to be the catalyst for invoking attention to the “lack of gender inclusion in a school community” (Meyer et al., 2016, p. 17).

In fact, Caroline mentioned that she felt “sheer panic”: “I don’t want to put my foot in my mouth. I don’t want to say the wrong thing. I don’t want to have this as like, the defining moment that ruined the rest of this kid’s life, type of idea”. Jane also expressed some trepidation about how the other students might “react” and wondered “if they were mature enough to kind of understand or grasp [the idea]”:

… but anyways the student was like, “Yeah I’m ready. I’m just ready. I’m ready to say it. I want everybody to know and I want to be called ‘he’, and I want to change my name but not yet”, and so I went in with [Caroline] … we related it more to the health curriculum and how people identify … We talked about how people can identify through religion, through culture, through gender, through all these things and we talked about how, [this student] wanted to [be known as a boy]

Jane elaborated on how she and Caroline scaffolded the lesson about pronoun use, and its trans-specific relevance to the student in question by starting the lesson with a discussion “about identification and how people identify and then we started breaking it down a little more … how people identify themselves” with respect to “culture and religion”:

And then we just got to gender … and I said [deadname] has just decided that she’s [sic] feeling that she [sic] wants to use the male pronouns … I was very pleasantly surprised with the reactions from the class and it opened up a really interesting conversation and they were like it’s still [deadname]. … one of the kids said we used to have a Max Milk down the street and now it’s called Circle K, but we still call it Max Milk … it was interesting to see them have this connection, right? Because we had the conversation about how [deadname] wants to use male pronouns, and it’s okay if we make mistakes. [Deadname] understands if you make a mistake but she’s [sic] going to correct you, or he’s going to correct you and say ‘he’. And if you hear any of your friends it’s okay to correct them, and so … then one kid was like there’s a Max Milk and we still call it Max Milk even though it’s Circle K and I was like exactly! So, we kind of focused on health curriculum and went through it that way and then we just kind of left it just to kind of, you know, what’s going to happen?⁵

Caroline specifically talked about how the health curriculum, with its focus on addressing self-identity, was an anchoring lens for structuring the lesson on gender – it was a way of introducing gender identity “making sure gender was in there … so when the student talked about that [we were able to] to talk about how people identify as male or female or nothing or both or whatever … [which is why] we have all gender bathrooms in and around the school … so people can kind of see that and kids use those”. In this lesson there emerged an unanticipated pedagogical opening for exploring trans intelligibility with the Mike’s Milk example provided by a student. For example, there was an opportunity to reframe a well-intentioned comment and expose how the sentiment or intent (presumably that a person’s essence does not change when their name and pronouns do) is a false equivalent to the convenience store: if the Circle K were a person who chose their name, the impact of still calling them Mike’s Milk, a deadname, would be harmful. As Brown (2005) observes of silence and speech, in making gender diversity visible through discussion, one “truth” emerges from the student’s example, the teacher’s endorsement of the statement creates a silence which forecloses discussion of a problematic representation, and peers, teacher, and lesson remain “neutral arbiters of injury” (27), their awareness of their potential to harm despite their good intentions still invisible to them.

However, this lesson did lead Caroline to incorporating readalouds, deploying specific picture storybooks with a thematic focus on gender identity and gender expression such as William’s Doll and My Princess Boy (Kilodavis, 2009; Zolotow, 1972). She used these texts to create spaces for deconstructing and interrupting the logics of gender binaries. It seemed a revelation to her that students did not react negatively or resist such constructions of gender non-conformity depicted in these texts:

They were … almost not fazed … “Well of course boys can play with dolls if they want to.” … the anxiety that I had bringing this in … . “how are you going to react?” and trying to anticipate everything … And, they were just kind of like, “Okay, Mrs. X, yeah. Of course, you can do that. You’re not a sissy if you cry. I cry all the time. So do you.” And, Jane and, I were kind of looking at each other going, “Oh, okay. Well, let’s move onto the next one. Okay. You’re okay with this? Let’s move onto the next one.”

In relation to specifically teaching gender-specific picture story books, Caroline added:

It surprised me that the kids were like, “No, we can do whatever we want”. As we were thinking that they were going to say, “Oh. Well boys should do this.” Their answers were, “Well, boys can do whatever they want.” So, it kind of threw our teaching for a loop.

Caroline did not expect the students to be receptive to this sort of questioning about gendered expectations, implicitly affirming Ryan et al.’s (2013) conclusion that “children are, in fact, quite ready to learn about gender diversity” (p. 101), which reveals more about the constructs that the teachers carried with them of their students and their anticipated resistance or pushback (Kurt & Chenault, 2017). However, it is important to note that what does not get interrupted here is the liberal humanist imaginary of individual choice and freedom to be and “do whatever we want”. Vital issues related to the regulatory effects of specific norms understood in terms that are encapsulated by what Rands (2009) refers to as gender category and gender transgression oppression, as well as the privilege afforded by being cisgender and how cisnormativity actually curtails or impacts the realisation of such social imaginaries of gender possibilities for trans youth are not entertained. For example, when asked specifically about texts such as 10,000 Dresses, a story of a trans girl whose parents do not believe her when she tells them that she is girl, Caroline indicates that she is not aware of this resource (Ewert, 2008). In some respects, the pedagogical interventions with respect to deploying classroom resources as part of the curriculum are limited to addressing gender stereotyping and deconstructing gender binaries through a liberal cisgenderist lens, without extending such critical discussions to raising awareness about trans personhood and cisnormativity thereby foreclosing possibilities for enhancing trans intelligibility and representation. However, as Sullivan and Urraro (2017) point out, central to promoting an understanding of “multiple gender ontologies” is ensuring that picture storybooks with transgender characters are deployed so that a space for trans and nonbinary subjectivities can be represented (p. 17; see Malcom & Sheahan, 2019). Butler (2001), for example, argues that the face appears within an epistemological frame that needs to be understood as an operation of power with respect to understanding the politics of representation which is underscored by “a set of norms governing what will and will not constitute recognisability” (p. 24). Such a politics of representation raises questions about epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007) related to trans invisibility in schools and highlights the cisnormative conditions under which “some individuals acquire a face, a legible and visible face, and others do not” (Butler, 2001, p. 23, our emphasis).

Jane, however, emphasised that the whole lesson was really about creating a normalising space for sharing knowledge about the student’s trans identification with respect to pronoun use: “ … the student wanted the class to know and we were like, “how do we do this without just going in and having a full-on announcement?” In this respect, such a pedagogical ethic of recognisability is redolent of a desire to avoid perpetuating a sense of enforced alterity of transness and is about wanting to create conditions for helping the student to feel comfortable and not singled out. This position, in fact, resonates with the perspectives of trans participants in Cavalcante’s (2018) study who wanted to embrace a sense of belonging and ordinariness, particularly in the face of frequent exposure to media representations where “transgender figures bear the burden of hyperbole and can only live extraordinary lives punctuated by extreme violence, loneliness, or martyrdom” (p. 14). However, such normalisation needs to be conceived as part of a broader commitment to integrating trans affirmative and gender expansive education that attends to crucial questions of cisnormativity and cisgenderism irrespective of the embodied presence of a trans student in the classroom. Luecke (2018), for example, argues that in a gender facilitative school, “diverse understandings of gender are explicitly woven into the curriculum throughout the elementary school years” as a necessary basis for interrupting trans erasure and invisibility (p. 277).

The administrative limits of embracing an individualised ethic of liberal inclusion

It was clear that the principal, Lisa, played a key role in supporting Caroline and Jane in responding to the trans student’s request for recognition at the school. In fact, her interview provides some insight into the administrative and pedagogical frames that define the terms of trans inclusion in this school community which are grounded in appeals to a certain sort of liberal individualisation articulated “through discourses of rights and responsibilities” (Brown, 1995, p. xiii), while failing to account for systemic mechanisms and systems of cisnormativity. In fact, Lisa’s approach is informed by embracing the school board’s 2012 and 2018 trans-affirmative policies which rely on a logics of accommodation once a trans student requests or vocalises their need to be recognised. In fact, the 2018 school board policy stipulates an individualised approach to trans inclusion. Specifically, it insists that its intent is to “provide practical suggestions to help parents/guardians and schools support a child through the in-school transition process”. Beyond the problematic stipulation of insisting upon the inclusion of parents/guardians in the process, the policy offers little outside of reactive measures once a student announces their gender identity (to staff and their parents/guardians). Such a policy frame, therefore, does little to discourage Lisa from inciting “a discourse of generic personhood” by articulating her own understanding of the centrality of equity in her approach to governance which she ties explicitly to the necessity of ensuring individual human rights (Brown, 1995, pp. 96–97):

Why do we have to have equity for LGBTA, and equity for black, and equity for Muslims, and equity for this and equity for that … We all are human beings and we need to be treated fairly. We all bleed the same colour … To me everyone is a human being and we are, you know, being human together … I always go to that policy first, this is basic human rights … it really allows us to open up those conversations and to have a wider variety of resources in our school that people can go to, to have those conversations in classrooms as they are appropriate, … to be able to support students and their families through the process that they’re going through.

Thus, for Lisa, equity is about embracing a fundamental individualism and humanism which is inextricably tied to ensuring and advocating for everyone’s basic human rights. It is also evident here that such framing of equity as human rights is central to an understanding of trans inclusion which requires the presence of the trans student as a basis for having those conversations about gender diversity in the classroom, but which do not extend beyond interrogating gender binaries and the hammering effects of transphobia to address important questions about cisgender privilege (Ahmed, 2016). As such the trans student becomes incorporated into an overall LGBTQ rainbow of diversity (Greytak et al., 2013). Hence, what is significant about this articulation of equity is that it highlights the extent to which “rights operate as a political discourse of the general, the generic, and universal” in ways that deflect attention away from the specificity and historicity of systems of oppression that impact marginalised individuals (Brown, 1995, p. 97). As Brown (1995) points out:

The danger here is that in the name of equality or justice for those historically excluded even from liberal forms of these goods, we may be erecting intricate ensembles of definitions and procedures that cast in the antihistorical rhetoric of the law and the positivist rhetoric of bureaucratic discourse highly specified identities and the injuries contingently constitutive of them. (p. 28)

This liberal pluralism that informs the principal’s approach to trans inclusion is reflected in her enactment of the board’s equity policies more broadly which Lisa referred to in her interview. She talked specifically about the role of the equity officer at the board office, and the workshops he offered on gender and sexuality diversity as central to her own education and enactment of the board’s trans-inclusive policy.

Lisa explained how she worked to promote a sense of positivity and recognition that is central to creating a school climate and culture, which is consistent with the liberal individualist rationality driving her approach to administrative governance:

You know I think that’s how it helps to send the awareness out there. … I knew that we had an equity officer and that you were going to be supported by the board no matter what … . I mean it’s always nice to know no matter what you’re doing in this role of authority that your board is going to support you … that you’re not going to be fighting this fight on your own.

However, Lisa is very conscious of the need to provide resources for teachers and asserts that “even more than the policy it’s the resources that we have access to” and has worked hard to ensure that trans-specific picture storybooks are included in the school library. In fact, she mentioned that she has a collection of these books in her office which teachers are free to drop by and take for use in their own classrooms. Lisa specifically identified William’s Doll and My Princess Boy, the two resources Jane and Caroline refer to in their interviews, which highlight her very conscious role in supporting teachers at the school.

Lisa also stressed that “we have to embed this in what we do in our approach every single day, it can’t be a one-off”. However, there appears to be a slippage here conveyed in the difference between the articulation of an expressed commitment to such an ethic of pedagogical integration and its enactment. For example, addressing gender diversity and trans inclusion at the school appear to have been driven solely by the presence of a transgender student without which there would have been no such sustained educative intervention. This is evident when Lisa mentioned both the trans student in Grade 8 and also the Grade 5 student in Caroline’s class whose request for trans recognition initiated the lessons that we report on in the previous section:

Last year we had a student in Grade Eight here who was a trans student and we made sure that all the teachers knew … the name and the pronouns … and the chosen name was used in school … so that was certainly a time when we used policy I suppose … This year we have a young person transitioning again, lots of questions, lots of dialogue, lots of conversation. … so the teacher came to me because the student wanted people to start using chosen pronouns and the teacher felt very uncomfortable on how to approach it … so her and I sat and had a little conversation and I always bring it back, to make it un-scary, to simply gender stereotyping. And so, I said that’s where you start, and I’m happy to come out and have the conversations with your kids but you need to be empowered to have those conversations too.

Lisa makes reference to deploying lessons regarding gender stereotyping that are encouraged in the school board’s policy document regarding the accommodation of transgender students. Specifically, the board’s 2012 policy encourages “discussions about gender identity and gender roles and stereotypes” in order to “help students think more openly and critically about the world around them” but makes no specific mention of cisgendersim. Lisa depicts lessons regarding stereotyping as the sole resolution to dispelling all issues regarding gender identity, inadvertently dismissing the possibility for trans-informed accounts of embodiment and personhood. Instead, she went on to explain how she “modelled” a specific lesson plan “to make it a little easier”:

I sat down with that Grade Five teacher and said here’s exactly what I would do, here’s an exact lesson that I would use, I would have a Venn diagram, … I would give the kids all sticky notes and start with the simple binary gender: boys, girls, and have the kids come and put the sticky notes up … And you’re going to have … only boys play sports, or girls cry, or something like this, and then you as the teacher end up taking all those sticky notes and putting them in the centre of the Venn diagram.

The critical pedagogical focus here on gender stereotyping, which amounts to deconstructing gender binaries, however, results in silencing and an erasure of trans embodied intelligibility and awareness that “the transsexual desire to become a man or a woman is not to be dismissed as a simple desire to conform to established identity categories” (Butler, 2004, p. 8). For example, trans-informed understandings of gender identity and gender expression cannot be reduced to a sustained critical project of eliminating gender stereotypes starting at childbirth, and it is in this sense that the necessity of addressing the whole question of cisgender privilege and cisnormativity is eschewed. As Rubin (1998) points out an understanding of trans intelligibility needs to take into account “the productive, creative work of the subject struggling to articulate itself within received categories” (p. 266).

It is clear that relying on policy and also the curriculum frameworks already in place were helpful and enabled Lisa to create a scaffolding space for the Grade 5 teacher who is constructed as “freaking out” in how to actually deal with the trans student’s request for recognition in her classroom (Payne & Smith, 2014). For example, Lisa also referred to the Health Education Curriculum as a basis for justifying a specific focus on addressing gender identity:

… the first thing I did was go to the Health curriculum and said look, you’re not outside of your realm of anything when you tie it into … here you go. It absolutely fits with exactly what’s in the curriculum but it’s helping [teachers] to see how and where it fits … And there now are specific expectations in the curriculum about gender diversity and sexual orientation, and affirmation of LGBTQ identities … in Grade Five it talks about gender identity … So, there’s your conversation starter, you talk about what is it, what does that mean?

What Lisa highlights is the importance of having specific policies and curriculum frameworks which explicitly address gender identity and trans inclusion as central to the administrative governance of dealing with the demand for trans recognition in this school community. However, what emerged for us were the limits of such administrative governance which are a consequence of ascribing to an individualised ethic of liberal inclusion that in part leads to a failure to address the more systemic problems of the institutionalisation of cisgenderism and cisnormativity and its hammering effects (Ahmed, 2016). In fact, our research findings concur with the critical policy analysis undertaken by other scholars in the field who claim that “[w]hile these policies may create a pathway for some trans students to access resources and support, they rest upon a model of inclusion that requires institutional legibility and recognition and are primarily focused on the management of individual people and cases rather than institutional change” (Meyer & Keenan, 2018, p. 749). As Spade (2015) points out, a commitment to enacting a critical trans politics “requires an analysis of how the administration of gender norms impacts trans people’s lives” and indeed how administrative systems themselves are a source of the problem in addressing trans marginalisation, particularly with regards to understanding issues of power in addressing “how harm and vulnerability operate and are distributed” for trans people and specifically in this case trans youth in the education system (p. 73). The other limit that emerged pertained to knowledge about gender diversity and trans intelligibility, which points to important questions of hermeneutic justice with respect to supporting pedagogical interventions that are able to address the cisnormativity and cisgenderism responsible for the erasure of trans youth in the first place.

Conclusion and implications

In this article, we have reported on our case study research into supporting transgender youth in one particular school to draw attention to how discourses of individualisation play out in the articulation of equity as it pertains to addressing trans inclusion in this particular community. The specificity and particularity of the case enable us to undertake a more in-depth examination of the administrative, policy and pedagogical dimensions of trans inclusion and gender expansive education in terms of how they are being conceived and enacted in this school community. There are lessons to be learned with respect to the limits of discursive policy frameworks and an approach to administrative governance that relies on a rationality of accommodation as a basis for ensuring the human rights of individual trans students in schools. In drawing on critical trans scholars such as Spade (2015) in conjunction with Wendy Brown’s (1995) scholarship on “a righteous critique of power” (p. 27), we illustrate how political discourses of individualisation permeate the administrative governance of trans inclusion with implications for limiting the pedagogical and educative work that needs to be done in order to address broader systemic forces of cisnormativity and cisgenderism which are responsible for trans erasure and invisibility in the first place (Namaste, 2000). Such governance relies on the requirement of the individual trans student to declare themselves or rather to make themselves visible of their own volition as a basis for targeted intervention and education about gender identity and gender diversity. In short, the embodied presence of the individual trans student is the lynchpin of administrative and pedagogical intervention. However, what our research has highlighted is how the production of a discourse of trans inclusion, which is activated in response to this trans embodied presence, actually results in a fundamental silencing of and failure to address broader systemic impacts of institutionalised cisgenderism and cisnormativity. Ultimately, understandings about power and an examination of trans marginalisation in the education system, with significant implications for enacting gender expansive education are eschewed (Malatino, 2015). In this respect, our study highlights the need for knowledge about cisgenderism and cisnormativity to inform both policy and practice in terms of administrative governance and pedagogical interventions in schools that are designed to support trans youth specifically and gender diversity more broadly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

SSHRC (Social Sciences Humanities Research Council Canada) Grant entitled: Supporting transgender and gender minority youth in schools: Policy and practice [435-2015-0077] (Principal Investigator: Wayne Martino).

Notes

1. We use transgender and trans interchangeably throughout the article and understand them as umbrella terms that encompass many gender identities of those who do not identify with their birth assigned sex. We do not associate the concept of transgender with gender expression, sexual orientation, hormonal makeup, physical anatomy, or how one’s identity is perceived by others (Trans Student Educational Resources [TSER], 2020).

2. Policy enactment is based on the understanding that “policies are interpreted and ‘translated’ by diverse policy actors in the school environment” and requires a creative process of interpretation and recontextualization that involves numerous policy actors (Braun et al., 2010, p. 549).

3. We wish to acknowledge the limitation of this case study in terms of its triangulated focus and emphasis on teacher and administrative accounts of trans inclusion. We were unable to get access to the individual trans students or parents who are referred to by all three participants which would have added another layer of complexity to our data analysis.

4. It is important to further situate our case study as set against the broader backdrop of Ontario’s diversity of school boards across various geographical locations and, hence, to acknowledge the specific contexts of varying school communities which speaks to our justification for employing case study methodology. For example, Ontario contains the most school boards in Canada, hosting 72 boards (31 English public boards, 29 English Catholic boards, 4 French public boards, and 8 French Catholic boards), culminating in 3,900 elementary schools across the province (People for Education, 2019). Each board contains a diversity of schools situated in differing contexts where the demographics of students differ between each geographical location (e.g., rural, urban, etc).

5. The process of “deadnaming” involves “calling a trans person by their birth name after they have adopted a new name” (Sinclair-Palm, 2017, p. 5) and is a form of violence experienced differently by each individual (Riedel, 2017). Once a person shares their affirmed name, there is no need to refer to their previous name or gender identity, and doing so invalidates a person’s affirmed identity by tying them to a name that they have explicitly distanced themselves from. Here, the student has unequivocally stated their name and their desire to be referred to as such by their peers but is consistently identified as female through his teacher’s deadnaming and misgendering. In an attempt to ensure that the student is accepted, the teacher unintentionally deploys a cisnormative logic and marks the student’s assigned gender as legitimate by stating that “Deadname” is making the choice, not “Affirmed Name”. This subtle centring of assigned identity over the student’s affirmed one indicates to the class that despite the student’s assertion of self, his “true” identity is irrevocably tied to who he was perceived to be. Throughout the lesson, the teacher remains unaware of her role in perpetuating a cisnormative learning environment, or of maintaining trans identities as “other” (Marx et al., 2017).