Can policies help schools affirm gender diversity? A policy archaeology of transgender-inclusive policies in California schools

ABSTRACT

Since 2010, California passed three laws that address the safety and inclusion of transgender students. Seth’s Law (SB 48), the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act (AB 9) and The School Success and Opportunity Act (AB 1266). The policies of 10 large urban districts in and around the San Francisco Bay Area were analyzed using policy archaeology methodology (PAM) to critically evaluate the possibilities and limits of transgender-inclusive policies to support and affirm gender-diverse (transgender, agender, non-binary, etc.) students. The analysis presented here aims to trouble the normalizing categories of the gender binary that get reified in these policies and offers additional ways to create schools that are more affirming and supportive of all forms of gender diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgender
• policy studies
• North America
• bullying
• harassment
• discrimination

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Wayne Martino, the Principal Investigator on the grant that supported this work as well as our community partners who served as the Advisory Board for this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth J. Meyer is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder and is a former high school teacher.

Harper Keenan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University and is a former elementary school teacher.

ORCID

Elizabeth J. Meyer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1974-1576

Notes

1. Here, we will always be limited in our capacity to put into writing the many forms of language and expression that young people use to describe their bodies and identities. New terms are being developed each day, reflecting both the inadequacy of the currently dominant system of gender and the creativity of young people in subverting its norms. We primarily use the term ‘trans’ and ‘transgender’ as this is the language of the policy itself. For us, that term means the exponential and infinite ways that one might express their gender outside of a static, medicalized gender binary, and includes non-binary, gender-fluid, agender, genderqueer among other identities, but as we write in this article, that is not a definition that consistently aligns with policy.

2. Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin as well as the Arizona Department of Education and Maine Governor Paul LePage

3. Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Wyoming

4. ‘Biological sex’ generally refers to the sex assigned to an individual at birth and noted on the birth certificate. There are various markers used in the medical community to determine biological sex, but the most commonly used one is the newborn child’s external genitalia. For more extensive discussion on this please see (Fausto-Sterling 2000)

5. This was one of the first laws protecting LGBTQ students in K-12 schools, preceded only by Minnesota whose legislature amended the Minnesota Human Rights Act to include ‘sexual orientation’ in 1993. In Minnesota, ‘sexual orientation’ has been broadly defined[5] to also include gender identity and expression.

6. There were subsequent attempts to repeal this law, including a signature drive to get a proposition on the ballot, but while the opposition group submitted enough signatures (619, 387 in total), 131,903 of those signatures failed to meet the verification test set by the state so they did not meet the minimum 504, 760 signatures required for ballot eligibility (Sandeen 2014)

Additional information

Funding

This paper has been made possible with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for a study entitled: Supporting transgender and gender minority youth in the school system: Investigating policy and practice.