Sex and gender in transition in US schools: ways forward

Abstract

This paper examines the current state of law and policy in relation to US transgender youth and their lived experiences. We approach this from different disciplinary backgrounds, identities, and ways of writing terms related to gender identity. We begin with an examination of the current legal climate in the USA and explore how students have pushed back against gender and sexuality norms even in a restrictive climate. Some transformations are already happening in public schools and some backlash, too, is being felt. Laws and policies in some locations are encouraging students, teachers, school leaders and community members to collaborate in making schools more educationally concerned about trans student success and teaching the school community about gender diversity. In shifting among scales and experiences of youth thinking and working on gender, we aim to emphasise youth agency and outline young people’s frustrations at the obstacles related to trans, gender dissidence and sexuality. In conclusion, we point to changes that can be made in schools to help professionals understand how policy and curricular innovation can bolster the openings that trans, gender creative and gender non-binary youth are already creating, whether or not those opportunities are officially recognised.

Keywords:

• Trans
• gender non-binary
• gender identity aware
• gender identity self-determination
• schools
• USA

Notes

1. We recognise there to be a spectrum of terms for gender identity and vary terms throughout our manuscript without privileging or landing on one term as ‘correct,’ or static.

2. LGBT references lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people who are targeted by policies. Other identities such as ‘I’ for intersex, ‘Q’ for queer or questioning or ‘A’ for asexual or ally, or not included here because they are not (yet) the groups currently legislated against.

3. Ruth Ginsberg authored the deliberate legal conflation of sex and gender. She distinguished between sex, as in sexual acts, and gender, which was identity. Court decisions remain muddled due this conflation (Case 1995; more recently, Kim 2017).

4. The school district appealed to the US Supreme Court after the 4th Circuit originally found for Grimm. The Supreme Court threw out the 4th Circuit’s decision and ordered it to be reconsidered under the new regulations. At the time of writing (December 2, 2017), the 4th Circuit has yet to render another decision.

5. This federal incoherence will probably come back to haunt the Trump administration in future legal cases, since the posted material is ‘official policy,’ which is at utter variance with the administration’s public pronouncements.

6. California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia (see American Civil Liberties Union 2017).

7. All names are pseudonyms.

8. Zimman writes trans with the asterisk.

9. ‘They’ is used in the first person as a signifier of gender identity self-determination.