Risk, resilience, resistance and situated agency of trans high school students

Abstract

Research on the experiences of trans youth has generally emphasized their disparate risk for negative educational, housing, and health outcomes. While drawing attention to very real vulnerabilities, these depictions can represent trans youth as one-dimensional passive victims. Some recent research draws on resiliency theory and offers a strengths-based perspective highlighting the strategies trans youth employ and the resources they draw upon in the face of challenging circumstances. In this study, we look to the concept of situated agency as a way to understand how risk and resilience simultaneously characterize the high school experiences of trans youth. Through hearing their own accounts of daily life in a large urban public school district, we seek to understand their attitudes, behavior, and choices as strategies for coping, surviving and resisting the bureaucratic structures that create conflict by upholding traditional binary gender norms. In so doing, we seek to redirect the spotlight on the practices and systems that constrain trans youth agency—rather than the trans youth, themselves—as the most appropriate focus for intervention.

Keywords:

• Transgender
• high school
• gender identity
• Title IX
• youth participatory action research (YPAR)
• agency
• resilience

Notes

Notes

1 We will use “trans” throughout this manuscript to refer to people who hold a variety of identities including but not limited to transgender, gender queer, gender fluid, gender non-conforming, gender expansive, agender, non-binary, transfeminine, and transmasculine. In using this term “trans,” we underscore the need to move beyond binary or “categorical” ways of thinking about gender. We acknowledge that gender is a social construct that has real meaning for individuals and institutions (Connell 2012; Stryker 2008).

2 Adultism is a specific form of ageism that names the interpersonal and institutional power and privileging of adults over youth and young adults. Bell (2010) defined adultism as “behaviors and attitudes based on the assumption that adults are better than young people, and entitled to act upon young people without their agreement.”

3 Cisgender refers to an individual who exclusively identifies their gender with the sex they were assigned at birth.

4 In this article, we use “queer” as a descriptor of an identity or community, as we have here, and later, as a verb to describe a variety of behaviors that have the intention and/or effect of disrupting heterosexism and cisnormativity.

5 “Dead name” refers to a trans person’s legal name, as opposed to a name they may have chosen to better reflect their identity. Referring to someone by their “dead name” is often tantamount to “outing” them—letting others know that they are trans.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amy Hillier

Amy Hillier is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice.

Kel Kroehle

Kel Kroehle is a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice.

Hazel Edwards

Hazel Edwards is an educator and outreach specialist at The Bryson Institute of The Attic Youth Center.

Giana Graves

Giana Graves is a prevention specialist at the Mazzoni Center for LGBT Health and Well-being.