ABSTRACT
With growing awareness of the negative school experiences of trans students, more schools in North America are working to support such students and create more inclusive educational environments. This paper analyses how 60 educators in British Columbia, Canada talked about the involvement of trans students in decision-making processes at their school. It focuses on a prominent narrative, the ‘student in charge’ narrative, which suggests that educators should follow the lead of the young trans person to best support them. By centering the expertise of trans student, this narrative has the potential to disrupt cisnormativity in schools and traditional understandings of youth as unreliable. However, educators have also to negotiate dominant discourses about undue adult influence, young age, safety and gender fluidity that tend to undermine their initial commitment to young trans people’s self-determination. This paper analyses the effects of these contradictions on how educators respond to demands for recognition by trans students, and discusses the limits of student-led change. It concludes by arguing for more systemic changes that do not require the presence of trans bodies and instead offer possibilities for educational spaces in which all students would experience fewer pressures of gender and sexual conformity.
Introduction
Decades of academic research shows that primary and secondary education is structured by gendered norms (Pascoe 2007; Ryan 2016; Thorne 1993), including the assumption that gender is a stable binary. These norms are built into administrative systems, institutional practices and everyday routines, such as gendered washrooms, the use of gender in administrative documentation and gendered interpellations (e.g. ‘boys’ and ‘girls’). Academic research and activist efforts increasingly challenge these assumptions (Ferfolja and Ullman 2017; Jones 2017; Riley et al. 2013; Seelman et al. 2015; Stafford 2016). In British Columbia (BC), the Canadian province where this research was conducted, the Vancouver School Board was the first district to pass a trans-inclusive policy in 2014, despite some pushback (Carman 2014). At the time of the research, institutional support for trans students was distributed unequally between and within BC school districts. Official efforts to support trans and gender-nonconforming students have increased significantly since September 2016, when the BC Ministry of Education announced that all schools would now be required to include sexual orientation and gender identity in their codes of conduct. In addition to providing some protection against harassment, this change gave some institutional support to efforts to create more inclusive schools.
Despite this relatively supportive context, the institutional terrain of schools often continues to mark trans students as troublesome because they (intentionally or otherwise) highlight the limits of the gendered assumptions that underlie many school practices. Trans students must actively seek recognition of their identities in schools, often without institutional backing in place to do so. The term ‘social transition’1 is used to describe the process whereby trans students come to be recognised as a gender different from how they were assigned at birth. This process may include using a different name and/or third-person pronouns, using different toilets and changing rooms, changing the gender marker on class lists and adopting an appearance in accordance with societal expectations for their gender. Social transition is simpler for binary trans students because their genders are more culturally intelligible, whereas there are no societal expectations for what non-binary people look like. This makes it difficult to be recognised consistently as a non-binary person.
If educators – including teachers, administrators and non-teaching staff2 – want to support trans students in this process, they must make changes to enable students to be recognised and integrated into established school practices – or, more rarely, make changes that re-work established practices to integrate trans students. This paper analyses conversations with educators about their experiences of supporting trans students, and focuses on the recurrence of the ‘student in charge’ narrative in these conversations. The main feature of this narrative is the idea that trans students should guide decisions regarding their social transition or changes made to accommodate them, with adults following their lead. In the words of Claire,3 an administrator from District C: ‘we let the students come and tell us […] what they’re comfortable with.’ Through this narrative, I examine how adults made sense of their experiences with trans students, and trace how normative regimes shaped the way that educators talk about, and thus respond to, demands for recognition by trans students.
When educators seek to support trans students, they engage in complex discursive practices informed by the institutional conditions that structure the school lives of young trans people. By analysing discursive practices surrounding the ‘student in charge’ narrative, this paper shows how this narrative operates to create opportunities, tensions and limits in what it means to support trans students. These discursive practices tend towards enforcing cisnormative expectations of gender that must be questioned to generate more significant changes in schools.
Literature review
Schools are key sites in which normative gender identities and practices are legitimised – through gender-segregated schooling, curriculum, school rituals, everyday practices and interactions between students and educators (Best 2000; Meyer 2009; Pascoe 2007; Payne 2010; Ryan 2016; Zlatunich 2009). In the process, schools bolster cisnormativity – or the belief that gender is a binary category that naturally follows from one’s sex assigned at birth (Bauer et al. 2009) – and render trans students invisible, despite their well-documented presence (Clark et al. 2014; Veale et al. 2015). While counternarratives of gender diversity are possible (Blackburn, Clark, and Martino 2016; Dittman and Meecham 2006; Helmer 2016; Martino and Cumming-Potvin 2016; Miller 2015; Pendleton Jiménez 2016; Walters and Rehma 2013), existing curricular resources can be limited (Hermann-Wilmarth and Ryan 2016), and fear and resistance still act as barriers to change in schools (O’Donoghue and Guerin 2017; Payne and Smith 2014, 2017; Wright-Maley et al. 2016).
Partly as a result of this reality, many trans youth face harassment and violence in schools, leading to negative health and educational outcomes (Greytak, Kosciw, and Diaz 2009; Jones et al. 2016; McGuire et al. 2010; Peter, Taylor, and Campbell 2016; Reisner et al. 2015; Veale et al. 2015). While the impact of cisnormative school cultures is very concerning, scholars have highlighted the limitations of discourses that focus primarily on bullying and trans youth as being ‘at-risk.’ First, trans students are also resilient and respond to cisnormativity with a multiplicity of strategies to connect with and advocate for each other, and gain knowledge about gender and sexual diversity (Byron and Hunt 2017; Lapointe 2016; McGlashan and Fitzpatrick 2017; Riggs and Bartholomaeus 2017). Additionally, the focus on risk and violence individualises the problem, taking away from the operation of hetero- and cisnormativity in schools (Formby 2015; Payne and Smith 2013). Gendered harassment among students is enabled by the ways that school spaces make gender diversity abnormal and unintelligible (Payne and Smith 2012). Educators, by the nature of their jobs, act as observers and organisers of this normative gender order. Although educators participate in the institutional structures that support cisnormativity, they also resist them, often in complex and contradictory ways (Frohard-Dourlent 2016; Greytak and Kosciw 2014; Harris 2014; Marx, Roberts, and Nixon 2017; Mayo 2016; Parsons 2016; Preston 2016; Smith 2015). Educator practices are crucial because support for gender diversity has positive effects on students (Burford, Lucassen, and Hamilton 2017; Seelman et al. 2015; Ullman 2017). This paper focuses on educators’ discursive negotiations precisely to illuminate their complicated position and show how supportive educators can unintentionally reproduce institutional cisnormativity.
Methods
Study design
This study was designed to address a gap in the literature on trans students regarding the experiences of educators. Based on initial interest by local administrators, ethics approval was obtained from four school districts as well as from the University of British Columbia (#H12-02591) to recruit participants in four distinctive school districts to reach a broad range of educators who had worked directly with trans students. I initially relied on key informants to connect me to potential interviewees, then used snowball sampling until the study reached data saturation. School administrators often helped connect me to staff with relevant experiences. My long-standing involvement in education initiatives on gender and sexual diversity, the hesitancy that these topics still evoke for many, my recruitment materials and my own embodiment as a genderqueer person are all factors that likely shaped my sample towards educators who saw themselves as supportive of trans students.
Participants
In 2013, I interviewed 60 public school educators who had worked with trans or gender-nonconforming students in four school districts in BC. While most participants were administrators, counsellors and classroom teachers, I also interviewed other staff when relevant, including librarians and district employees. Most participants worked in secondary schools and were interviewed in private rooms at their workplace.
Participants were predominantly white (87%) and straight (84%), and all of them were cisgender. They were mostly women (71%), with master’s-level degrees (71%), and in their 40s and 50s (61%). My positionality as a white person (read as a gender-nonconforming woman) likely impacted who I interviewed. This sample also resembles the larger body of BC educators, especially in terms of gender, age and race (BC Ministry of Education 2014; Ryan, Pollock, and Antonelli 2009). As such, these data offer a window into how educators primarily from socially privileged perspectives navigate dominant discourses related to gender diversity.
Epistemology and methodology
Good-quality in-depth qualitative interviews can help capture people’s worldviews and perceptions (Patton 2002). They allow researchers to explore how people make sense of their world and experiences, the discourses that are available to them and how discursive practices shape what actions they understand as (im)possible. This paper analyses the discursive practices of educators ‘not for their assumed reflection of reality but […] for their production of social and cultural effects’ (Søndergaard 2002, 188) that affect their understandings and responses to gender diversity within schools. While discursive practices do not have straightforward casual effects on beliefs and attitudes, they contribute to sustaining or changing ideologies and thus social relations of power (Fairclough 2003). Power circulates through discursive practices by making certain subjects or arrangements more legible than others; discourses are ‘both instrument[s] and effect[s] of power’ (Foucault 1978, 101).
This epistemological approach refuses an assessment of whether educator accounts are truthful – a profoundly inadequate approach without the perspectives of the youth involved. Instead, I analyse the meanings educators produce, and the effects of these meanings. Although discursive practices are not one-sided impositions onto subjects, schools have ‘disproportionate power to produce and circulate discourse, and [to] promote dominant interests’ (Bucholtz 2003, 57). This is a process through which ‘power relations are discursively produced, sustained, negotiated, and challenged’ (Lazar 2007, 142): educators thus constantly negotiate multiple discourses as they make sense of their experiences.
Analysis
I conducted a thematic analysis of the interviews, which is ‘a method for identifying, analysing and reporting patterns (themes) within data’ (Braun and Clarke 2006, 79). Using the Atlas.ti software, I coded transcripts for key topics or concepts based on theoretical knowledge and recurring occurrences in participants’ answers. These inductive and deductive codes were then collated into potential key themes based on thematic connections (Braun and Clarke 2006). The ‘student in charge’ narrative was part of an inductive theme that emerged as analytically relevant as I repeatedly encountered similar language across interviews.
For further analysis, I drew on critical discourse analysis to focus the details of talk by paying attention to discursive elements such as linguistic forms, lexical choices, assumptions, silences and contradictions that might suggest that the speaker is negotiating competing discourses (Cameron 2001, 51; Fairclough 2003; Gee 2005). This process helped identify the underlying conceptualisations informing the key themes.
These epistemological, methodological and analytical lenses shift the focus from individualised accounts to an analysis of how power functions in the talk of educators. By considering the ‘systems of meaning-making which members of a culture have available to them’ (Stokoe and Weatheral 2002, 708), this kind of analysis avoids blaming individual educators for systemic failures and institutional limitations. Instead, the focus is on how dominant discourses and institutional patterns of marginalisation are sustained, resisted and negotiated by participants as they work to make sense of their experiences with trans and gender-nonconforming students, and the effects of this process on what happens in schools.
Findings
Students as empowere...
