LGBTQI Parented Families and Schools

Visibility, Representation, and Pride

Anna Carlile,Carrie Paechter

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317378280
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Education General

Exploring the experiences of LGBTQI+ parents and their children and their relationship with schools, this book illuminates how these families work with schools, and how schools do, or do not, support children of LGBTQI parents. Based on empirical research and making space for the voices of both parents and children, the research extends beyond previous studies of gay and lesbian parenting to include bisexual, transgender, queer, non-binary, and intersex parents. The authors consider the influence of pressure groups, school inspection frameworks, legislation, and the media, and examine the ways in which some schools are working to become more inclusive.

1 Introduction

It is January 2003. My eight year old daughter is showing me a book by Jacqueline Wilson, The Illustrated Mum (Wilson, 1999). On the front cover is a cartoon picture of a 30 something woman with curly hair and tattoos, like me. ‘Look mummy’, she says, ‘it’s just like you!’ ‘Is she a lesbian mum?’ I ask, my heart pounding with grateful hope. I so desperately want visibility for my children’s sake. ‘No silly, she’s got tattoos’, said my daughter. Later on I flick through the book, rapidly picking up the narrative. It seems that the illustrated mother is not a very attentive or well-organized parent. But I am still grateful. Flawed as she is, and not even queer, I am still happy that my daughter can experience some semblance of her own family life as validated in a book by Jacqueline Wilson.

Anna

Why We Wrote This Book

This is a book about the experiences of LGBTQI+ parents and their children, and their relationship with schools. In it we look at how these ‘alternative’ families work with schools, and at how schools do, or do not, support their children. There has previously been a range of research on and parenting books for lesbian mothers (Pollack & Vaughn, 1987; Arnup, 1995; Wright, 1998; Johnson & O’Connor, 2001; Ryan-Flood, 2009; Taylor, 2009), and research on gay male fathers, particularly those who had adopted their children (Bigner, 1999; Stacey, 2006). Often this work focused on families in big cities, and was limited to the opinions and experiences of the parents (Wienke & Hill, 2013; Shelton, 2013; Hequembourg & Farrell, 1999), rather than including children’s voices directly (though see Stonewall (2010)). Much of this work remains useful despite the rapidly changing legislative and social climate. Nevertheless, much research on lesbians and gay men ignores a wider range of parents who are LGBTQI+. We wanted to discover what parenting is like for a broader group of LGBTQI+ people, and, as educators, we were especially interested in these families’ relationships with the children’s schools, both formally with school staff and processes, and in social contact with other parents. Schooling is a central part of life for most parents and children: we wanted to explore how LGBTQI+ parented families were visible, recognized and included in overlapping playground and classroom worlds.

Civic life in the UK has recently become more inclusive with the advent of the Gender Recognition Act, 2004, the Equality Act 2010 and the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act 2013. However, these developments have mainly conformed to a binary model of gender that is at odds with the experience of many LGBTQI+ people. Trans people in particular have, in recent years, experienced an upsurge in both recognition and abuse in the media and in institutional life. We wanted to contribute to the more diverse recent discussion (Russell, McGuire, Lee, Larriva, & Laub, 2008; Bergman, 2013; Shelton, 2013; Garwood, 2016; Pallotta-Chiarolli & Rajkhowa, 2017) by addressing schools as nuanced, complex fields of research, and by attempting to be more inclusive of less binary identities and relationships and of bi, trans and intersex people. We also sought the voices of people living both inside and outside big cities, in order to see if there were any differences in their experiences. Finally, we felt that a piece of qualitative research conducted outside of the survey-based campaigning literature (Bradlow, Bartram, Guasp, & Jadva, 2017) might help to develop a deeper analysis, and offer some nuanced ideas as to how schools can continue to support diverse families in a time of flux.

A Rapidly Developing Climate

While we have been writing this book, trans people have become the topic of much debate in media and politics and the target for increasing levels of violence and abuse both in the streets and in social media (McInroy & Craig, 2015; Samer, 2017). This has become mainstream: for example, in The Times, Gilligan (2017) stokes a moral panic about trans activists lobbying to abolish birth certificates and hand out free hormones to children on demand. Trans celebrities such as Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox have huge transatlantic exposure (Samer, 2017), while at the same time, the UK government is attempting to update gender recognition legislation. Meanwhile, there is an increasingly visible presence of lesbian- and gay-parented nuclear families in schools, the media and other institutions, a development underpinned by the recent legal changes noted above. This corporate and institutional acceptance of the apparently well-behaved, affluent homonormative lesbian and gay family, however, can act to exclude other, less normative queer, polyamorous or activist LGBTQI+ parented families. We unpick some of these dilemmas and contradictions from parents’ and children’s points of view, within the specific context of schooling.

Empirical Basis for the Book

The findings we report in this book come from four different sets of data, all but one collected specifically for the book. They are linked by our overall interest in how LGBTQI+ parented families experience and interact with their children’s schools, and by our overarching theoretical framework, which we discuss in Chapter 2. At the centre of the book is a set of in-depth interviews with 26 parents and carers (referred to as ‘parents’ throughout) and 19 children, all from LGBTQI+ parented families. Some of the children and parents come from the same families, but in other cases we interviewed the parents but not the children, or vice versa. Family members chose whether or not they wanted to be interviewed alone or as a group. The findings from these interviews are juxtaposed with three other studies: an analysis of media reports concerning LGBTQI+ parented families over four discrete time periods; an analysis of policies found on school websites in two contrasting English Local Authority areas, alongside responses to a survey of schools in or near London; and an evaluation of the England-wide Educate & Celebrate intervention to support schools in becoming more inclusive of LGBTQI+ people. We hope that this will give a more rounded picture of the factors involved in how LGBTQI+ parented families are able to be recognized by, interact and work with schools.

We discuss the methods used and the respondent or data samples for each study in more detail in the specific chapters that focus on each. We should, however, make a few overarching ethical comments at this point. All participants were given full information about the study in which they were involved, using a participant information sheet tailored to their situation, plus, where appropriate, additional information and consent check from whichever one of us was conducting that interview or focus group. Participants, and, where appropriate, parents and other relevant authorities (such as a child’s social worker) completed and signed consent forms for the research. Both audio recordings and written transcriptions were stored in a secure file on Goldsmiths’ university servers, and all participants, their partners, parents, children and schools have been given pseudonyms. Although some parents and children were interviewed together, or children interviewed in the presence of their parents, where this was not the case, we were particularly concerned that parents should, as far as possible, not be able to identify what their children had said to us in their own confidential interviews. We have therefore not associated parents with their children in the text, and removed contextual clues that might otherwise make this possible. For the same reason, we do not offer an appendix with a table of the various family members we interviewed. While this has its drawbacks, we felt that it was essential in order to protect the confidentiality and anonymity of participants, especially child participants.

Insider Positions and Their Effects

We come to this research as insiders, but to different extents and with different standpoints (Acker, 2000; Breen, 2007; Dwyer & Buckle, 2009; Keval, 2009; Paechter, 2012b; Perryman, 2011; Taylor, 2011). While writing together from our different positions has been fruitful, our differences may also have had some effects on some of the data collected and on our analytical positions. Anna is a half Catholic, half Jewish, cisgender lesbian parent of four children aged 2 to 25, married to a woman. Whilst focused clearly on social justice (and with a keen eye for injustice), in her early career she wanted to avoid being pigeonholed as a lesbian academic conducting research on lesbians. However, she has spent the last four years conducting research with the LGBTQI+ schools charity Educate & Celebrate, and collecting data for this book. Her early research (Carlile, 2012a) was on permanent exclusion from school and institutional prejudice, looking at inclusion and exclusion more broadly, such as in the case of gender (Carlile, 2009) and ethnicity (Carlile, 2012c); she has also addressed student voice (Carlile, 2012b), multilingualism, and creative and critical pedagogies (Carlile, 2016). Her four children are variously mixed heritage Jamaican, Irish Traveller and white British; as a parent she has visited their schools on several occasions to address the racist, homophobic and heteronormative pressures on them. Anna has a history as a school teacher, and was asked to leave her first teaching position after a parent complained about her presentation as an out and visible lesbian on the staff. She saw multiple transgressions of children’s rights and of institutional and personal racism, homophobia and sexism during her school-based career. In collecting, coding and analyzing data for this book, Anna has, therefore, tried to think intersectionally, foregrounding respondent voice in the process. Carrie is a cisgender, Jewish, heterosexual parent whose mother came out as a lesbian when Carrie was 14. Carrie has therefore been part of an LGBTQI+ blended family for 45 years, and went to school while part of such a family (Paechter, 2000), but has no direct experience of LGBTQI+ parenting or what it is like to be part of such a family interacting with schools today. She is also a former school teacher, and her interest in gender and identities related to education (Francis & Paechter, 2015; Paechter, 2007, 2012a, 2017) stems from this period. She presents as conventionally feminine, and was previously unknown to most of the parents and all of the children she interviewed.

It is difficult to unpick the effects of these multiple differences in our positions, but we have attempted to be mindful of them when gathering and analyzing our data. For Anna, her full insider position allowed an exchange of experiences and an assumption of shared perspectives which may have resulted in parents speaking more openly with her than with Carrie, whose sexual orientation was only known to some participants. On the other hand, some things which Anna’s own experience led her to ask about, such as whether Mothers’ Day or Fathers’ Day was a problem, were not explicitly mentioned by Carrie, who was then struck by how much some common issues were raised by parents unprompted. All the children interviewed by Anna were aware that she was a lesbian parent herself, and several had met Anna’s children; those interviewed by Carrie had no information about her position. We do not know how much this affected children’s responses. However, it is interesting to note that the two children who said that when ‘gay’ was used as a derogatory term in the playground it was not intended as abusive were talking to Carrie, and it was clear from her interviews with their parents that they would not have shared this view. Several of Anna’s interviews with both adults and children also took place at Rainbow Families camps, in which LGBTQI+ parented families gather together on holiday. This context may have had an effect on children’s responses, particularly to the question we asked about the benefits of being in an LGBTQI+ parented family. The fact that these children were recruited in this setting may also point to a difference between them and some of those interviewed elsewhere, in that they came from families in which being LGBTQI+ was an important aspect of their parents’ identities and networks. Not all of the children we interviewed came from families that were so embedded in such connections.

Language

We should also say something at this stage about some of the terminology we have chosen to use. We spent some time discussing whether or not to use the full acronym LGBTQI+ and decided, on balance, that it would not be inclusive to leave out any of the various identities it encompasses.¹ We do need, however, to add some clarifications about T, Q and I. We understand T as indicating trans, which includes non-binary identities as well as those which involve movement across a binary divide. In doing so, however, we are mindful of the specific identities and preferences of our respondents. In particular, we discussed for some time how to refer to parents who had a trans history but did not identify as trans at the time we interviewed them. This applied specifically to women who had been assigned male at birth but who identify as women. While we do not want in any way to deny the status of these women as women, we do need to distinguish them from cis women in our analysis as our data suggest that they can experience very specific difficulties in working with their children’s schools. Following the usage of one of our respondents we refer to them as ‘women of trans history’. We refer to the men of trans history as ‘trans men’ as that was how they indicated that they currently identify.

Our own understanding of Q, and that of most of our respondents, is that it refers to a ‘queer’ identity that is related to, but not synonymous with, non-binariness, or, at least, to a position dissociated from binary gender narratives. However, one older respondent, a woman of trans history, was clear that she was very uncomfortable with the term being used in this way, and thought that it would be better if it stood for ‘questioning’. This was due to her own previous experience, as someone growing up in the 1970s, when it was used repeatedly to bully her:

Right, so I fully understand that some people embrace that world and want to be described that way. What I also know, for me personally, and for most gay people that I know of a similar age to me, specifically, quite a big chunk of us find it grossly offensive…. I mean, when I was at school, I was taunted as being a queer one, and there wasn’t really a day went by that that wasn’t thrown at me.

While many younger LGBTQI+ people feel able to reclaim the word ‘queer’ as an identity, it is important to be aware that for others it brings back painful memories.

The inclusion of I, or intersex, was also something that we discussed. Intersex is both a condition and an identity, and many intersex people identify as one or other binary gender. However, related to the increase in intersex activism in recent years (Accord Alliance, 2017; Organization Intersex International, 2017; Viloria, 2017) more people with intersex conditions are taking up intersex as an identity. One of our respondents identifies as intersex, so we felt that it was important to include their identit...