Bullying, Binaries, Bathrooms, and Biology: Conversations With Elementary Educators About Supporting Transgender Students

• In Event: Bound by Bullying: Exploring the Limitations of LGBTQ Bullying Discourse Through In-Schools Experience and Research

Abstract

Educators’ investment in binary constructions of gender and the absence of nonnormative genders in elementary schools mean that many children emulate their teachers’ faith in the heteronormative “natural order of things” (Atkinson & DePalma, 2009, p. 27). Elementary schools are “cultural sites [that]…engag[e] girls and boys in becoming gendered social beings” (Korth, 2007. p. 57) and “children co-construct their gender through social interactions with others in their culture” (McMurray, 1998, p. 272). The culture of school is a prime site for the development of gender and a child’s sense of “beingness.” These highly gendered cultural sites leave little room for gender transgressions, let alone the comfortable presence of a transgender child.

This paper examines how educators make meaning of teaching transgender students after attending QuERI professional development about transgender identity. The professional development workshop covered differences between sex, gender, and sexuality; research on elementary schools as gendered spaces, limitations of the gender binary for all children, recommendations for inclusive practices for transgender students, and guidelines for changing curriculum and pedagogy to challenge the cultural norms limiting children to binary gender performances. Research participants were 12 school professionals from urban and suburban public schools in the Northeastern US who were directly involved in the education of an elementary transgender child and attended the training. Semi-structured interviews focused on the educator’s personal experience with transgender children, perceptions of their school’s success in supporting a transgender child, ideas about resources and education schools need to support these students, and responses to the training. Data analysis utilized an emergent coding process reflective of Carspecken’s (1996) critical qualitative method.

Findings in this paper focus on participants’ responses to the professional development content, learning about non-normative gender identities and expressions, and learning about systemic marginalization of queer people. Overall, educators resisted recommendations to critically examine their schools’ privileging of normative gender or challenge strict gender norms through gender-affirming curriculum and pedagogy. Instead, teachers remained fixated on “the problem” of securing transgender students’ safety and fitting them into existing heteronormative institutional structures. That is, preventing the bullying of the transgender child and procedural issues such as bathrooms, using correct pronouns, and adjusting school records to reflect a child’s chosen name took precedence over challenging institutional privileging of gender conformity. Teachers interpreted their responsibility to solely be the child’s “safety”- not shifting the cultural practices that might lead to gender non-conforming students being “unsafe” in school. This interpretation of teacher responsibility is reflective of the broader cultural discourse on “bullying.”

Refusal to challenge normative gender as part of “supporting” a transgender student creates missed opportunities to shift the gender enculturation of children in ways that could disrupt youths’ fierce investment in the binary and in policing “normal” gender performance. Furthermore, these findings are indicative of a broader problem preventing the creation of inclusive schools for LGBTQ students: educators and policy makers’ fixation on fitting queer students into normative structures and failure to make structural changes that have potential to disrupt the cultural privileging of gender conformity.

Author

• Melissa J. Smith, University of Central Arkansas