Policy as Pedagogy: Defining and Confining Trans Life in Schools

• In Event: 43.060 - Will the Truth Set Us Free? Queer, Trans, and Youth of Color Challenging Essentialism

Abstract

Recently, school policies that aim toward supporting transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) youth have begun to emerge. While these policies establish a channel for some TGNC youth and their families to advocate for themselves and access resources, they can create a kind of “script” for what gender transition is and means (Keenan, 2016; Keenan, 2017; Meyer & Keenan, 2018). Here, the social scripts offered by school policy reflect similar scripts to those offered by the law, medicine, and mass media. Put simply, the effects of this phenomenon result in a paradox: as school districts establish policies aimed at TGNC freedoms, they can simultaneously define and confine the meaning of gender in schools. I analyze school policy developed to support TGNC youth in two Northern California public school districts, responding to two key research questions: How do these policies define and seek to address the challenges TGNC youth face in schools? What might these policies implicitly teach K-12 students and their teachers about gender? In other words, how might these policies operate pedagogically in the education of the public?

Transgender people have long resisted definition. The term “transgender” itself was borne out of an effort to name the experiences of those who do not fit easily into legal and social categories of binary gender (Feinberg, 1992; Stryker & Whittle, 2006, p. 4). As public knowledge of transgender oppression grows, efforts have been made to establish legal rights and protections for transgender people, which form the basis for the development of trans-inclusive school policy. This, in turn, forms how transgender experience is understood through public education. As queer and trans studies scholars have argued, formal policy often constructs a normative TGNC subject that can be seamlessly included into the established system (Beemyn, 2015; Frouhard-Dourlent, 2016; Stiegler, 2016; Spade, 2011) and fails to address the complex network of factors that shape how trans bodies are understood in public systems (Brockenbrough & Boatwright, 2013; Currah, 2006; Marquez & Brockenbrough, 2013; Snorton, 2017), thus constricting the public meaning of transgender life.

Building from Meyer & Keenan’s (2018) content analysis of trans-inclusive school policy, which focused on the common components and limitations of school policy aimed at supporting trans youth, I analyze the hidden curriculum of these policies. Following Giroux & Penna (1979), I identify the assumptions made and social lessons offered by these organizational structures. I find that transgender experience is framed in three key ways that offer flawed lessons for the public: first, that gender is an innate, fixed, and isolated category; second, that transgender experience is rare; and third, that transgender people are best supported through inclusion within the existing structures of public schools. I argue that these lessons do little to interrogate the broader system of gender as it is (re)produced in public schools, and rest on convenient truths at the sacrifice of deep inquiry, analysis, and administrative transformation. This analysis aims to reconsider the pedagogical work of policy, and to push toward greater complexity and rigor in its embedded curriculum.

Author

• Harper Keenan, Stanford University