How Teachers Navigate Resistance and Compliance with Laws Mandating the Outing of Transgender Students

• In Event: 21020 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 11: Educator Identities and Experiences

Abstract

The recent wave of legislation targeting transgender students in the United States fits into a long history of imposing normative gender onto children in schools. These laws are a potent threat to teachers’ professional identities at a historic low point in the profession. As teachers think through how they will respond to these laws, they struggle to balance their personal obligation to support their students with the obligation to retain their professional status through legal compliance. In this paper, I use the case of Iowa’s law mandating the outing of transgender students to interrogate how teachers respond to these laws in ways that cohere with their personal and professional values. Through 36 interviews with middle and high school teachers in Iowa, I found that teachers blurred the boundary between resistance and compliance to justify their actions in an increasingly repressive legal environment. Teachers engaged in acts of resistant compliance like calling students by their last name, giving students an “out” after they make a request, or leaning into the fuzziness of what “gender-affirming” means, work to fit their own gender-affirming actions within the boundaries of legally compliant action. This research shows how threats to personal and professional identity lead to actors reconstructing definitions of legal compliance, and could be a roadmap as the United States enters a second Trump administration that puts unwanted policy imperatives on teachers and other public workers.

Author

• Xavier Fields, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor