When Care and Concern Are Not Enough: School Personnel’s Development as Allies for Trans and Gender Non-Conforming Students

Robert Marx,Carol Nixon,Leah Roberts

doi:10.3390/socsci6010011

Abstract

Trans people—and particularly trans youth—have come to the forefront of political and educational discussions, especially as legislation has aimed to ensure that school personnel act as enforcers of state-level policies targeting trans youth. For this reason, and because research demonstrates that youth in schools form attachments to and receive support from school personnel, our research looks at school personnel’s development as allies. By analyzing focus group data following a training workshop, we explore how participants understand their roles as allies to trans and gender non-conforming youth. We found that trans issues were salient and participants expressed new knowledge about and openness towards transgender youth, as well as care and concern for their wellbeing. Nonetheless, many participants retained frames of understanding that relied on trans people as Other and that situated their roles as allies through the frameworks of protection and care. We argue that these understandings of trans youth and the role of allies reinforces cisnormativity, and we push for a more nuanced understanding of allyship that moves beyond knowledge, beliefs, attitudes and intended behaviors as markers of allyship to ensure that allies do not reproduce cisnormativity even in their support of trans and gender non-conforming youth.

Highlights

Our data suggest that participants in our study saw themselves as new allies to LGBTQ+ youth, and trans youth in particular
Throughout the focus groups, they reflected on both the very general—today was “reinforcing of what we need to do for all children who may live within the margins”—and the highly specific—“we have kids that all day long every day don’t go to the bathroom”—aspects of what they learned and believed about trans people’s lives within classrooms and communities
In times where the bodily autonomy, human rights, and freedoms of trans people and trans youth are being violated nationally, and in the South, we are heartened by the overall positive and supportive messages that focus group participants expressed after the training

Summary

Introduction

In the American South, anti-trans bathroom bills in North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee have pushed the conversation forward [2], as activists who might have focused on issues of police brutality, access to health care, or any number of other systemic injustices trans people face are instead arguing for the right to go to the bathroom without being singled out, surveilled, or put in danger This increased conversation about trans people and where they can and cannot go is explicitly focused on trans youth; the proposed anti-trans bathroom bill in Tennessee, for example, targets students at public schools and universities [2], putting adolescents and youth in the crosshairs of political battles and public scrutiny. Sci. 2017, 6, 11 being explicitly asked to enforce a restrictive and harmful interpretation of gender politics In this and many other debates about gender expression—for example, gender policing of homecoming and prom courts, school uniform enforcement, or extracurricular activities—school personnel function as judge and jury. They shape and foster a school environment that can either support or damage trans and gender non-conforming youth, one that can disrupt or reinforce cisnormativity, affecting all students

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