Supporting Schools, Educators, and Trans, Nonbinary, and Intersex Youth
And what a moss-encircled fairy city in a tree hollow suggests about sustained resistance through what may be a long winter
After snow and ice, virtual teaching days, and frigid weather that kept me inside, I stop on the way home from school for an impromptu walk in the woods. My neck and shoulder muscles relax as I thread along the trail’s leafy edge to avoid mud and puddles. When the path bends toward the creek, I pause to gaze at a stonewashed sky through the almost-budding trees. Breath deepening, I close my eyes and listen to the scurry and rustle, flutter and chirp around me—forest song.
Giving thanks for the solace of the woods, I open my eyes and walk on, but before long, words from the current administration’s executive dis-order about schools (#14190) intrude like a crow’s caw: indoctrination, echo chamber, anti-American, harmful.
Many educators, including me, feel called to our work. We thrive on creating inviting learning environments and experiences that help students grow and flourish. To be characterized as someone “imprinting” children is galling and disrespects teachers and the students we serve. The young people I work with are keen on forging their own path and have a healthy sense of skepticism, traits that resist imprinting. It makes me wonder how long it’s been since the dis-order’s authors have been part of a high school community, or if they spend much time with teens.
Roots meander across the trail. Here and there, slender roots entwine with thicker ones, the forest drawing strength from connections between emerging and established trees. In high schools, learning is its own kind of forest where what students know (often influenced by what their peers and parents know) intertwines with what teachers know, the curriculum, and the myriad cultures and content in which each of them is immersed.
A decade ago, when I first learned the terms cisgender, genderqueer, and nonbinary, I wasn’t teaching them. Students taught them to me. A small group dropped by the library during lunch. They described feeling uprooted when teachers didn’t understand this part of who they were. As we talked, they shared personal insights, showed me research, and pitched an idea. I acknowledged that this was unfamiliar terrain for me, asked follow-up questions, did more research, and learned as I listened and read.
A few weeks later, the students offered an optional after-school presentation for staff about how this aspect of self-identity impacted them at school. We ran out of chairs.
Afterward, they initiated a discussion about welcoming classrooms. Since this was the first time most staff had encountered concepts like nonbinary, their responses reflected a blend of curiosity, compassion, skepticism, and discomfort. Some wondered aloud about how to use “they” as a singular pronoun when teaching languages with shifts for masculine and feminine—and whether that would be appropriate. No one left with all the answers, but both staff and students did leave with a deeper appreciation for the complexity of human experience.
Dis-order #14190 accuses educators of “usurp[ing] parental authority” and “undermin[ing] family unity.” On the contrary, teachers often design learning experiences to foster connections between students and their families. Back when I taught English, I assigned Fallen Angels, a novel about American soldiers in Vietnam. I sent home a permission form with an excerpt that illustrated the profanity and violence students would encounter. It also listed options for the unit research project which included interviewing a relative who’d served during the Vietnam War.
Near the conclusion of the unit, a student pulled me aside. She told me that she and her dad had drifted apart after her parents divorced and he moved out. After she’d asked him for an interview, he’d bought a copy of Fallen Angels, read it, and wrote her a letter detailing how his experiences in Vietnam, good and bad, compared to what the characters experienced. This was before email or texts. She pulled out an envelope and unfolded the letter inside. “I’ve read it over and over,” she said, looking down at her father’s handwriting. They’d talked on the phone since, about the book and about life—hers, his, theirs. I taught the novel again the following year.
As a librarian, I’ve provided opportunities for students to connect with family through oral history projects, book groups, genealogy workshops, and a program that teaches students the importance of understanding the experiences and values of people whose policy opinions differ from theirs, including relatives. Just last week, I heard a participant tell a classmate about forging a closer relationship with her grandfather by applying the listening skills she’d learned. Starting in freshman year, I also teach strategies for staying out of viewpoint echo chambers—liberal, conservative, or otherwise. Teachers reinforce and expand these skills.
I am not a unicorn. Educators all over the country at many grade levels offer these kinds of activities.
In addition to sowing distrust of educators, dis-order #14190 isolates a specific group of students for harm: transgender, nonbinary, and intersex youth. It seeks to rescind funding from schools that “directly or indirectly support a minor student’s social transition” or “deliberately conceal” that transition from parents. It threatens educators who support students by using their related pronouns or name, even if parents affirm a student’s transition. The White House is making public schools increasingly unwelcoming and unsafe for these students, perhaps hoping they’ll stay home so the administration can pretend they don’t exist.
This compounds the harm caused by attacks on these same youth in executive dis-orders about gender identity, women’s sports, and gender-affirming care. Collectively, they seek to…
Deny the humanity of anyone who is intersex, transgender, and nonbinary.
Strip decisions about gender-affirming care from young people and their parents and doctors.
Threaten doctors who provide such care.
Ban transgender, nonbinary, and intersex students from competing in sports.
My last post delved into these callous, calculated directives and their hypocrisy in greater detail, but in the context of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex adults.
These executive dis-orders usurp parents’ rights while accusing schools of doing so and trumpet patriotism while trampling freedom and promoting persecution. They are un-American and unconstitutional.
Transgender, nonbinary, and intersex youth are equally deserving of an education, including the option to play sports, as their cisgender classmates. Public schools exist to serve all students. Human biology and human experiences are complex, including experiences of gender. Like the staff and students discussing welcoming classrooms a decade ago, we may still have unanswered questions, but these demonizing directives are not the answer.
Legal challenges have been filed. A bill introduced to codify the dis-order about women’s sports failed a Senate vote this week (AP News). It is Congress, after all, who passes federal laws, not the Executive Branch. But even when such bills fail and legal challenges succeed, that won’t disappear the fear such rhetoric foments, reverse the damage it wreaks on the mental health of nonbinary, transgender, and intersex youth, or erase the physical danger it places them in. Nor will it repair the distrust it sows toward schools and educators.
Some state legislatures have already passed bills like the one that stalled in the U.S. Senate about women’s sports. I’m grateful for the filibusters and legal challenges. I want to keep teaching so I can be present for our students—all our students. I don’t want to be forced to call a student by a name they find hurtful. One alternative could be to call every student by their last name like coaches do with athletes. At least that would treat all students the same way, but I prefer first names.
I also don’t want to be forced to “out” students. As of June 2023, six states had already passed laws which require schools to notify parents if their child requests to use different pronouns or a different name (EdWeek). I remember coming out as lesbian at 29 and how frightening it was, even as an adult—and unlike a teenager, I wasn’t at risk of being thrown out of my family home and ending up homeless.
Where is the line once this layer of student privacy is breached? What else gets reported? Who they’re dating? Who they eat lunch with? That they want to be a filmmaker instead of an engineer, attorney, or surgeon? High school has long been a place where young people explore and begin to define who they are, what matters to them, and how they want to move through the world. It still is.
On the trail, I reach a special tree. Inside a hollow where a branch once connected to the trunk, tiny towers of decaying wood form what looks like a fairy city. Moss encircles the hollow’s rim in starry green carpet. In this moment, snow hides the moss and the fairy city. But underneath, they’re still there.
This is a tense, difficult time for educators, and even more so for transgender, nonbinary, and intersex youth and adults. I’ve been putting the resistance plan that I shared at the end of my last post into action, but this will likely be a long winter. May all of us find ways to continue to grow and flourish, and to support each other as we resist the cold. Even when you can’t see us under the snow, we’re still here.
Here’s a poem for your pocket until the next post: The Formula for Forgiveness by Jae Escoto which provides a glimpse into how a trans man feels when people misgender him by not using his pronouns.
Additional resources
To affirm your support of transgender youth, take the ACLU Pledge:
Take the Pledge: Support Trans Youth Now | American Civil Liberties Union
To stay aware of anti-trans state and federal bills, visit translegislation.com by Seattle software developer Andrew Bales. Here’s an article from 2021 about why he created it.
To keep up with transgender and queer news, subscribe to Erin in the Morning by transgender journalist Erin Reed. The latest post is about a Texas bill introduced today that seeks to criminalize being transgender (and likely also intersex) as felony fraud. With only one sponsor, it’s very unlikely to pass but the escalation it represents in anti-trans rhetoric is alarming.
If you’re LGBTQI+ and/or would like positive queer news in your news stream, subscribe to Good Queer News by Ben Greene, a transgender author, advocate, and political organizer.
How’s your resistance action plan coming along? Do you have a resource to recommend? Leave a comment below.
This is elegant and beautiful writing