Power,Emotion,and Privilege: “Discomfort” as Resistance to Transgender Student Affirmation

Abstract

Context:

This research contributes to a growing body of scholarship on affirming and accommodating transgender and gender-diverse students in elementary school spaces by exploring how institutional resistance to gender-inclusive practices manifested in a single rural school district.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study:

The study was shaped by the following questions: (1) How is “successful” support of a transgender child defined by the educators who worked with a child as her gender identity and expression changed? (2) What were the educators’ strategies for facilitating the student’s in-school transition? (3) What (if any) actions were taken to recognize or affirm gender diversity? This article focuses on one educator advocate’s experiences navigating a district administrator’s expressions of discomfort with transgender inclusion, which he deployed in situations in which he believed proposals for gender-inclusive policies and practices were “running wild” and too far from the institutional status quo.

Participants:

Interview participants were school personnel, including administrators, teachers, and counselors, who worked in the school while the child was in kindergarten through third grade, and the student’s mother.

Research Design:

Eleven interviews were conducted. Limited observation included a school assembly focused on learning to accept differences and observation of gendered images throughout the school building. A semi-structured interview protocol was used that included questions about (1) first learning of the presence of a transgender child; (2) the process for learning about transgender identity; (3) implementing procedures for including and accommodating the transgender student; (4) integrating gender differences into the curriculum; (5) discussing gender differences with students; and (6) perceptions of the school district’s success in working with the transgender student and her family. Interview questions were designed to encourage descriptive accounts in which participants describe what happened, their interpretation of the events, and their understanding of their own positions within the events.

Conclusions:

This study addresses how discomfort serves as a socially acceptable narrative for school personnel to prioritize the (actual or perceived) feelings of cisgender adults and children over the needs of transgender students.

This article has been written in the midst of social, political, and scholarly contexts in which U.S. schools’ legal obligations to transgender students are ambiguous, but educators’ ethical obligations could not be more urgent. Before President Obama left office in January 2017, the Departments of Education and Justice had built momentum toward solidifying a legal interpretation of transgender students’ rights in public K–12 schools—most notably through the May 2016 “Dear Colleague” letter outlining trans students’ rights to access school facilities and activities that align with their gender identities. By February 2017, this guidance was rescinded. Secretary of Education DeVos ¹ and Attorney General Sessions ² raised legal questions about the relationship between Title IX ³ and access concerns such as bathroom choice, and both departments emphasized that this decision was part of broader efforts to return education decision-making powers to states and local school districts. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Education ⁴ again explicitly extended Title IX protections to transgender students. Meanwhile, 2021 also became the worst year in recent history for state anti-LGBTQ bills, with 17 bills enacted into law in the first half of the year alone—many of these targeting transgender youth (Ronan, 2021). Some states do have their own guidelines for supporting transgender students, and most individual school districts can be as accommodating of gender diversity as they choose to be, but transgender students in many parts of the country have few avenues of recourse if their schools deny requests for respect, access, and accommodations.

Given this context, we believe that it is important to engage in research that aims to develop deeper understanding of the relationships between local school and community cultures and educators’ responses to the challenge of working with transgender students and their families. We conducted a study of a northeastern rural school district’s processes for accommodating and including a transgender child. The child’s in-school gender transition process was described as “successful” by educators and the child’s parents, and we collected multiple educators’ perspectives on the experience of learning about gender differences and navigating a student’s gender transition during her early elementary years. The study was shaped by the following questions: (1) How is “successful” support of a transgender child defined by the educators who worked with a child as her gender identity and expression changed? (2) What were the educators’ strategies for facilitating the student’s in-school transition? (3) What (if any) actions were taken to recognize or affirm gender diversity? This article focuses on one educator advocate’s experiences navigating a district administrator’s expressions of discomfort with transgender inclusion, which he deployed in situations in which he believed her proposals for gender-inclusive policies and practices were “running wild” and too far from the institutional status quo. We argue that discomfort serves as a socially acceptable narrative for school personnel to prioritize the (actual or perceived) feelings of cisgender adults and children over the needs of transgender students. In this study, recommendations for proactive or institutional changes triggered discomfort responses from leaders at the district level, resulting in both delayed action and inclusion strategies that were individualized or temporary. These findings advance our argument (Payne & Smith, 2014; Smith & Payne, 2016) that schools are missing opportunities to reflect on their investment in binary gender and implement new practices that challenge gender norms, maximize opportunities for students to learn about gender, and disrupt rigid social expectations for their learning and development.

School Leaders and Transgender Students

Transgender and gender nonconforming students are now experiencing more public visibility, legal battles about these students’ school rights are ongoing (Halpert, 2022), and new research is being published that specifically addresses school leaders’ engagement with gender diversity issues (Mangin, 2020). Some of this research highlights school leaders’ concerns about visible transgender students potentially disturbing the (real or perceived) harmony in their school communities. In other words, school leaders negotiate their own and the community’s stigmatizing ideas about transgender identity as they make decisions about what support they are prepared to offer transgender students. For instance, Kurt and Chenault (2017) found that all administrators in their study “expressed a dilemma in which they must balance the needs of transgender students with the comfort of the general student population; a supportive, comfortable school climate for all students remained paramount in the administrators’ minds” (p. 10). In our own research, we have reported that school leaders let concerns about potential community resistance or backlash influence their decisions about transgender-focused professional development for school staff or pursuing opportunities to create gender-neutral policies and practices (Payne & Smith, 2014, 2018). In interviews specifically discussing transgender student accommodations, school leaders reported openness to strategies related to safety and confidentiality but rejected possibilities for reflecting on their schools’ investments in binary gender or taking steps toward increasing visibility for gender differences (Payne & Smith, 2014). Notably, the leaders represented in our previous publications worked in districts that did not have policies or guidance related to transgender student accommodations.

Other researchers have explored the strategies and dispositions that have resulted in administrators finding some success in their efforts to support transgender children. Leonardi and Staley (2018) examined six administrators’ implementation processes for their school district’s guidelines for supporting transgender and gender nonconforming students. They explored situational “puzzles” that required the administrators’ continuous engagement by (1) sustaining the school’s attention to gender-inclusive policies and practices, (2) communicating with families about why and how the district guidelines were good for the school, and (3) supporting families whose children were experiencing gender transition. They described these leaders as “active learners” who “stand out” (p. 770) in their commitment to the “messy” and “vulnerable” (p. 768) work of implementing (trans)gender-inclusive school policies. Mangin (2020) interviewed 20 elementary school principals who were recommended by parents for being supportive of their transgender children. These leaders were child-centered in their decision making and were motivated to learn about gender diversity and put new learning into action. Although this led to productive conversations and action among adults in schools, “generally speaking, the principals in this study were reticent to address the topic of transgender children with the students in their schools” (p. 275). Principals also reported that their experiences working to support transgender students were personally meaningful and, in some cases, personally transformative. Research on school leaders’ engagement with gender diversity issues is still rare, but these recent publications are important steps toward developing a more complex story about the multiple factors and agendas that school leaders navigate if and when they decide to take on—or are compelled to take on—transgender inclusion as part of their work.

Dominant-Group Discomfort

Claiming discomfort is a tool used in U.S. political arenas and institutions to slow down, sabotage, or obstruct forms of progress that challenge White cis-hetero-patriarchal ideologies and structures. Recently, discomfort has been an explicit rationale for state laws that limit K–12 curriculum about race and racism (Levin, 2022; Meckler & Natanson, 2021; Zou & Kao, 2021). For instance, Texas (2021), South Dakota (2022), and Florida (2022) have passed laws with nearly identical text: “An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, does not bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex. An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race” (see Flaherty, 2022; Levin, 2022; Zou & Kao, 2021). Combined with limitations on content about topics such as the origins of slavery and systemic racism, it is clear that these curricular limitations are designed to protect White students from discomfort at school. It is also clear that the discomfort of Black, Indigenous, and all students of color caused by these laws is implicitly inconsequential. The discomfort of the powerful anticipates and demands respect despite the consequences for others.

Educator discomfort with gender diversity significantly impacts the schooling experiences of transgender and gender-expansive children (Luecke, 2018). When tension between comfort and discomfort is present in conversations about transgender students’ inclusion, it is often about the emotional (dis)comfort of cisgender people in the school community—not the transgender student. This can take the form of educators feeling scared and stressed about the changes that need to be made to school routines and their own professional practice, or anxious about potential conversations with students or parents about gender differences and transgender identity (Payne & Smith, 2014). Regardless of the particulars, emotions of discomfort can be intense enough to take over educators’ professional judgment.

In Sara Ahmed’s (2004) work The Cultural Politics of Emotion, she asks, “What do emotions do?” (p. 4), and she explores “how emotions work to shape the ‘surfaces’ of individual and collective bodies” (p. 1). She uses the metaphor of impression to illustrate her thinking about emotions’ effects: “We need to remember the ‘press’ in an impression. It allows us to associate the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace” (p. 6, emphasis in original). That is, an emotion such as discomfort will leave impressions that, through “repetition of actions over time” (p. 4), shape how one moves through social spaces and engages in social interactions. For instance, if a gender nonconforming youth feels discomfort within a school, the impressions left by this routine emotional experience will shape the student’s methods for navigating the institution. The discomfort that institutions cause for historically marginalized groups often has significant consequences. In a school setting, queer and trans youth might be targeted, isolated, silenced, or pushed out of their educational opportunities. Dominant-group members within the same school could experience discomfort if they perceive challenges to social and institutional norms; this form of discomfort does not threaten educational opportunities or social privilege. Dominant-group members may respond to this discomfort by opposing the presence of nonconforming persons, or they may empathize with the discomfort of others and become advocates for institutional changes. These differing responses highlight how emotional experiences “may depend on histories that remain alive insofar as they have already left their impressions” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 8). That is, they depend on the individual values, beliefs, knowledge, experience, and openness of those in the dominant group.

Ahmed’s (2004) work is helpful for understanding educators’ actions and reactions related to transgender student inclusion because she focuses attention on what emotions do and what they are about. In our earlier research (Payne & Smith, 2014), we explored how fear and anxiety shaped educators’ responses to becoming aware of the presence of a transgender student in their school. What fear and anxiety do is create resistance and dismissal toward research-based practices for accommodating transgender students’ needs, gender-inclusive curriculum, and other efforts to disrupt rigid binary gender expectations and cisnormativity. Educators more easily accepted actions that were geared toward securing the safety and confidentiality of an individual transgender student because, even though the form of difference is unfamiliar, managing individual students’ differences is part of the regular order of business in schools. Recommendations that involved explicitly recognizing nonbinary gender identities or gender diversity were more disruptive to participants’ senses of self and professional competence. Participants expressed that they felt fear about how to appropriately interact with students if they could not assume that all students could be placed in one of the binary gender groups. It was less scary to teach around gender—cancel gendered activities or eliminate any practices that would involve acknowledging the presence of a nonbinary student. Ultimately, dominant-group adults’ feelings were prioritized over the needs of marginalized students.

In the present study, we explore how the emotion of discomfort is used as a tool for actively refusing to engage in transgender-inclusive practices. Dictionaries define “discomfort” as “a slight pain,” an “annoyance,” “to make uncomfortable or uneasy,” but synonyms for the word make the power of discomfort to unsettle more clear: to agitate, derail, disturb, freak out, perturb, undo, unhinge, unsettle, upset, weird out, worry (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). Ahmed (2004) defined discomfort as “a feeling of disorientation” (p. 148), “a restlessness and uneasiness, a fidgeting and twitching . . . a bodily registering of an unexpected arrival” (Ahmed, 2012, p. 41). Some discomforts are easily overcome, but others signal a need for wariness in unwelcome space or may be a defensive response to a challenge to reconsider deeply held beliefs and worldviews. In this study, some dominant-group adults experienced discomfort in response to the presence of a transgender student, and this discomfort had to be navigated as the child’s advocates made decisions about how to promote gender inclusion. Ahmed argued that “normativity is comfortable for those who inhabit it” (p. 147) and that “heteronormativity functions as a form of public comfort by allowing bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape” (p. 148). Cisgender heterosexual adults in a school should (mostly) feel comfortable within cisnormative and heteronormative institutions, at least in terms of their gender and sexual identities. They can easily extend into the spaces created for them. These are institutions where the possibility of nonbinary genders has not been considered, or the possibility is not urgent or real enough to compel any kind of action. Discomfort experienced by dominant-group members can arise when status quo power relations are disrupted by the introduction of nonnormative persons or identities. In such a situation, there is discomfort on both sides—discomfort from being one that does not “fit,” and discomfort from having norms and expectations established by the dominant group challenged. Social privilege, in such instances, can manifest in the dominant group’s insistence that their discomfort is an urgent priority. In the context of this study, once the transgender child’s parents requested support and accommodation, the school district administrator expressed discomfort openly and often, and this discomfort had to be navigated by other educators because of his higher position in the institutional hierarchy. The possibility of the transgender child’s discomfort was the legitimate and urgent concern, but the White cisgender male administrator had the social and institutional power to demand that his discomfort be privileged. Furthermore, a school administrator can use the potential or perceived discomfort of the dominant majority in the school community as rationale for only taking minimal steps toward transgender student inclusion.

Research Context and Methods

Data for this article are from a qualitative study of a school district’s process for supporting a transgender elementary school child’s “transition” from “male” to “female” within a small school community. The town and rural areas around the town served by the school district have a total population of approximately 15,000. Data collection occurred during the child’s third-grade year. Interview participants were school personnel, including administrators, teachers, and counselors who worked in the school while the child was in kindergarten through third grade, and the student’s mother. Eleven interviews were conducted, as well as some limited observation, including a school assembly focused on learning to accept differences, and observation of gendered images throughout the school building. A semi-structured interview protocol was used and included questions about (1) first learning of the presence of a transgender child; (2) the process for learning about transgender identity; (3) implementing procedures for including and accommodating the transgender student; (4) integrating gender differences into the curriculum; (5) discussing gender differences with students; and (6) perceptions of the school district’s success in working with the transgender student and her family. Interview questions were designed to encourage descriptive accounts in which participants describe what happened, their interpretation of the events, and their understanding of their own positions within the events.

Interviews were transcribed verbatim, and analysis followed Carspecken’s (1996) critical approach to qualitative data analysis. The full data set was initially read for a holistic understanding of the data, followed by multiple readings of individual interviews. Analysis was conducted using low-level emergent coding across the varied data types, with identified key themes. The data used in this article were within the set categorized as “resistance,” which were then further analyzed using meaning reconstruction with pragmatic horizon analysis. Meaning-reconstruction identifies the range of possible shared meanings that might be construed from a communicative act. Context and content of the interactive exchange provide frameworks for exploring meaning, which is understood to include the words and symbols used in the interaction but not be fully determined by them.

This article focuses on the experiences of a school counselor, Megan (the person who was primarily responsible for creating a school plan for supporting the student), and her work with the district assistant superintendent, Sam, to create a transition plan for the elementary school child. Pseudonyms are used throughout the article.

Findings

The need for tolerance is triggered when an undesirable or unfamiliar difference is introduced to a social context like a school. As Wendy Brown (2006) argued, “Tolerance is an internally unharmonious term, blending together goodness, capaciousness, and conciliation with discomfort, judgement, and aversion. . . . Tolerance is necessitated by something one would prefer did not exist” (p. 25). In other words, tolerance is a framework for dominant-group members to create conditions for coexisting with the Other without disrupting personal comfort or institutional status quo. Tolerance is expressed “from a position of hegemony within a culture, allowing the recipient of tolerance to do no more than exist as an invited guest within the dominant cultural identity” (Langmann, 2010, p. 337). Furthermore, “tolerance relies on the logic that discrimination or equity problems can be solved by privileged individuals making space for marginalized individuals, treating them kindly and fairly, and insisting others do the same” (Smith, 2018, p. 313). The discomfort expressed by some educators in this study indicates that affirming a transgender child was nearing the boundary of their tolerance. School personnel resisted the notion that they needed new knowledge or skills to teach a transgender child, and throughout our interviews, the possibilities for supporting a transgender student were limited to strategies that were responsive to the individual child’s needs but did not require long-term changes. Specifically, one school administrator’s stated and perceived discomfort created boundaries around what language could be used, what thoughts could be expressed, and what actions could be taken.

Discomfort as Control

The Plan

The school district where we conducted this study had never addressed gender diversity in policy and there were no state guidelines, so every action taken by the elementary school to support a transitioning student required new policies and procedures. In this way, this school is consistent with those represented throughout published research on schools’ methods for working with transgender students: “Trans visibility is contingent upon a student being required to declare their identity” (Martino et al., 2020, p. 2), and school responses are compelled through “appeals to a discourse of accommodation” (p. 8). When the student was in first grade, the school guidance counselor, Megan, created the first stages of a gender transition plan, and she was required to seek approval for each step from Sam, the school district assistant superintendent. Megan worked closely with the child’s mother and was motivated to design a plan that would make the transition process as smooth as possible for both the child and the school community. Her proposals drew on the literature she had been able to find about elementary-age transgender children and on the wishes of the child and family. Sam and Megan’s negotiations over these proposals happened behind the scenes of all decisions. Sam did not agree to be interviewed for this study; we examine Megan’s perspective on their negotiations. Her story provides some insight to how research-based, student-centered recommendations for supporting transgender students are doubted or undermined, and the ways in which powerful dominant group members’ comfort can take precedence over the needs of students.

During her interview, Megan was cautious in her choice of words and how she framed Sam’s responses, but his discomfort featured significantly in her stories about the transition plan. She made frequent references to him using his discomfort as reason to limit the policies and practices she introduced to him:

This [transition plan] was all, as we were going through this transition process, everything has to go through Sam, so we had to bring Sam along [i.e. educate him, earn his buy-in] and so he had to look at [the plan], like when I would say something [regarding recommendations for in-school transition], he would question me (pause). He would question me.

Megan had spent a great deal of time researching transgender child experiences, and she felt strongly that the elements in her proposals were best practices and aligned to recommendations from those who had expertise in transgender student inclusion. Notably, Sam left the research about transgender student accommodations entirely up to Megan, and his questions were not about increasing his own knowledge. Instead, he asked questions that suggested distrust of Megan’s research. He critiqued the necessity for many of the elements she recommended and made requests for limiting the scope of her proposed transition plan. Because Megan was required to get Sam’s approval for all accommodation steps before acting, his “discomfort” claims shaped the entire process for the school district’s, and thus the school’s, response to the child’s transition.

Initially, Megan felt that Sam was not respecting her professionally when he repeatedly questioned her, but she soon additionally began interpreting his hesitations and questions as evidence of his discomfort with creating accommodations for a transgender child and, more generally, about the very idea of gender identity. Sam stated his discomfort about using the vocabulary of gender and sexual diversity—and about Megan using it—which sabotaged the most basic step of opening a dialogue about what it would take for their school system to support a transgender student:

He was questioning me about, wh- initially he was questioning me about gender and gender expression and um (long pause) the conver . . . I had to have the conversation with him because he didn’t understand (pause) at all (with emphasis).

This [conversation about gender identity] was uncomfortable for him. It was uncomfortable for him to talk about gender. It is [still] uncomfortable. There are certain words that are very hard for him. (Speaking slowly, more reflective.)

He said, “I’m just not comfortable with the word queer.” And I said okay. And he said, “You might think it’s just . . . just me and just my lack of comfort but if we, if kids were tossing that word around in our schools, we’d be addressing it. So it’s not a word I’m comfortable with myself and it’s not a word I’m comfortable with for our children using within our schools.” And I said okay. And he said okay. And I said, okay, it’s [just] language. And I’m thinking you and I need to get onboard with what is honorable and respectful and the appropriate wording and what is an insult. And I said, “I think we’re behind the times.” (quietly) I said “we,” because I thought that would help him.

Given his position as a district-level administrator, Sam has power to set the terms for dialogue with Megan (a guidance counselor) about a student’s gender transition. In this case, the person in power labeled gender, transgender, and queer as problematic, so Megan had to fight for these concepts whenever they came up in conversation. This form of resistance—vague discomfort and avoidance of gender and sexuality topics—reflects well-established patterns of queer and trans stigma that are rooted in conflation of gender, sex, and sexuality (Youdell, 2005); hypersexualization of transgender children; and pathologization of all LGBTQ+ identities (Mayo, 2007). These forms of stigma are particularly vitriolic in elementary schools, where preoccupation with childhood innocence supports the narrative that all gender and sexuality issues are inappropriate for children (Robinson, 2013). While discomfort with the word queer is not uncommon among adults who remember the word only as a weapon of harassment, Megan experienced Sam’s discomfort with the word as another example of refusing to consider the possibility that binary thinking about gender is not in the best interest of all students. Navigating his aversion to essential vocabulary distracted Megan’s attention from the problem at hand: identifying and resolving gender-exclusionary school practices. Instead, she had to devote emotional and intellectual energy to developing proposals that would not be dismissed out of hand for involving the very terminology that would most precisely and directly describe the work that needed to be done.

The Pace

Sam was positioned to determine the school’s pace for responding to the child’s gender transition. The pace of administrative response was significantly slower than the child’s actual transition and, therefore, slower than the elementary school needed to have policy in place. The gender transition—announcing a new name and new gender identity—happened in the middle of the first-grade year. When the student was in kindergarten, they expressed a nonbinary gender identity but still used their given name and used bathrooms and other facilities aligned with the gender assigned at birth. According to Megan, the child’s mother “did an excellent job being clear that this is what my child likes and then really each step of the way coming in” to talk to school personnel about changes in her child’s gender expressions. However, the school did not take any official action related to gender inclusion, such as professional development, talking to students about gender, or making plans for gender-neutral facilities. Early in the first-grade year, the child’s mother notified the school that she was now asking to be addressed as a girl, and this triggered school leadership to begin conversations about how they would respond to this novel situation.

In Megan’s telling of the story, the district administration “dragged their heels” (her emphasis) when it came time to make decisions about accommodating the student’s gender transition. Two concerns came up from administration: the possibility that Megan would “run wild” with student accommodations, and the possibility that the transgender child would be positioned as a “poster child” for transgender children:

Megan: Before [the child’s transition], what happened was administration got together (sounding almost irritated). That was the delay piece, was Sam, th-the assistant superintendent, wanted to make sure, for this entire process, his whole thing was do not put this, do not make this a poster child. So, that was always his thing. Was [to] keep making sure that I didn’t run wild with this and somehow create legal and emotional difficulties for the district and for the child and [that] the mom didn’t either, so that was his whole protective “take this slowly” piece. And he did [take it slowly]. . . And . . . I probably did a good job with it, but I wasn’t going to run wild with it, and I get it that he didn’t trust me in-in that regard. He was just concerned.

Elizabethe: What would running wild have looked like?

Megan: If I s-.. If somehow made [the trans student] a poster child for . . . (quickly, nervously) you know, “We have to support this kid.” Just doing it the wrong way. He wanted to make sure we were doing, there is the right way that was respectful for all children.

The first time a transgender student requests accommodations, schools are generally pushed into new territory that is not covered by mainstream diversity strategies, which are designed to smooth over disruptions so that schools can move on with their status quo operations. In this case, Megan was the messenger for identifying hetero- and cis-normative policies and practices and recommending substantive changes. She was methodical about researching best practices for supporting transgender students and proposed her plans to Sam well in advance of the moment when teachers and other personnel would need to implement changes. Throughout this process, the school district took a reactive approach to the transgender student’s needs to the degree that they did not move to implement any accommodations until the need was immediate. Megan’s comment that school district leadership “dragged their heels” refers to Sam’s refusal to plan ahead in any way. She used her research to create a plan that would shift the school district to a proactive orientation, but Sam consistently held her back and forced the process to slow.

Megan’s position as the person responsible for translating research to her local context made her the target of Sam’s doubts and suspicions about what it takes to make cis-heteronormative institutions inclusive for transgender kids. Megan reports that Sam expressed concern about her “running wild,” or positioning the transgender student as a “poster child”—both of which would be doing transgender inclusion the “wrong way” because the strategies would be too different from their current practices and too focused on the specific needs of a single student. “Poster child” also suggests an assumption that the child who is known to be transitioning is the only student who would benefit from lessening the school’s investment in binary gender categories. The language of “poster child” creates the image of a child who is representative of an issue in the school, an issue the school is actively acknowledging and addressing by creating the poster and thus making the issue highly visible in the school and perhaps the broader community. “Running wild” implies practice that would be norm-breaking, out of control, and, therefore, highly visible to a broad audience. Sam would not be able to predict what would happen after the school district made visible “wild” changes in the interest of affirming gender diversity. Finally, Sam questioned whether changes that are accounting for the specific needs and experiences of a transgender student are the “right” way to think about appropriate school action. His criterion for evaluating the options was whether a proposed change was “respectful for all children” (right) or not (wrong). This criterion is concerned with the thoughts and feelings of all the other cisgender kids (and maybe adults) in the school, not with what the transgender student needs or wants, or what researchers have established as effective practice.

Delay strategies may have helped Sam feel more in control, and they definitely ensured that some of Megan’s proposals never came to fruition. The “take this slowly” approach did not keep up with the real-life changes occurring for the student and her school community. The district and school building were always playing catch-up, creating policy after a change (such as name change, changes in bathroom use) had already occurred in the elementary school:

The next day was the Christmas party and the gift exchange, so that was the day that [the trans student] lobs one over the fence back at us and comes in instead of [birth name] as [chosen name], signs her gift [chosen name] and . . . that was it. And so the teacher calls me and says, “Oh my gosh, what do I do? She’s not using [birth name] anymore. Do I change her nametag on her desk? Do I change all the stuff around the room or her stick to pull out, you know who volunteers, I pick” . . . all that stuff. All of the things around in the classroom because they write their name on stuff all the time. “Do I change that to [chosen name]” and I said, “let me call [Mom].” So I talked to [Mom] and said “Is it okay with you, can we, can we transition, can we do this name change too?”

Sam’s delays created a scenario in which the building-level faculty and staff were fearful of making spontaneous, identity-affirming decisions. The child’s parents communicated with the school well in advance of the child-initiated name change that such a change was likely coming, so there was an opportunity to provide information, training, and guidelines to relevant personnel. Megan had time to notify relevant school personnel that the child intended to transition, but she did not have the go-ahead from the administration to help teachers understand what to anticipate. Instead, the first-grade teacher (a) believed she needed permission to make some changes in her classroom to support the name change, and (b) had to scramble to do those things quickly. This did not need to be a surprise, and the teacher did not need to be left without a plan.

The Name

One key piece in the transition plan was addressing the child’s name in school documents. This is often complicated by state and school district policies requiring that the name on the student’s birth certificate match the name in school district records. After much go-around, it was determined that the child’s name could not be officially changed in school records. However, this district used a database system that provided an additional field for recording a “nickname.” The school counselor, Megan, felt that it was demeaning to refer to the child’s gender-aligned name as a “nickname” and proposed, in this particular case, changing the field title to “preferred name.” She believed this to be best practice given her research:

So, then it was nickname and how you know, I said in other places [other schools she’d read about where children had transitioned], they write “preferred name,” and he [Sam] said “Why would we do that? Why wouldn’t we keep it the same for everyone? Should we put preferred name on that field or should we leave it nickname? What should we do to support all students and transgender students? Because we can support everyone in the same exact way?” . . . It never did get changed. It was supposed to be preferred name for everyone.

Sam refused to create a change specifically for transgender students. This is an illustrative example of a situation in which he stated discomfort with having any school policy name transgender students as sole beneficiaries or recipients of accommodation. He felt that all students should be covered by the same policies—any change made to policy had to apply to all students, not just the one transgender student. This led to the conversation shifting toward changing the database field to “preferred name” for all students, which Megan believed was better than her initial idea because it would have been a change that recognizes myriad student needs regarding names that are different from those on birth certificates. However, she later recognized that such broad recognition was not exactly Sam’s intention, and at the time of this interview (approximately two years after she started the school records conversation), the data system had not been changed.

The Bathroom

Megan variously frames Sam’s insistence that each policy change apply to all students and that there be no specific transgender accommodations as both “thoughtful” and irritating. The name field in the school data system was an example of Sam’s “thoughtfulness” because his questions pushed their conversation toward an idea that—had it been implemented—would have been (inadvertently) a more powerful tool for inclusion. Sam’s thoughtfulness also came up in their discussion on how the school handled bathrooms:

He wanted to make sure we were doing this in the right way that was respectful for all children. So things like, to Sam’s credit, things like, um, the bathrooms. Those weren’t, this isn’t like, “[the transgender student’s] bathroom,” and he wanted to make [sure] this was boys’ bathrooms, girls’ bathrooms. Like (back peddling), this was all school policy, that in all places, this is for [all] students. He wanted to make sure that this wasn’t [a need] met for one student. Every piece of the conversation, all of the parts of our language. “How does this fit [all] students?”

Though initially Megan had argued for a gender-neutral single-user bathroom, she came to give “credit” to Sam’s “all students” strategy as possibly a better designation long term, though for different reasons. Megan considered a possibility that having a bathroom “just for” the current transgender student (a gender-neutral bathroom) could create stigma for both student and the redesignated bathroom, and that the “all student” designation would be useful in the future. That cisgender children would feel uncomfortable using a single-user gender neutral bathroom seems to be implied in Megan’s thinking, and perhaps in Sam’s as well. The single-stall bathroom was in the end designated “Boys/Girls,” avoiding the implied support for transgender inclusion represented by naming a gender-neutral bathroom, a choice that maintained the gender binary while still providing a bathroom option comfortable for this particular transgender student.

The option for the student to simply use the girls’ bathroom was never on the table. Entering a bathroom labeled as available to a single gender is a declaration of identity, and to be allowed to repeatedly do so is a type of institutional and social recognition that indeed, you are in the right place (Ingrey, 2018). Bathrooms are “productive spaces” (Ingrey, 2018) that don’t just direct us where to go, but also “tell us who we are, where we belong, and where we don’t belong” (Rasmussen, 2009, p. 439). Not allowing her access to the single-sex girls’ bathroom indicated boundaries in Sam’s and perhaps the wider school community’s willingness to recognize her as a girl. Directing her to a “Boys/Girls” space provided an acceptable option for this student, while not actually acknowledging her identities as a girl and a transgender person. Additionally, future gender-expansive students who feel like neither girl nor boy may not find a bathroom designated “Boys/Girls” to be a place where they belong, again placing the school in a reactive rather than proactive position to support them. School choices about bathroom designation and access, as in this case, are often about limiting the impact of transgender student intrusion into cisnormative spaces (Ferfolja & Ullman, 2021) and avoiding institutional change (Omercajic & Martino, 2020).

Mild Not Wild

One of Megan’s responsibilities as school counselor was to visit classes periodically and teach lessons about character, community, and healthy relationships. Once she was aware of a transgender student in the school, she added lessons about gender differences and stereotypes to her curriculum. Sam expected the conversations Megan had with students to avoid discussion of the transgender identities that made him so uncomfortable. Instead, conversations were to focus on “respect,” and “not teasing.” According to Sam, she should be

really trying to make that conversation, like from Sam’s perspective, trying to make that conversation about respecting yourself and honoring yourself and honoring what others like, so it’s not really about trans necessarily, you know it’s about not teasing. So that opens the door for anything [for any kind of difference and the expectation to not tease to be discussed].

Throughout education research on LGBTQ inclusion, scholars have found that school systems and individual educators alike are willing to engage with gender and sexuality diversity to the degree that the conversation is about safety and tolerance (see, for instance, Bower & Klecka, 2009; Formby, 2015; Fredman et al., 2013; Payne & Smith, 2012, 2018; Smith, 2018; Ullman, 2018). These are the discursive frames that are typically used to acknowledge nondominant identities in K–12 settings and define the scope of a school’s responsibility to make school a place where a diverse population can complete an education. This pattern endures because safety and tolerance do not demand disruptive changes to institutions; these frames form expectations for individuals to coexist without conflict (Mayo, 2001) and not bully. Sam’s request that Megan’s curriculum remain focused on “not teasing” is very much aligned with these commonplace diversity practices, which generally do not require raising the visibility of specific forms of difference. His further explanation of what he did not want her to discuss makes the roots of his discomfort about gender diversity and educating a transgender child all the more clear:

[Sam wanted it made clear that] You [if you are a boy] do not have (said with emphasis) to like sparkles. And that was Sam’s concern. “Make sure you [meaning Megan] put in [into discussions with students] the part where you don’t have to like sparkles.” We’re not saying you have (said with emphasis, as if responding to Sam) to be a boy that likes all this stuff. No, Sam (exasperated), we’re not saying that. We’re not telling anyone that.

This example of Sam’s discomfort with conversations about boys liking sparkles is significant because it illustrates how an individual educator’s personal discomfort can shape their interpretation of events and how they anticipate student needs or problems. His interpretation of Megan introducing the possibility that boys could like sparkles was that Megan was “running wild” and teaching boy students that they are supposed to like sparkles and enjoy other such gender transgressions. We (the researchers) found the conversations Megan was having on gender with students and staff to be mild, not “wild.” Conversations with students followed iterations of Title IX that challenge gender stereotypes and have been common in K–12 educational spaces for more than 20 years (e.g., girls can be doctors, boys can be nurses, gender should not limit your choices in life); her lesson did not include efforts to raise visibility of trans personhood or expand children’s understanding of gender possibilities (Martino et al., 2020). Sam responded to Megan as if she were asking for a radical queering of school culture and pedagogy, but the actual truth was that most school routines went on with very few changes.

Megan’s goals of helping school staff become aware of gender diversity and think through possibilities for wider gender inclusion in curriculum and school life were largely unmet. Here, she shares an exchange with a second-grade teacher who had the transgender student in her classroom the year after the child had transitioned:

[Megan recalling the teacher’s words] “I’m all set; I don’t need to read a book.” And I thought, Oh, how can you not need to read? Like, you don’t know what you don’t know, and for an educator to say that, that just seemed odd to me, so I said “Are you sure, because I could do a little 5-minute book report for you,” and she said, “I already know what I need to know. I can treat her like a girl; she’s a girl.”

This teacher’s rejection of Megan’s offers of professional development materials to learn more about transgender identity and gender-inclusive teaching illustrates the degree to which the idea of pedagogical changes was dismissed and the gender binary virtually unquestioned. Within their existing pedagogic frameworks, many teachers are able to accommodate traditional transgender narratives that move a child from one side of the binary to the other, but these same teachers would likely be unable to so seamlessly include a fluid or nonbinary child (Paechter et al, 2021). This continued “dualistic thinking can be toxic for children who find themselves outside the ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ boxes” (Luecke, 2018, p. 270). There was significant dissonance between Sam’s fears that things could “run wild” in the school building under Megan’s guidance, and both her intent and her actual experiences of encouraging her colleagues to learn about transgender kids and their needs. The second-grade teacher’s active refusal to learn and assurance that she could just treat the student “like a girl” and didn’t need to know anything about gender diversity is evidence that entrenched gendered practices were largely undisturbed.

Managing Sam’s Emotions

The presence of a transgender student potentially opens doors to conversations and reflections on the role of gender in a school. However, Sam was deeply discomforted by Megan’s attempts to open conversations about gender in any form, and he had ongoing difficulty with the idea that sex assigned at birth and gender were not the same thing:

He was questioning me about gender and gender expression and, um (long pause), I had to have the conversation with him because he didn’t understand (pause), at all. (slowly, thoughtfully) So I had to explain that “it is beyond the scope of what you understand, Sam,” and that was tough.

Sam did not understand how sex assigned at birth and gender were not innately aligned with social constructions of masculinity and femininity, or how that could be possible. Megan speculated that the presence of a transgender child was triggering some emotions about Sam’s own masculinity, and that was compromising his judgment as an educator:

I think that was kind of where it was all coming from (pause), from Sam (pause). He didn’t understand that this wasn’t a personal challenge to him. This wasn’t a personal challenge to boyhood. It was by no means a personal challenge to the structure of the world, his world, our world, any world.

We disagree with Megan here, in that we think it is likely that knowing a transgender student did challenge Sam’s understanding of “the structure of the world, his world, our world” because his assumptions about sex and gender no longer held true. His lack of understanding about the complexities of gender, his discomfort with the presence of a transgender student, and his resistance to any challenge to normative expectations for gender in the school continually showed themselves as defensiveness in many interactions he had with staff related to the topic— even interactions that were intended to be light and more casual. Words needed to be chosen carefully to avoid heightening Sam’s discomfort and creating further tension around discussions of the transgender student and her needs:

We had a-a-a not so pleasant exchange because I had made a [joking] remark that he took offense to (speaking quickly). He jumped down my throat about something and it was . . . it was . . . it had to do with something about (thinking, slowing down). . . . It was. . . . So it was something about. . . . He took offense to thinking I was saying if you clean your house, you’re acting like a girl, or something (quickly, defensively) [Sam perceived a challenge to normative masculinity in this exchange]. . . It was just so distorted (with emphasis) and-and so he was jumping down my throat about that. So, then I realized, like, that I cannot, on any level, say something without it being a checked comment that I’ve run through my head first and that was, that was the kind of stuff I always had to do [with Sam]. I always had to have a check-in. How am I going to say this? Never a joke. Never lighthearted. Like it needed to be (pause) professional and, um, with intent, and with the sense of how I was, I wasn’t going to turn [the student] into a poster child for, I think Sam’s concern was a poster child for my sense that (pause) boys should wear dresses (laughing).

Following a tense encounter, Megan came to realize that strict professional norms were going to be enforced any time she and Sam needed to talk about transgender inclusion. Sam perceived her to be pushing an agenda for gender nonconformity (i.e., “boys should wear dresses” or “boys have to like sparkles”), and she felt pressure to rehearse her speech before meeting with him and be precise with every word choice. Megan’s research was an advantage in these situations: She was able to demonstrate that any recommendations she made were based on practices that had been effective in other places and were therefore endorsed by clinicians, educators, and parents who have deep knowledge about transgender children going to school. Even so, Sam never did come around to respecting her positions or knowledge; she shouldered the burden of over-preparing and treading lightly on his emotions throughout the transgender student’s time in her school building.

Significantly, the professional dynamics between Megan and Sam were overtly cis and hetero-gendered, particularly when Sam was trying to establish the terms of what he believed to be reasonable conversations about transgender inclusion. His strategies for “managing” Megan are reflective of the history of gender relations in K–12 education: “Where women were expected to acquiesce in the increasing authority of administrators, men expected to be granted independence, respect and the freedom to carry out their responsibilities as they alone saw fit” (Blount, 1999, p. 59). Megan knew he was not moving fast enough to keep up with needs at the school, and she tried to praise his forward movements to stay in his good graces and keep him engaged with the process. However, he was quick to assert his authority when he felt she was pushing him too far, too fast:

“I heard you Megan (pointedly, imitating Sam). You called me last week regarding this matter. I’m a busy person. I will handle it, like I said, and when I do I will return your call.” That’s how he talks to me (very quietly, slowly, annoyed). “Sam, I appreciate you returning my call. I know you’re a busy man” . . . but he was going to do [what he wanted] (pointedly) . . . what I constantly say to him is, “Do you understand that as far as I know, you are the only assistant superintendent who is coming along with this conversation without any, you know legal action. . . You’re doing awesome,” this is, and I say that to him all the time. “You know Sam, you know, you don’t need me to stroke your ego [implying he does need his ego stroked], but I do need you to know that you are doing right in a conversation that is difficult for you.” So (laughter). Can you get that on tape? I made a snarly face (laughter). You know. Yeah.

Throughout the three years that Megan negotiated transgender accommodations with Sam, she absorbed his impatience, his doubts about her professionalism, and his distrust of her motives for advocating for transgender inclusive practices. All the while, she invested considerable energy into working around his discomfort and generally treading lightly on his emotions about gender. While this is a story about resistance to transgender inclusion, it is just as much a story about masculine models for school administration. Not only was Sam in a situation in which he needed to make unprecedented (for him) decisions to address an issue that he did not fully understand, but he was also encountering a challenge to his assumptions about sex and gender. His response to that challenge was defensiveness, not humility.

Conclusion

We came to this study site intending to take a close look at how educators in this elementary school came together to accommodate one student’s “successful” gender transition between kindergarten and second grade and the ways that all involved defined “success” in that effort. In many ways, this school succeeded. Based on an interview conducted with the child’s mother, we know that this student was safe and continued learning throughout her time in this school, and the mother was generally pleased with how the school responded to her child’s gender transition. However, this research site also serves as an example of the endurance of heteronormative and cisnormative policy, pedagogy, and curriculum, and the findings are broadly about how student-centered recommendations for transgender inclusion were undermined. This study is, therefore, an example how individualized accommodations for transgender students make very little difference to the grand scheme of school operations. Facilitating accommodations may create stress and discomfort for school personnel while the transgender student is attending the school. But, if that child moves on and there is not another gender nonconforming student attending, it is quite possible that procedures will snap back to “normal,” as if the challenge to cis-hetero-gendered policies and practice never happened. Megan’s deep learning about gender identity and transgender-inclusive practices is likely to stay with her and influence her work, but her stories about colleagues’ refusal to learn anything meaningful about transgender students or nonbinary genders raise doubts about whether educating a transgender child had any effect on how they understand the intersections of gender and schooling. We have argued elsewhere (Payne & Smith, 2014; Smith & Payne, 2016) that schools miss opportunities to critically examine how the assumption that all students are cisgender shapes all facets of school life. Indeed, this study is another example of this pattern.

From Megan’s perspective, some of her best intentions for transgender inclusion fell short because of decisions by a specific administrator. Throughout Megan’s stories, there is a pattern of Sam hyper-individualizing the question of how to enact transgender inclusion, which amounts to a refusal and erasure of trans recognition and visibility. At the heart of many of his statements about not creating a “poster child” or only making changes that help “all students” is the assumption that the only student who would benefit from thinking about gender and education in a different way is the transgender student who is currently attending the school. Any time Megan proposed an idea that specifically recognized transgender identity, Sam argued that the proposal was too specific to be applied to “all students” and dismissed it. His preference was to make minor temporary tweaks and changes to make one individual transgender student fit into the school’s existing system. Sam asserted that policy should be good for every student and that every student should benefit equally, and he refused the proposition that students whose identities and very lives are marginalized by the institutional culture of school might need a specific policy or accommodation to be equal in their potential to experience school. As Martino et al. (2020) have argued, “an individualist approach . . . does not lead necessarily to addressing the cis(sys)temic barriers preventing such trans recognisability and intelligibility in the first place” (p. 9).

Sam did not agree to an interview, so we cannot speak to his perspective. From Megan’s stories, it seems possible that making the issue of gender inclusion as small and inconsequential as possible was a strategy for Sam to manage his own discomfort with a transgender student. As a leader in a public school system, he is expected to have “professional” responses to novel situations introduced by the diversity of students and families the school is charged with serving. In the community where this research occurred, open expressions of disgust, aversion, and hatred—when applied to students—are understood to be completely unacceptable. Discomfort provided a tool for Sam to distance himself from a student whose being and identity were beyond the boundaries of his ability to be willingly tolerant and accommodating. Furthermore, discomfort is a strategy for subtly but intentionally refusing changes that challenge dominant norms and values. Sam refused to respect Megan’s research-based recommendation for transgender-inclusive practices, to learn about diverse gender identities, or to consider the possibility that some of Megan’s recommendations would make school life better for the entire community. It is understandable that teachers or counselors like Megan would want to avoid increasing their administrator’s openly expressed discomfort, but accommodating a dominant-group member’s personal discomfort conflates oppressive ideologies with individual preferences. Rather than address the larger cultural biases underlying discomfort, the problem is framed as an individual who needs to personally grow—to, in Megan’s words, “get with the times.” Sam’s discomfort with the process of creating district policies for supporting a transgender student and his discomfort with transgender identities served as a mechanism to slow and narrow what was possible in a way that could not be challenged. His discomfort commanded respect.

On one hand, we believe that Megan’s account is instructive for educators who are seeking strategies for navigating school leaders who resist their efforts to accommodate transgender students. She used research to create credibility for her recommendations, and increasing her knowledge about gender identity gave her tools to respond to Sam’s questions and (carefully) counter his doubts. Despite her understandable frustration, she was successful in leading her school to accommodate and support a transgender student. On the other hand, this case is an example of the nonpublic, minimally visible ways that institutions undermine authentic transgender inclusion and affirmation. The emotional charge of “discomfort” implies that Sam is concerned with doing what is best for the entire school community (where he implicitly assumes his discomfort is shared), but the effects of his delay tactics and claims that some recommendations for inclusion were too “wild” resulted in transgender erasure. Discomfort here can best be understood as a “collaborative political force” with profound social implications, formed as an expression of dominant group resistance rather than merely as the “individual, internal, private” state of being of one man (Zorn & Boler, 2007). Exploring the emotions of educational leaders can allow us to “engage questions of power” and the ways emotions sustain cultural norms and hierarchies (Zorn & Boler, 2007). Educators who are engaged with transgender inclusion efforts will need to understand these hidden institutional dynamics in order to advocate for sustainable changes to gendered policies and practices.