Putting Parental Pushback in Context: A Comparative Case Study of a School District’s Gender Policy-As-Practice

Abstract

This study examines the formation and implementation of the New York City Department of Education’s Gender Guidelines. Drawing on 41 interviews with policymakers, professional development providers, and school staff, as well as policy documents and media sources, we examine how marked fears of pushback influenced policy formation and shaped how schools interpreted and took up the policy. The case of NYC offers a valuable example of how policies can leverage pushback and motivate positive school cultural change when they incorporate the appropriate human and material resources to scaffold whole-school deliberation and conciliatory processes. Ultimately, we argue that policy stakeholders would benefit from carefully attending to the roots and nuances of parents’ dissenting perspectives throughout the formation and implementation of gender policies

Introduction

In recent years, public visibility and awareness of the needs of trans students have notably increased. Across the U.S. and the Western world, state and local governments have released policies and administrative guidance to better support trans students (McQuillan, 2023; Suárez & Mangin, 2022). New York City (NYC)—the largest school district in the U.S. and context of this study—created a LGBTQ+ Liaison position, released a series of Gender Guidelines (from now on, Guidelines), and put in place professional development strategies aimed at making schools more welcoming for trans students (NYCDOE, 2017, 2019a). We refer to these efforts broadly as the New York City Department of Education’s (NYCDOE) Gender Policy.

In this study, we examine how the NYCDOE’s Gender Policy has played out in practice. We conduct a Comparative Case Study (CCS) (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017) to unpack how historical, material, and sociopolitical contexts have shaped the policy formation and implementation. As we will elaborate, we found that NYCDOE’s fears of parental pushback strongly shaped the policy processes, its affordances, and limitations. Hence, analyzing the NYCDOE’s Gender Policy case, we join Leonardi’s (2018) invitation to “reconsider the power(lessness) of parent reactions [and] use parental pushback as a leverage point for educating school communities, instead of remaining silent or recoiling from it” (p. 712). We argue that policy stakeholders would benefit from carefully attending to parents’ dissenting perspectives throughout the formation and implementation of gender policies. Thoroughly accounting for the roots, nuances, material, and cultural contexts of parents’ oppositions, we posit, might offer more effective gender policies in practice.

The following section provides a brief overview of the NYCDOE’s Gender Policy and locates it within local parental resistance and a broader context of intense anti-LGBTQ+ backlash. Next, we outline our policy-as-practice theoretical framework and our CCS methodology. Lastly, we present our findings and conclude with a discussion of the NYCDOE policy’s unintended consequences and implications for more promising translation of gender policies into trans-affirming school practices.

The NYCDOE’s Gender Policy Amid Parental Pushback and Far-Right Backlash

The relationship between educational policy and practice is messy. Gender policies are often limited to changing school practices and improving the lives of trans students, educators, and families (Farley & Leonardi, 2021; McQuillan, 2022). As Meyer et al. (2022) posited, “Although some districts and states have developed laws and policies to improve [trans] students’ experiences, many are either ill-conceived, ineffectively implemented, or reinforce restrictive and inflexible structures regulating gender” (p. 3). Often, policies aim to accommodate trans students while leaving untouched the school systems and structures that render cis, White, middle-class subjects as expected and normal; and low-income, and trans people of color as abnormal or impossible (Dockendorff et al., 2019; Meyer & Keenan, 2018).

The NYCDOE first published the Gender Guidelines in 2014. Indeed, the policy was ill-conceived, articulating the trans experience as a linear and binary one (Snaider, 2023). Since then, the Guidelines have been updated and improved twice. The second iteration better acknowledged the needs of non-binary students. The third and latest update, which took effect in September 2019, expanded the policy aims from an individual approach of accommodating trans students to a broader revision of cis-heteronormative school systems and practices (NYCDOE, 2019b).

Overall, the current Guidelines determine the steps to support transgender students’ needs, such as respecting their right to privacy, to use their chosen name and pronouns while at school, and access to facilities and activities according to their gender identities. The Guidelines also target school curricula and institutional procedures, requiring schools to revise gender binary practices (e.g., boys’ and girls’ lines) and implement curricula that incorporate, for instance, LGBTQ civil rights history and inclusive health education (NYCDOE, 2019b). While not perfect, the NYCDOE’s Gender Policy is in many ways laudable, offering schools resources for professional development, LGBTQ-inclusive curricula, and prohibiting gender-segregated activities.

However, when policies require a shift in cultural ideas of normalcy and difference, such as the NYCDOE’s Gender Policy, which calls for changes in cis-heteronormative long-lasting practices and traditions (e.g., dress codes, yearbooks, father-daughter dances), they are likely to be met with fears or resistance (Leonardi, 2018). Moreover, by recognizing a child’s right to use their preferred name, pronouns, and gender markers in schools without requiring parental consent, the NYCDOE’s policy recognizes young children as knowledgeable and authoritative beings, with a right to gender self-determination. Such recognition is likely to trigger strong resistance, as it not only challenges cultural notions of abnormality but also questions sedimented ideas of children as innocent, pure, ignorant, and vulnerable beings in need of adult protection (Snaider, 2024). In other words, trans-affirming policies disrupt the authority of parents and the state over a child’s gender (Gill-Peterson, 2019).

In this context, state policymakers, for example, might simply disregard federal trans-inclusive mandates (McQuillan et al., 2024). Similarly, at the school level, research highlights teachers’ fears of parents’ reactions as one of the most prominent obstacles to closing the gap between LGBTQ+ policies and practices (Martino et al., 2024; Morgan & Taylor, 2019; Rudoe, 2018). Given the notion of young children as innocent and pure, the younger the students, the greater the teachers’ fear of parental pushback (Meyer et al., 2019). Even when mandated by law, educators’ concerns about parental disapproval often deter them from addressing LGBTQ+ topics in their curriculum and pedagogy (Leonardi, 2018). Teachers’ fears are especially marked in religious communities (Meyer et al., 2019; Rudoe, 2018) and in schools where school administrators are dismissive or unsupportive of existing gender and sexuality policy mandates (Leonardi & Stanley, 2018; Mangin, 2020).

On top of this, the U.S. is experiencing heightened anti-trans political backlash. Since assuming office in January 2025, President Trump has rolled out a series of executive orders undermining trans protections, such as their rights to identity documents, gender-affirming health care, and curricular representation (Rummler & Sosin, 2025). At the time of this writing, 575 anti-LGBTQ bills have been proposed in the U.S., most of them targeting trans children and youth (ACLU, 2025). So-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws have become effective in 19 states, censoring schools from talking about LGBTQ+ issues (Movement Advancement Project, 2024). Evangelical Christian far-right extremist groups regularly take information out of context and spread frightening and false grooming and gender ideology narratives to gain support for their anti-trans efforts. Political groups such as Moms of Liberty have been taking over school boards across the country. Weaponizing parental rights and childhood at risk discourses, they use trans and queer people as scapegoats to spread misinformation and capitalize on parental fears to achieve their White supremacist agendas (GLAAD, 2023, 2024; Perkins, 2023).

By any means, we intend to downplay this extreme hate and heightened contexts of violence that disfranchise trans life (Stanley, 2021). We do, however, believe that not all pushback originates from the same space, shares the same goals, or has the same dynamics. Arguably, the origins, goals, and intersectional complexities of local parental pushback are influenced by, yet distinct from, the far-right backlash. Local parental pushback is often more spontaneous, nuanced, and affected by misconceptions and misinformation; whereas religious far-right anti-trans backlash is coordinated and designed, and has larger political aims (Nagourney & Peters, 2023). Analyzing the case of NYCDOE, we focus on local school communities’ pushback and highlight the need to understand its roots and nuances to more effectively address it. As Halperin (2007) acutely posited, “we can only defuse those fears if we are willing to analyze them, to understand them, to figure out where they come from” (p. 166).

Conceptual Framework: Policy as a Sociocultural Practice of Power

To examine how the Guidelines were taken up in practice, we adopt a policy-as-practice approach (Levinson et al., 2009). Mainstream policy studies assume a rational, instrumental, and technical understanding of the policy processes. These studies examine if a specific policy was implemented with fidelity and if it produced the expected outcomes (Sutton & Levinson, 2001). They seek to improve policy implementation and outcomes, yet rarely address the negotiations, assumptions, and contexts that shape the policy processes. In contrast, policy-as-practice does not take the policy problem for granted. Neither does it conceive policy as a rational and linear, top-down, neutral process in which higher-level policy actors objectively define a problem, design paths to solutions, and local actors (e.g., principals and teachers at schools) follow them with more or less accuracy. Rather, stemming from the domain of anthropological inquiry, policy-as-practice assumes that putting policy into action is, first and foremost, “a social practice of power” (Levinson et al., 2009, p. 769). That is, policy-as-practice underscores that, undergirding the policy processes, actors are always negotiating power and giving meaning to the policy according to their historical, material, and sociocultural contexts. Thus, a major focus of policy-as-practice studies is to grasp the larger social, political, and economic forces that underpin policies (Kendall, 2012).

Policy-as-practice is not concerned with a neat sequence of policy phases. Instead of distinguishing between design and implementation, studies of educational policy-as-practice examine the iterative and nonlinear relationship between policy formation and implementation, highlighting the policy appropriation processes that occur across different times and spaces. “Appropriation refers to the ways that creative agents interpret and take in elements of [official] policy, thereby incorporating these discursive resources into their schemes of interest, motivation, and action” (Levinson et al., 2009, p. 779). In other words, “appropriation” refers to how policy actors provide meaning to the policy; “is a kind of taking of policy and making it one’s own” (Sutton & Levinson, 2001, p. 3). ¹ Appropriation occurs at all levels of policy, with policymakers negotiating and reinterpreting official policy texts and teachers and other local actors influencing and changing official policy as well (Levinson et al., 2009). Just as the policy cycle lacks a clear distinction between the phases of design and implementation, the roles of designers and implementers are also not markedly separated. High-policy level and school actors all shape policies, which are constantly traveling and being (re)appropriated from higher to lower policy levels and vice versa.

We draw on a policy-as-practice framework to examine how different policy stakeholders appropriated the NYCDOE’s Guidelines. We explore how policy actors, located at different times and spaces—from district officials to teachers and principals—made sense of the policy according to their historical, social, and material constraints. As we describe next, to study NYCDOE’s policy-as-practice, we use a CCS approach, which, by incorporating various axis of comparison and analysis, allows us to center the broader historical, material, and sociopolitical contextual forces in our inquiry and examine how the policy travelled across different locations (Vavrus & Bartlett, 2022).

Methods

The CCS is a methodological approach proposed by Lesley Bartlett and Frances Vavrus to study educational policy-as-practice, by bringing “methodological clarity as to how one might explore the complex assemblages of power that come to bear on policy formation and appropriation” (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2014, p. 131). Like traditional case studies, the CCS requires extensive and in-depth data collection at the local research sites. Yet a CCS “strives to situate local action and interpretation within a broader cultural, historical, and political investigation” (Vavrus & Bartlett, 2006, p. 96). Underlying a CCS design is the belief that to understand how policy plays out in practice at the local level, the researcher must acquire extensive knowledge of the broader contextual forces (Bartlett, 2014; Bartlett & Vavrus, 2014).

To that end, the CCS relies on three axes of comparison and analysis to facilitate contextual inquiry. First, a horizontal axis requires attention to policy appropriation across different locations. We engaged in horizontal analysis by comparing how different schools appropriated the Guidelines. Second, a vertical axis attends to how the policy “travels” across different policy levels. To address our vertical axis, we explored how district policymakers appropriated the policy and how the NYCDOE’s policy “moved” top-down from the NYCDOE to schools and bottom-up from schools to the NNYCDOE. Lastly, a third transversal axis of analysis investigates the historical context of the policy, “attending to the occurrence of key “policy events” and significant changes across time” (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017, p. 139). Through the transversal axis, we paid particular attention to how our participants dated the NYCDOE’s gender policy and chronicled significant events, and how historical forces shaped the current policy. This comparative approach, spanning different schools situated within higher policy levels and across time, helped us identify how various constellations of contextual forces converged to shape the conditions under which schools enacted gender policies, and with what consequences.

Data come from 41 semi-structured virtual interviews conducted during the Fall 2021-Spring 2022 academic year. At the local level, the purposive sample (Yin, 2016) consisted of 18 teachers and four school administrators from eight schools that varied in their socio-demographic compositions and had been revising their institutional and pedagogical practices to create safer spaces for gender differences. Some schools had predominantly White and wealthy student populations, and others had greater racial, economic, and linguistic diversity. Table 1, available as online supplemental material, provides further details on the backgrounds and school contexts of school-level participants. At higher policy levels, data come from interviews with City Council members, NYCDOE policymakers responsible for writing the policy, and NYCDOE officials overseeing and coordinating its implementation (n = 7). Only a few City Council members and NYCDOE officials were directly related to the initiative. To ensure confidentiality, we refer to all of them indistinctively as policy stakeholders. Additionally, we interviewed 12 professional development (PD) providers, endorsed and funded by the NYCDOE, to train educators or provide programming to students. We also analyzed current and archival media outlets, as well as other peer-reviewed articles, to reconstruct the policy antecedents and gain a deeper understanding of the policy’s broader historical and contemporary context.

We approached the analysis of the policy texts and interview transcripts inductively. We first generated In Vivo codes—that is, “words or short phrases from the participant’s own language in the data” (Miles et al., 2014, p. 74). Progressively, after coming together to discuss our In Vivo codes and preliminary insights, we refined the codes toward a more analytical and abstract level (Marshall & Rossman, 2016). For example, multiple In Vivo codes referred to situations where schools encountered the Guidelines after some conflict arose. Examples of In Vivo codes in this regard were: “They reach out to us after something has already cropped up in their community; Some kids were being harassed. The principal asked the DOE to come to the school; or, We’ re printing and reading [the Guidelines] right now because of this situation where parents are pushing back.” After noticing all these instances where schools became involved with the policy following some conflict, we re-coded them under the broader code “Reactive Policy Appropriation.” Likewise, other In Vivo codes such as “The policy was validating of the things we were doing,” and “Those policies were already aligned with what we were doing as a school,” described instances where the school used the NYCDOE’s policy to justify and enrich their ongoing gender-inclusive practices. We grouped those In Vivo codes under the larger category, Proactive Policy Appropriation.

We approached our data holistically, and in addition to inductive codes, we wrote analytic memos (Miles et al., 2014). Throughout the data collection and analysis phases, we crafted memos with our insights regarding the historical, material, and sociopolitical forces that have shaped the policy in practice. Lastly, using Google Drive documents, we collaboratively wrote cross-case summaries, in which we condensed the analytic memos and included excerpts of coded data to serve as evidence of the major forms of policy appropriation we identified across the different schools.

Regarding the limitations of the study, we acknowledge that the original study design involved extensive in-person data collection in three schools using ethnographic methods, a plan that was halted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Relatedly, recruitment and data collection were all done virtually. Thus, without the possibility of building in-person relationships with all members of the school, recruiting multiple participants within the same institution was notably challenging. As we will show, engaging in vertical, horizontal, and transversal comparisons enhanced our understanding of the NYCDOE policy in practice. However, we recognize that collecting more extensive data at each site, as initially planned, would have been in better alignment with the tenets of CCS, affording us a deeper understanding of the micro dynamics of policy take-up within the different school contexts (Vavrus & Bartlett, 2022).

We must also clarify that, for the sake of conciseness and clarity, the analysis presented in this article does not include a critical reading of the policy texts. Put differently, in this article, we take the official policy documents for granted. However, drawing on our policy-as-practice conceptual lenses, we understand policy texts as normative discourses “that function to empower some people and silence others” (Wright & Shore, 1997, p. 7). While this article does not critically analyze the Guidelines, we recognize that, remarkable in many aspects, they also had several limitations. As elaborated elsewhere, the Guidelines were somehow affected by class and racial bias and often dismissed institutional practices to account for more fluid gender identities and expressions (Snaider, 2024).

Findings

Below, we present our findings through our three axes of analysis. First, we focus on the transversal axis and elaborate on the policy’s historical roots and formation. Next, we attend vertically to how the policy traveled from the NYCDOE to schools. Lastly, we compare horizontally to identify different forms of policy appropriation across schools. For the sake of analytical clarity, we organize the findings across these three axes. However, as the reader might notice, the boundaries between the axes sometimes blur, overlap, and influence one another.

Addressing the Transversal: (Fears of) Repeating History

Tracing back the policy origins, we learned that, using its political and economic power over the NYCDOE, the City Council mandated the creation of the LGBTQ Liaison position and allocated funding for LGBTQ organizations to provide free-of-cost training and programming in NYC public schools. The Liaison would lead the development of the guidelines and coordinate the work of the LGBTQ organizations. One PD provider shared: [The NYCDOE] has been told by the City Council. They have been told by their political bosses that they have to do this.” Likewise, a policy stakeholder uttered: “The position was created by the advocacy of the City Council. [This Council Member] really ruffled some feathers to get this position.”

Many participants referred to the central role the City Council played in creating the LGBTQ Liaison position and emphasized the influence of one constituent who had been committed to LGBTQ advocacy in the city since the early 1990s (McMorrow, 2019). Back then, he was a public-school teacher and became a key player in supporting Children of the Rainbow: An early childhood curriculum that the NYCDOE released “to teach first graders to respect the city’s myriad racial and ethnic groups” (Myers, 1992, para. 1). Largely because of the link between the past and present NYCDOE’s efforts through this Council member, our study participants often brought up Children of the Rainbow when sharing about the origins of the current policy and some of its setbacks.

Children of the Rainbow was created in response to the demands of Black families, who, frustrated with decades of battles against school segregation and disinvestment, called for a curriculum that more accurately reflected the racial composition of NYC schools (Johnson, 2003; Nelson, 2001; Viadero, 1990). However, three out of 400 pages of the Children of Rainbow curriculum that included content on lesbian and gay families triggered strong public outrage.

The backlash was incited by the members of Community School Board 24 (CSB24). ² All of them were White, and some of them were members of the clergy and affiliated with far-right groups, a strategy similar to the current far-right approach of taking control of school boards across the U.S. (Baptise, 2024). On the other hand, Queens, the neighborhood they represented, had the fastest-growing immigrant population in the city, and more than 70% of the students in District 24 overcrowded schools were children of color (Karp, 1993). Representing a far-right, conservative White sector, CSB24 maneuvered and built coalitions with low-income parents of color, capitalizing on their long-lasting resentments and anger against the NYCDOE. CSB24 members wrote letters to more than 20,000 parents spreading false information, claiming the curriculum was homosexual propaganda with sexual content for young kids. Parents were bused to massive protests, and the social turmoil was such that the Board of Education ousted the by-then School Counsellor Joseph Fernández a year after the controversy started (Karp, 1993).

Fast forward three decades, Fernández’s ousting still resonates among NYCDOE’s leadership, shaping the way they fear repercussions for the current Guidelines. In one policy stakeholder’s words,

This Chancellor and this Mayor seem to have stuck with [the NYCDOE’s Gender Policy] a bit, but still, they worry about it because they know what happened during Rainbow. The Chancellor lost his job because of it, because of the Rainbow curriculum. So, the backlash was real. Yes, I think that the fear goes back to the Rainbow and the rejection of Rainbow and the firing of the Chancellor . . . I heard one saying it with these words: “I am not gonna go down like Joe Fernández,” and others weren’t as open, but that’s what they implied.

Memories of Children of the Rainbow and the pushback it triggered were alive among the NYCDOE leadership. As we will further expand in the vertical axis section, the NYCDOE’s Children of the Rainbow debacle, combined with the contemporary national context of anti-LGBTQ backlash, rendered the NYCDOE’s leaders reticent to disseminate the current policy across the school system.

Importantly, analyses of the Children of the Rainbow controversy point out how School Counselor Joseph Fernández and the supporters of the curriculum failed to recognize the perspectives, fears, and frustrations of low-income parents of color and, relatedly, to actively engage with them in much-needed participatory and conciliary policy processes (Barbanel, 1993; Hymowitz, 1993). While an elitist group of White gay activists with access to the Mayor lobbied the Central School Board offices and succeeded in incorporating the contentious three pages with lesbian and gay content, the families of color who initially demanded the curriculum had no opportunity to provide their input (Karp, 1993; Hymowitz, 1993). School Counselor Fernández’s style was perceived as authoritarian, creating policies and mandating curricular reforms while ignoring the need for public involvement and consensus building, and dismissing the delicacy of school-family relationships (Barbanel, 1993).

In alignment, contemporary analyses of the Children of the Rainbow’s controversy point out as one of the main takeaways of Children of the Rainbow the fractured ability of their supporters to build coalitions, and caution that “history is repeating itself” (New York Historical Society Museum & Library, 2022, 22:55). As one analysist uttered:

If you don’t build alliances, and we are seeing this now, we will lose these issues. If people are not standing by those of us who are LGBTQ we are going to lose. So, it’s really important to build a family-friendly alliance. . . Part of us advocates, is how do we convince people, and how do we meet people where they are. . . to move them to another place. (30:39)

Since the Children of the Rainbow controversy, school segregation has markedly increased: Nowadays, NYC is one of the most segregated school systems in the U.S, and many neighborhoods and schools, with once primarily Black populations, have rapidly gentrified (Cohen, 2021; Graham, 2023). Yet, while memories of the Rainbow and the fear of triggering parental pushback are alive and well at the NYCDOE, it appears that three decades later, the dismissal of considering the voices, difficulties, and frustrations of these parents also negatively impacted the current policy formation.

Initially, when the NYCDOE began crafting the Guidelines, they engaged with broader audiences in the write-up process. Specifically, they partnered with LGBTQ organizations that provided feedback and engaged in an iterative process of consulting with parents, students, and teachers to help improve the policy with trans-informed perspectives. As one policymaker explained,

[We work with] community-based organizations that are oftentimes working directly with young people and their families in the schools; we needed to know what they saw in the Guidelines, what needed to be improved. We would send them a version of the Guidelines that we had and say, “Mark it up, add comments, tell us what you want.” Then, we talked to young people, and we would talk to teachers and families and say, “What are you hearing?”

However, mirroring the weakness of the Rainbow policy processes, they excluded the perspectives of school-level actors who, presumably, would not have readily accepted the policy mandates. As this policymaker candidly continued,

There was a big audience that we left out. In hindsight, I probably would have included people who were not supportive of trans people, because I think what we didn't do was acknowledge the difficulties that they were experiencing. We were looking for people who were on board and supportive of trans young people. We were not talking to the people who are not on board and not supportive. I sort of had in my head what they were thinking, but I didn't directly look for their feedback because, frankly, at the time, we didn't care. We didn't want to interface with those people. But I think, in hindsight, we could have done that, and that would have, I think, helped the policy to be stronger.

As this policy stakeholder acutely reflected, they neglected—or plainly avoided—incorporating the perspectives of potentially dissenting school populations into the policy formation. Like the analyses we shared from Children of the Rainbow, he concluded that listening to these communities and acknowledging “the difficulties they were experiencing” would have rendered a stronger policy.

Addressing the Vertical: NYCDOE’s Fearful Dissemination of the Gender Policy

Attending to our vertical axis of analysis, we elaborate on the NYCDOE’s mechanisms to filter the policy down to the schools, which also hindered possibilities for community democratic engagement. Seemingly, to keep pushback at bay, combined with a material context characterized by bureaucratic inefficiencies and inadequate resources, the Guidelines remained obscure, and most schools had little to no knowledge of the policy.

The initiative, in fact, was severely under-resourced. The LGBTQ Liaison oversaw all work, from leading the development of the Guidelines to coordinating with PD providers and responding to complaints, questions, and requests from schools and families. As one policy stakeholder poignantly shared,

It’s one person, it’s 1800 schools, it’s a million students . . . It’s crazy, after they promised a team of people. And one person for the full DOE when it should be at least one person for every district, at least. The whole thing’s a bureaucratic nightmare that’s underfunded.

Likewise, another policy stakeholder expressed, “Each person has left asking for more staff, they left asking for more people. They’ve asked for more people since day one.”

Alongside an understaffed effort that led to a high turnover rate in the LGBTQ Liaison position, the dissemination of PD opportunities available at no cost to teachers and schools was notably deficient. PD providers often struggled with low enrollment and highlighted how schools were entirely unaware of the policy. As one PD provider uttered: “But as far as getting that information to the ground, to teachers, across the board, there’s a missing link. . . educators are not sure the PD is offered. Well, first of all, they don’t know that policy even exists.” Likewise, another PD provider reflected, “Occasionally I say [to teachers], ‘Am I the first person who’s told you about this [policy]?’ Oftentimes the answer is ‘yes.’” Interestingly, the same participant suggested that this widespread lack of awareness about the policy may stem from a deliberate approach by the NYCDOE to minimize potential controversy. As he explains,

Part of it is that it is inherently something that is controversial in many communities. And I think the DOE wants to do the most while rocking the boat the least. They don’t want to cause issues. . . I really think that the Department of Education is a little bit avoidant because they don’t want to deal with the pushback.

Along the same line, another policy stakeholder shared that the NYCDOE authorities were reluctant to create a mandatory, system-wide online workshop to disseminate the Guidelines across all schools because of potential repercussions and pushback. In her words, “I feel like folks are kind of wary of making [training] mandatory, especially for schools that might be in a conservative area, and they aren’t really that proactive. They don’t want to deal with the consequences.”

In fact, the only system-wide form that NYCDOE used to communicate the policy down to schools was emails, although policy stakeholders recognized the ineffectiveness of this mode of communication. For example, one of them reflected,

We do require principals to read the full set of guidelines and teach it to their schools. Realistically, that’s not happening. Principals have an immense amount of work to do. There’s no way that every single principal is realistically going through those both sets of guidelines in detail.

In an already full day with many administrative, assessment, and student-related demands and queries, it is easy to see how principals and teachers overlooked, dismissed, or simply ignored email communications around the Guidelines.

Against this background, most of the principals and teachers interviewed had never read the Guidelines. For instance, a teacher openly shared: “I mean, did I get an email about [the policy]? Maybe, because I don’t check my DOE email.” Another teacher also expressed, “I’ve never read them. And I almost thought about Googling them before we met. But I didn’t.” Another teacher expressed, “I believe there is a policy that there needs to be at least one gender-neutral bathroom, but I could get it wrong. I feel like that’s what I’ve heard.”

Ultimately, the NYCDOE’s leaders’ cautious approach to implementing the policy—rooted in historical backlash and present fears of triggering pushback— resulted in limited dissemination efforts and a general lack of awareness across the school system. With minimal resources and inconsistent communication, the policy remains largely unknown to many educators, leaving principals and teachers with limited guidance. This environment of hesitancy and under-resourcing set the stage for an inevitably fractured understanding of the policy at the school level. In the following section, we delve into how this fragmented dissemination affected how schools and their staff have appropriated the Gender Policy.

Addressing the Horizontal: Schools’ Appropriation of the Gender Guidelines

While the Guidelines and related resources were not widely known or used by the entire school system—essentially condemning most schools to an impossible appropriation—some schools encountered them through different paths—and, as we will elaborate, with different (unintended) consequences. Beyond the overall lack of appropriation, we identified three different patterns. First, some schools proactively appropriated the policy. That is, school actors—most often the school leadership—actively consulted the NYCDOE for available LGBTQ+ resources by way of further supporting their goals and practices towards gender inclusion and social justice more broadly. Second, other schools came in touch with the Guidelines reactively due to conflict—what the NYCDOE calls escalations. In these instances, the NYCDOE was made aware of ongoing cases of bullying, harassment, or conflict and responded by educating the schools on the policy. Lastly, we identified cases of antagonistic appropriation, where schools reacted with sharp resistance, typically after learning about the policy through an email, a brief one-time workshop, or in other profoundly decontextualized circumstances. We dub this third case an antagonistic form of policy appropriation because it was characterized by disorientation and pushback, as the school community had no opportunities to make sense of the Guidelines as aligned with their mission and values.

Proactive Appropriation

Occasionally, a teacher or, more often, a school administrator would actively consult the NYCDOE for available LGBTQ+ resources and make training available for their staff. As a PD provider stated, “A lot of it is voluntary. Schools call us because they realize they need this education that they wanted to happen with their students, so they call us proactively.”

Schools that adopted the Guidelines in this proactive manner tended to already have an explicit commitment to addressing gender diversity and social justice issues, and their institutional, curricular, and pedagogical practices were aligned. For instance, one PD provider shared that the schools that required their services were usually “schools that. . .from the beginning, they have sort of a different approach to cultural stuff or inclusivity.” Concurringly, when asked why so few schools have heard about the policy, one teacher shared,

One of the reasons I have gone to so many trainings in our schools is because we are a progressive school, and that's an objective of ours: To make sure that our school is a safe place. . . . The principal is really great. She is a Black woman who is very progressive. It really depends on the school; what they want to use the money on, rather than the DOE saying, “we're going to have this happen in every school.” They did have one LGBTQ Liaison hired. But they’re supposed to be for the whole DOE. I went to a workshop with this person. They’re really good. But I went to a workshop because my school [was] interested in it. It's great to have it on paper, a policy, and training you can do in your school, but it's just not a system-wide thing.

As this teacher reflected, it was up to the schools to decide whether to engage with the Guidelines and utilize the available training opportunities. The schools that took advantage of the NYCDOE resources were mostly schools whose commitments and goals were somewhat aligned with the policy, and supported by their leadership. In fact, this teacher also shared that the school had engaged in other practices such as revamping their social studies curriculum to include LGBTQ history and other marginalized identities, created an “equity team” with teachers from each grade level to critically revise binary schoolwide practices such as boys’ and girls’ lines and bathroom policies, and regularly invited trans authors for read-alouds.

Importantly, the schools that proactively appropriated the policy were mostly—although by no means exclusively—schools that served socioeconomically advantaged populations. For example, one PD provider explained that they prioritized hiring trainers from communities of color because it was harder for them to reach out to schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

We have a few schools that reach out every year, but it tends to be the same schools like. . .very progressive schools. There's one in [a wealthy neighborhood] that's been doing it from the beginning. And it's always the same schools. We really want to reach kids and other schools, not necessarily the progressive schools that are already doing a lot of LGBTQ stuff.

Likewise, when asked what characterized the schools that were reaching out proactively for their training, another PD provider reflected,

It's really interesting to look at the links between the physical areas that these schools are in, and they're often much more heavily White affluent areas of New York City. There's definitely a correlation there. . . versus a neighborhood where that's not what they're prioritizing. And the reason they're not prioritizing the gender-neutral bathroom is because 90% of their student body has reduced price lunches and things like that. They have other things to take care of and worry about. I do think that is a piece.

Worth mentioning, the two most proactive, social-oriented schools in our study predominantly served low-income children of color. Our purposive sample of schools indicates that inclusive practices were not exclusive to socio-economically advantaged schools. However, as a broader trend highlighted by these PD providers and other district stakeholders, schools serving socioeconomically advantaged populations had greater access to material and social resources. Hence, they found themselves in a privileged position to be aware of the policy and proactively take advantage of it.

Reactive Appropriation

The second way in which schools engaged with the policy was often triggered by what the NYCDOE called escalations, which referred to a specific “incident” or general negative school climate impacting trans students. As one policy stakeholder described,

Escalations would be problems that would come either internally through other offices or externally through parents, students, or teachers. Something would happen that would require additional support. . .So that might look like a student whose teachers are not respecting their name and pronouns, and the parent would call and say, “Help us, our school is not doing what they need to.” And we would figure out a plan of action. I would call and visit the school, I would listen, I would recommend training.

When someone reported a school to the NYCDOE, the LGBTQ+ Liaison office responded with “additional support” and a “plan of action.” These interventions provided opportunities for school members to engage in dialogue and participate in training sessions offered by the NYCDOE or other partner organizations. Other participants shared anecdotes about escalations. For example, one policy stakeholder recalled:

There was a problem in this school, some kids were being harassed. The principal asked the DOE to come to the school and to work with the school. The school was predominantly Muslim. When the DOE went into the school and worked with the Parent Teachers Association, they talked about what was happening. [The parents] realized that these could have been their own kids. Not only did they started the GSA, but after a year or two that school marched in the pride parade with their [Muslim] parents. So, it can be done if it’s done the right way, but you have to involve all members of the school community and you have to work with them and let them vent their fear and their frustrations.

As this policy stakeholder explained, working in partnership with the NYCDOE, the school members were given space to discuss their difficulties and disagreements to ultimately drive positive school change. Allowing space for school members to talk and listen to each other, even if troubling and messy, was an essential component of this process. In the words of this policy stakeholder, “You have to involve all members of the school community, and you have to work with them and let them vent their fear and their frustrations.”

As another example of reactive appropriation, a school principal shared that removing the boys/girls’ signs from the bathrooms created a huge turmoil among the families. The DOE LGBTQ Liaison provided support. As she recalled, “At some point, he came in for a family workshop, he helped, talked to us. He really felt like an ally, a resource, and a useful person to talk to.” Although it was a long, complicated, and agitated time for this school, it helped the school have essential conversations and grow. In this principal’s words,

As challenging as that year was, it forced many important conversations, and it shifted the thinking for so many people. Some of it was really hard, and there were people who came away, not feeling super great. . . those were very deep and interesting conversations where people were very passionate and somewhat yelling at each other, to be frank. But the conversation happened. I wouldn't have it otherwise. So, it was big and intense. And really layered. . .I think you need to talk to adults a lot more before you [implement changes]. I think that a big lesson we learned was having some forums, town halls, spaces and times for people to talk through some of their own stuff would have made it feel less like an emergency to them after we [already removed the bathroom signs].

Naturally, DOE-scaffolded whole-school conciliatory processes were complex and often created fractures within the community. As the principal quoted above pointed out, reactive appropriation was anything but an easy process. Not all school members were satisfied with the outcome (In fact, she shared that one religious family decided to leave the school). Still, even when strenuous, having the whole school engaged in democratic deliberation and participating in PD often rendered so much-needed institutional change. Generally, our participants framed these experiences as very difficult yet productive. Involving the whole school, and “having forums, town halls, and spaces and times for people to talk through”—to borrow the principal’s words—proved central to appease anxieties and address parental concerns.

Similarly, one PD provider shared that the NYCDOE called them to collaboratively design a plan to support a struggling school. She explained that, regularly, the NYCDOE would simply offer their training to individual teachers who voluntarily wanted to enroll, but in this instance, the PD was going to be offered in the context of a whole-school plan of action, an opportunity she valued as having more potential to foster positive change.

In this elementary school, there were teachers who began introducing LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and content. And there was a contingent of parents who pushed back significantly. Another contingent of parents who have LGBTQ-identifying children pushed back against the pushback. We were called and asked if we would provide a whole staff training, which included all the school staff, school administrators, district leadership. And it was incredibly fruitful. . . These efforts are a gold standard on how to bring all stakeholders together, to have a clear understanding of what the policy is, and how the schools are responding to that. . . When [a member of the DOE] first called, and he said, “would you be willing to do this?” I mean, this is our dream! This is exactly what we want to be doing. Stepping into the fire; working with the whole community. That's where real change can happen. So, the first layer was to provide this training for teachers. And then there is a town hall with parents to introduce the policy. [The NYCDOE] is going to do that. Then we're going to come in, give them access to the curricular LGBTQ+ content, walk them through how the content is presented, the conceptual underpinnings behind that to hopefully mitigate some fear. Later, there will be an opportunity, on site, when people are together in a physical space to reflect and let their voices be heard.

As noted, this PD provider also highlighted how involving all school members to address ongoing conflict was a promising approach for school community growth. She also referred to the allocation of time and space for people to make sense of the policy and its rationale, fostering authentic dialogue where people could “reflect and let their voices be heard” as a valued component of these policy appropriation instances.

Similarly, one policy stakeholder shared about reactive appropriation cases, and he emphasized that when he visited schools, he prioritized listening and figuring out where parents’ resistance was coming from. In his words,

When I go into specific communities, I go into these Harlem schools, then I start working and wondering: ‘Really, what is the issue at hand? What's actually happening in this community?’ So, I make people talk. You will see that really backlash isn't really homophobia, nine times out of 10, it's not. These parents, oftentimes, feel they're losing control of their community, they're losing power, they feel like different things are happening. So, it’s really trying to get to the root cause within these communities. And let them understand you don't have to get rid of what you bring. Everybody brings their own to the table; we have our religion, our culture, and our background. We are not asking you to get rid of your ownness.

This policy stakeholder pointed out that when attentively listening parents, he often learned that their concerns were not simplistically grounded in hate against queer and trans people. Rather, he explained, they were rooted in their intersectional and complex realities, such as the rapid gentrification of their Harlem schools and being subjected to institutional and curricular changes without consideration of their perspectives.

In sum, reactive cases of policy appropriation were characterized by instances in which the NYCDOE, after learning about a troubling situation, would come to the schools to listen and learn from the school members’ perspectives and needs. They developed plans of action that leveraged the different professional development resources the NYCDOE had available through the policy. Importantly, reactive policy appropriation tended to involve the entire community. They were messy processes that allowed people to express their disagreements and fears. Rather than viewing these challenges negatively, our study participants framed them as a necessary part of the process for whole-school positive change.

Antagonistic Appropriation

This third way the schools reacted to the Guidelines was characterized—as its name suggests—by hostility and resistance. A common trend we identified across these instances is that the NYCDOE communicated the Guidelines to schools in ways that, contrary to the reactive appropriation cases we illustrated above, did not engage the whole community. Usually, antagonistic policy appropriation entailed just one school staff member learning about the policy in a short, one-time workshop or a school leader receiving bureaucratic communication from the central offices about the Guidelines requirements. As a result, decisions made by individual staff members without broader community engagement felt abrupt or out of place, leading to confusion and resistance within the school community. For example, after attending a one-time NYCDOE training, a school principal attempted to eliminate their father-daughter school dance. A policy stakeholder recalled,

I’ll tell you one specific story that is well documented on the Internet: the story of the Father-Daughter dance and Staten Island. You can find it; it was [published] in the New York Post. Donald Trump Jr tweeted about it. A principal had come to one of our trainings around gender inclusivity. And she went back to her school; her school was doing a father-daughter dance. She, in her right mind, was like “yeah, this is not okay.” The problem was, in the way that it was communicated back to the [Parent Teacher Association], everybody kind of got up in arms.

As this policy stakeholder shared, the principal tried to modify the father-daughter dance. She rightfully recognized, after attending a NYCDOE training, that school rituals like father-daughter dances reproduce heteronormativity and normalize gender binaries (Payne & Smith, 2018). However, the parents reacted with resentment. As pointed out by the policy stakeholder, a core factor that triggered resistance was “the way it was communicated.” The parents, who had not attended the training or engaged in any conversations about the nature of cis-heteronormative practices in the schools, were told that the event was going to be canceled to comply with the NYCDOE policy. Seemingly, the emphasis was placed on legal compliance, as indicated by the school’s PTA online statement: “Until we understand what we are legally permitted to do, we need to table this event.” (Bennett, as cited in Solé, 2018). A mother wrote a letter to the NYCDOE expressing that they “agree that school events should be inclusive and welcoming, but that this goal can be accomplished without a ban on every assemblance of tradition” (CBS News New York, 2018). While this mother fails to understand how the father-daughter dance event renders her school not inclusive and welcoming, it is arguably also an instance where local resistance is not coming from a place of outright hatred. Perhaps, learning about the decision to cancel their long-standing beloved tradition in such a decontextualized way, parents lacked a proper framework to make sense of its rationale and thus support changes to the traditional event to align with their declared inclusive values (e.g., family dance).

One teacher also recalled a similar experience in another school, Fall 2019, the principal is announcing, the first or second day of school, “there’s this initiative, this this, this, this, this . . . Oh, also, we can’t have kids in boys and girls lines, like mix up your lines whatever way.” I tell you, people were “Oh, oh my god, what’s happening in this City? We can’t even say boys and girls anymore.”

As this teacher shared, her former school principal filtered down the Guidelines as a simple technicality among many other logistical announcements. The school staff had no further context to make sense of this measure, nor did they engage in collective thinking around the reasons and importance of eliminating gendered lines. Like father-daughter dances, boys and girls’ lines are normalized binary school practices that reinforce cis-heteronormativity. However, unable to make sense of the measure and how they could be better teachers by reimagining this practice, the school staff reacted defensively, expressing confusion about the nature of the changes (“What’s happening in this City?”).

One of the school principals interviewed also reflected on how teachers and parents were more likely to react with fear and resistance when the policy was localized without any community engagement. In his words,

We’ve been considering and reflecting on our teaching, and why we do the things we do, and what kids should know. . . I could see some schools or some principals being “Oh, there’s this random PD available for LGBTQ youth,” but have never said a word about LGBTQ or anything in the school. If they just send that PD, if there’s no context, if there was no intention behind it, people then don’t know what to do, because no one’s talked about it. . . If there’s no real community engagement around these topics, then I think what happens is fear sets in because people don’t know what to expect. If the school has never even opened the conversation, the fears would just take over.

As this principal eloquently expressed, when the school would not communally make sense of these issues, “the fears would just take over.” Indeed, as in examples of antagonistic appropriation, when school actors felt unheard, had no opportunities for deliberation, and “no context” for the policy, they were more likely to react with disorientation and resistance.

Discussion

A thorough account of the historical, material, and sociopolitical contexts of the NYCDOE’s Gender Policy was necessary to better understand the policy’s affordances and setbacks. We made sense of NYCDOE’s fears and the advent of parents’ pushback within and against a profoundly racially and socioeconomically segregated school system backdrop, alongside policy formation and appropriation processes that dismissed the voices of potentially dissenting school populations. Dockendorff et al. (2019) “provocatively. . . suggest that perhaps more important than the content of the policies themselves is the process by which these policies are developed. . . Policies are only as good as those who develop, know and use them” (p. 164). Yet, in the case we examined here, the NYCDOE failed to create mechanisms to include all the targeted populations in the policy development, and most school actors were unaware, let alone benefited from, the policy.

NYCDOE’s leaders’ fears of repeating the past—i.e., triggering social turmoil and the ousting of the School Chancellor—drove much of the present policy formation processes. On the one hand, it seemed that NYCDOE authorities somewhat learned that top-down, authoritative mandates are more likely to trigger resistance than to drive school cultural change, as they refused to approve a system-wide, one-time compulsory workshop on the Guidelines and mirror the authoritarian style of former Chancellor Joseph Fernández. However, instead of facilitating mechanisms for building consensus throughout the policy formation and appropriation processes, worried about how so-called conservative communities would react, the NYCDOE maintained the policy in the shadows. Relatedly, the material and human resources to support the initiative were markedly insufficient, further hindering more promising forms of policy dissemination and, ultimately, positive change at the school level.

The failure to create mechanisms to include resistant voices in the policy formation and appropriation processes, alongside a material context of policy disinvestment, increased the likelihood of antagonistic appropriation, triggering much of the pushback the NYCDOE aimed to avoid. School actors learning about the Guidelines through emails were rarely granted opportunities to discuss their perspectives and collectively make sense of the policy rationale in relation to their values and cultural traditions.

Seen through a policy-as-practice lens, the three appropriation patterns reveal how the “same” Guidelines become different policy objects once they encounter distinct constellations of history, resources, and authority. In proactive appropriation settings, pre-existing equity discourses and leadership commitments supplied the symbolic and material capital that let staff appropriate the guidelines as confirmation of work already underway; here, policy acted less as a mandate than as a legitimation device. Reactive appropriation demonstrates the hinge role of communal deliberation and support from interpretive intermediaries: District liaisons and PD partners translated policy language into shared problem-solving processes that gradually shifted school norms. Antagonistic appropriation, by contrast, lacked both the interpretive policy scaffolds and the relational trust needed to transform parental concerns and opposition into collective, locally-sound meaning-making.

Moreover, these dynamics can be seen, in part, as the result of entrenched racial and class hierarchies and as forces that contribute to deepening those very inequalities. In under-resourced schools, where teachers and administrators already face significant challenges, limited support from the NYCDOE made it less likely for the policy to be appropriated proactively—or even reactively by having someone at the school with the time, knowledge, and cultural resources to reach out to the NYCDOE and advocate for themselves and their school. This disparity led to a widening gap between schools with the capacity to adopt inclusive policies and those struggling to do so, thereby exacerbating existing divides within the system.

As educational system change expert Fullan (1993) famously put it, “you cannot mandate what matters” (p.22). This does not mean, however, that gender policies aimed at changing school institutional and pedagogical practices are pointless. As previous literature and our study showed, fears of parental reactions tend to undermine gender policies in practice (Kurt & Chenault, 2017; Martino et al., 2024; Meyer et al., 2019). However, parents’ diverging perspectives might catalyze difficult yet necessary learning processes (Leonardi, 2018).

The NYCDOE’s reactive appropriation cases offer a valuable example of how policies can scaffold positive school cultural change, investing the appropriate time, human and material resources, and creating whole-school conciliatory processes. District leaders visiting schools to learn from community concerns, holding town hall meetings with staff and families, and providing professional development for the entire school proved to be successful paths to advancing change. They afforded opportunities to learn the reasons for shifting cis-heteronormative school practices such as father-daughter dances, as well as to address many of the fears and concerns rooted in misinformation and myths, such as that curriculum and pedagogy about gender diversity are meant to indoctrinate and groom young children. Furthermore, scaffolded spaces for deliberation enabled policymakers and schools to develop a more nuanced understanding of parents’ pushback and its diverse origins. Sometimes, our data illustrated, resistance was rooted in more complex, intersectional dynamics where school communities feel they were required, by a top-down mandate and in contexts of racial segregation and gentrification, to cast aside their cultural values and traditions. In the words of one policymaker, they felt they ‘were losing power’ and being ask to “to get rid of their ownness.” While the NYCDOE was fearful of parental repercussions, communities were not static. Democratic deliberation and whole-school training often improved school climates. Putting parents’ pushback against gender policies in historical, material, and cultural contexts, our analysis suggests, might illuminate promising paths for so much-needed school cultural change.

Last but not least, we acknowledge that at the time we conducted this study, organized anti-trans backlash had already begun to ramp up, but had not yet taken the form of official laws and policies. However, the local dynamics illustrated in our research now unfold inside an unprecedented national assault on trans rights, which not only increases district leaders’ and teachers’ fears of pushback but also emboldens detractors who cast any gender-inclusive policy as an attack on parental rights. In districts where such narratives dominate school board politics, our findings highlight both the possibilities and the limitations of the context-sensitive approach we propose. Whole-community deliberation can still carve out space for incremental change; listening to parents’ concerns, creating spaces to counter false information strategically disseminated by the far-right, and building alliances, in fact, might be even more urgent and necessary. Yet, local pushback is vulnerable to co-optation or stalemate when policy arbiters operate under punitive statutes or coordinated extremist campaigns. Future efforts must therefore recognize asymmetric policy environments: alongside consensus-building, districts may need defensive legal strategies and cross-district coalitions, lest the labor of inclusion fall solely on individual school efforts.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-epx-10.1177_08959048251387034 – Supplemental material for Putting Parental Pushback in Context: A Comparative Case Study of a School District’s Gender Policy-As-Practice

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-epx-10.1177_08959048251387034 for Putting Parental Pushback in Context: A Comparative Case Study of a School District’s Gender Policy-As-Practice by Carolina Snaider and Mauro C. Moschetti in Educational Policy