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Saving Lives Through Education

Saving Lives Through Education

The effects of cissexism and transphobia can be extremely detrimental and long-lasting, especially when they are imposed on children during the early years of their development. When children are in school, they should be learning about the world and how they fit into it.

Instead, the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network found that 75 percent of transgender youth have reported feeling unsafe at school, which seriously affects the GPAs of some and causes others to frequently skip school altogether.

Many reported that their time at school is colored by the struggle to be accepted for who they are and how they present themselves to such an extent that some are even punished for wearing the clothes consistent with their gender identity. When teachers exhibit such discriminatory behavior, students tend to follow suit, and that harassment can lead to mental health issues and financial instability later in life.

These students need support, and they need allies.

Since President Trump overturned the Obama administration’s letter guiding schools to interpret Title IX to include protections against transgender discrimination, gender nonconforming students have one less tool in their toolbox. This is where education can step in, whether it’s peer-to-peer or teacher-to-student.

The Boulder Valley School District has been at the forefront of the movement to bring LGBTQ issues into the classroom. Kindergarten teacher Jenny Magee integrates messages about gender in a natural way through books such as Heather Has Two Mommies and dress-up games that encourage all the students to try on the princess tiara or the construction outfit, whichever they want to wear.

Magee is part of a training program with A Queer Endeavor, an initiative housed in the University of Colorado’s School of Education aimed at “queering the classroom.” They have tiers of training programs, complete with sample lesson plans, that begin with destigmatizing the word “gay” and move toward studying queer historic figures or authors. Some teachers, such as Simone Snead, a high school health teacher in the Boulder Valley School District, have even felt empowered to come out to their students.

Echoing the sentiments of other teachers who came out to their students, Snead noticed that her students felt more comfortable asking her questions and seemed to connect with her more easily.

Similarly, Milwaukee public school teacher Melissa Bollow Tempel took it upon herself to expand her students’ views in order to help one of her gender nonconforming first graders feel more comfortable. She was delighted with the open-mindedness that her students brought to the assignments, as only days before they had been questioning why another student “look[ed] like a boy.”

Once Tempel initiated the discussion by pointing out how “boy things” and “girl things” are arbitrary, her students took it from there, excited to bring up examples in their lives of gender nonconformity. It should be noted that the first grade class did not immediately change their behavior, but it was a hopeful beginning to a lesson that must be continued and reinforced.

On the blog Tranarchism, a piece called “Not Your Mom’s Trans 101” very cleverly describes gender as three-dimensional rather than linear, saying “Being trans is not always about falling ‘in between’ binary genders, and as often as not, it’s about being something too expansive for those ideas to have meaning at all.”

And therein lies the beauty and necessity of encouraging children to think about gender in all its iterations and nuances, a way of thinking that is essential to their well-being and the well-being of all of us.

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