Education Week - April 28, 2021 - 20

INSIDE

Racial Justice Demands
More Than a Lawn Sign

What Ed. Leaders Can Learn From a
Wildfire About Spending Federal Funds

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OPINION

Trans Youth Are Under Attack.
Educators Must Step Up

Anti-trans legislation across the country has been targeting trans children this year

e are both trans scholars who
have devoted our careers in the
field of education to schools
and universities. For us, schools
have been invaluable sites of
learning, community building,
and imagining how we might
cultivate a more just and equitable world. It is for that reason
we are profoundly concerned by the recent increase of political
attacks on trans children. Although trans people have become far
more visible than ever before, hypervisibility without systems of
support and protection has made us vulnerable.
Most trans people experience extreme hostility in public life. In
a 2015 survey from the National Center for Transgender Equality,
77 percent of trans people reported being harassed in K-12 schools.
One in 4 trans people reported being physically attacked at school,
and more than 1 in 10 reported being sexually assaulted.
These conditions have severe consequences: Seventeen
percent of trans students reported leaving their school because
of mistreatment. To us, and to most educators, it is clear that
schools are not adequately meeting the needs of trans and gendernonconforming youth. We can and must do better.
Yet just since January, more than 100 anti-trans bills have
been introduced in state legislatures across the country. Most
of them target youth. The focus of these bills varies: Some ban
or criminalize trans health care (in the midst of a pandemic, no
less); some prohibit teaching in schools about trans people and
related topics; some mandate educators to disclose a child's sexual
orientation or gender identity to their parents without the child's
consent. Half the bills forbid trans youth from participating in

school sports based on their gender identity.
One bill in Minnesota goes so far as to make trans girls'
participation in girls' sports a petty misdemeanor, a crime on
the same level as fifth-degree assault. The rapid spread of this
legislation is largely due to coordination by far-right political
organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is
designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
It's crucial to note here that many of these bills particularly
target trans girls. Although this coordinated attack creates
dangerous conditions for all trans people, it does so largely by
suggesting that trans girls are not who they say they are-that they
are predators invading women's spaces.
When adults frame a group of children as predators, it puts
those children at risk. This is a violation of our most fundamental
responsibilities as educators and as adults. The demonization of
trans girls has serious consequences, especially when combined
with racist attitudes. Trans women and girls face extreme
and disproportionate levels of physical and sexual violence,
especially trans women and girls of color, who made up an
estimated 79 percent of the known trans murder victims in 2020.
Overall, trans women and girls of color are among those most
targeted for violence in the United States. Unless our society
intervenes to better support trans girls-particularly trans girls of
color-this pattern of violence and harm will be reflected in our
nation's schools.
These anti-trans bills do not represent the public schools
we want for young people, whether they are trans or not. We
want schools where all young people learn how to play together
and share public space without antagonism from adults or
their peers. We want schools that are less invested in policing

children's bodies and identities and more focused on listening
carefully to children in order to respond to their basic learning
needs and overall well-being. These are simple, attainable goals.
Together with our colleague Kevin Kumashiro (a former
dean of the University of San Francisco School of Education),
we wrote an open letter calling on the Biden administration to
support trans youth and school employees in the face of these
coordinated attacks. We shared it during the week of action to
commemorate Trans Day of Visibility, March 31, and the letter
was signed by more than 17,000 educators and educational
scholars in just five days. We were heartened by this remarkable
demonstration of support from our colleagues, which shows
that there is widespread support for trans youth from educators
across the United States. Still, there is more work to do to ensure
that support translates into concrete action.
To paraphrase our colleague Jules Gill-Peterson, an assistant
professor at the University of Pittsburgh, we want schools that
embrace the possibility that a trans childhood can be a happy
and beautiful one. In our letter, we suggest key ways that schools
can begin to better support trans youth and school employees:
expanding access to trans-inclusive school support services and
employee health insurance, providing equal access to all school
activities and facilities, and implementing trans-competent
school records and information systems.
Although our open letter is addressed to the Biden
administration, we hope that teachers, families, and school
leaders will also advocate these changes within their local
school districts. Together, we can create schools that care for
trans youth rather than ones that treat their existence as a
matter of political debate. n

By Harper B. Keenan & Z Nicolazzo
KEENAN is the Robert Quartermain Professor of Gender & Sexuality Research in Education at the University of British Columbia. A former New York City elementary school teacher, his work
addresses how adults teach children about complex social issues. NICOLAZZO is an associate professor of Trans* Studies in Education at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on
how discourses of gender mediate trans people's lives in higher education, and her first book is titled Trans* in College: Transgender Students' Strategies for Navigating Campus Life and the
Institutional Politics of Inclusion.
20 | EDUCATION WEEK | April 28, 2021 | www.edweek.org/opinion

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Education Week - April 28, 2021

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