How Can Educators Better Support Trans Students?
Trigger warning: transphobia, suicide ideation
“Do you think suicide is always bad or do you think it depends on the person?”
It was close to midnight when I got this text from a preteen early last week. “What do you mean?” I wrote back.
“I mean is it sometimes better,” they said, “maybe if the person really has no one that cares about them anyway, and they don’t add anything special. What’s wrong with it, if it doesn’t hurt anyone?”
“It hurts you,” I pointed out.
“I would be dead,” they responded, “so I wouldn’t know.”
It was a hard conversation. It was particularly hard because their thoughts of suicide were stemming from the hard-edged transphobia of a school turning a blind eye to their unending experiences of harassment, a judgemental family echoing that violence, and a body that they already hated more than anyone else ever could.
And it was Transgender Awareness Week.
According to EGALE, 90% of trans youth hear transphobic comments on a daily basis. In 2021, more than half of them considered suicide. Anti-trans rhetoric continues to rise in our society. We are failing some of the most vulnerable young people in our schools.
We need to do better.
We need to help parents respond supportively to trans children.
For many young trans adolescents, puberty blockers and hormone therapy are at the centre of their wellbeing—and access to trans youth health care and mental health resources remains difficult without parental support.
That’s part of the reason the Human Rights Campaign and American Academy of Pediatrics developed Supporting & Caring for Transgender Children, a resource that explains how families and healthcare professionals are helping trans children thrive.
One of the excerpts I’ve used most often when advocating for trans youth is this table outlining different responses of parents to children who are experiencing gender dysphoria.
Human Rights Campaign, “Comparing Approaches to Childhood Gender Dysphoria,” Supporting & Caring for Transgender Children
Note that some trans folks challenge the ‘insistence, persistence, consistence’ language that is used in the recommendation to distinguish between gender-expansive kids (i.e. those with non-conforming forms of gender expression) and trans kids (i.e. those with a non-cisgender gender identity) if it is used to discourage trans youth and youth who are unpacking their gender identity from freely and completely exploring who they are.
Equipping parents to support their kids matters because 2SLGBTQ+ youth who are rejected by their families are eight times more likely to attempt suicide than cisgender kids. Eight. Times. Trans kids who are supported in their identities, by comparison, have positive mental health.
Check out: The Ten Oaks Project’s Families in Transition group, a 10-week program that supports parents with trans or gender-questioning children.
We have to address the warning signs of suicide ideation.
I’ve been part of countless suicide interventions throughout my professional life. Not once can I recall a suicide attempt coming as a surprise.
According to resources like the Centre for Suicide Prevention, young people thinking about suicide typically exhibit warning signs that we can recognize as red flags for their wellbeing. All behaviour is communication. Whether it’s so-called attention-seeking or changes in behaviour that they try to keep hidden, the beliefs, experiences and actions of vulnerable children merit our attention.
For educators, this means touching base with students to check on their wellbeing and make sure they know we care.
As a young boy who didn’t conform to traditional masculine norms, I faced merciless homophobic bullying every day throughout middle school. I experienced verbal taunts, physical assaults, even microaggressions from my friends.
I never once had a teacher stand up for me or ask me how I was doing.
“I need to know that I am loved and accepted and believed in, and that life has a point and I will find it someday. That’s just getting harder and harder to believe.”
Listen: Breaking the Boy Code’s podcast episode with a 14-year-old trans boy, Because I Was Different.
We need to change the way we think about feminine boys.
In an article in The New York Times, Ruth Padawer describes how girls have gained more access to traditionally masculine activities and forms of expression.
On the other side of the spectrum, she points out that when a boy acts like a girl, it subconsciously shakes the foundation of how we traditionally conceptualize gender—after all, why would someone want to be the lesser gender?
Schools are underprepared to support trans girls. When educators legitimize arguments against trans girls’ access to gender-affirming bathrooms or sports teams, we expose those students to increased harm. When we shrug our shoulders at homophobic or transphobic bullying, we perpetuate the expectation that boys are naturally proponents of violence.
We need to create spaces in our schools where young people of any gender can expand beyond the rigid boys-will-be-boys norm, and we need to actively protect those who do.
“More than liberal righteous anger, we need concrete funding for trans shelters, scholarships, program grants. More than nihilistic leftist rhetoric, we need creativity and transformation. We need people to stop talking about how trans women get killed all the time. We need people to start telling us that they won’t let us die.”
We need trans visibility in the curriculum.
For any of this to be possible, schools need to face the silence surrounding trans lives. The erasure of trans visibility in classrooms, school policy and curriculum delegitimizes trans identities and forces vulnerable students to be either invisible or hypervisible—neither of which is safe.
According to the Human Rights Campaign, only 16% of gender-expansive youth feel safe at school every day.
An inclusive curriculum tackles the misconceptions that underpin transphobia, reinforces peer support, builds a more welcoming school environment and gives gender-questioning children vocabulary to understand their feelings and identities. The positive outcomes are limitless.
On the other end of the spectrum is the defenceless hurt of the seventh-grader who texted me last week: “I’m completely fucked up.”
We can empower young people as allies for their vulnerable peers.
The person making the biggest difference in that seventh-grader’s life right now actually isn’t me. It’s an 11-year-old boy in Next Gen Men’s Discord server, NGM Alliance. He noticed that his classmate was facing an unfair amount of judgment and bullying, and decided to start doing something about it.
Educators can and should intervene on bullying when they see it. We should also be realistic about the fact that untold amounts of violence are happening in locker rooms, school hallways, off school property and on social media outside the scope of our influence.
The best allies for young people are often young people themselves.
That being said, peer-led allyship is all-too-often a response to school-level inaction. Educators have enormous power to uphold the rights of gender-expansive students.
Read more: Jonathon’s call to protect gender-expansive youth, For the Boys Who Are Fighting, written as part of Breaking the Boy Code.
Rest in Peace Leelah by Raven
That is a sacred trust that we hold.
So to better support trans students, teachers need to realize that safety and suicide prevention are the absolute minimum. We need to ensure that our relationships, classrooms and school environments are inclusive, affirming and oriented towards justice for young people of all genders.
ICMYI This Week
‘Trans Awareness Week’ Sounds Nice, but We Need Action (Daily Beast)
Why Are More Black Kids Suicidal? A Search for Answers. (The New York Times
I’ve Taught Monsters (Creative Nonfiction)
Written by Next Gen Men Program Manager Jonathon Reed as part of Learnings & Unlearnings, a bi-weekly blog reflecting on our experiences working with boys and young men. Subscribe to Future of Masculinity to get Learnings & Unlearnings delivered to your email inbox.