How are Trans Teens Doing in School?

Given the choice, you couldn’t pay most adults to go back to high school.

But former youth worker LJ Slovin is not like most adults.

Slovin’s first book, Fierce, Fabulous and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity, from University of Regina Press, is the result of on-the-ground, first-person ethnographic research they conducted at a Lower Mainland secondary school.

Slovin spent the 2018-19 school year attending classes and hanging out with students, both cis and trans, to explore how the public school both did and did not accommodate students’ gender identities and expressions.

“As a non-binary person, I'm interested in the experiences of young people that don't always get understood or recognized as trans,” Slovin said. “[Who] wouldn't necessarily be approached by a teacher or an admin person about accommodations or concessions in school.”

A post-doctoral fellow at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, Slovin has digested a lot of scholarship on the negative and sometimes deadly consequences of transphobia for young people.

They saw the results of their own ethnographic study as an opportunity to challenge that narrative and showcase the diverse experiences of trans youth.

“I felt like, ‘What do we miss? What do we not notice about young people, their lives and their desires, when we're so fixated on this idea of risk?’” Slovin said.

The book features insights and complications from school administrators, teachers and students — all identified using pseudonyms to protect their privacy — who are sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing to include and respect all students in an education system deeply divided along gender binary lines.

The Tyee spoke with Slovin, who will start their new position as assistant professor of child and youth care at the University of Victoria in January, about their new book before the recent provincial elections in B.C. and New Brunswick.

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

The Tyee: Some kids in the book didn't want to be recognized by teachers, staff or their peers as being part of your study. How did you keep them anonymous while also spending time with them at school?

LJ Slovin: It was a lot of front-loading work. When I got to this school, I spent about two months attending as many classes as possible in grades 9 through 12. I had gone to the first staff meeting of the year and introduced myself to the teachers and school workers and said, “I'm a graduate student. I'm here doing a study for my dissertation. If I can come in and observe in your classes, that would be really helpful.” Most people were fine with that.

I spent the first couple months just being in these classes, constantly introducing myself to students, telling them I was doing this study about gender, but not giving really more specifics than that. With a dual intention of making myself available and known to students who would read my body, the word “gender” and make some accurate conclusions.

It became regular and mundane for me to sit in on someone's class. So for the students who wanted to be in the study, but didn't want to be visible as being in the study, I would pop into their classes. I would not sit with them, we wouldn't talk or interact during the class. Versus the students who were totally fine or excited to be doing that, I would usually sit next to them.

A lot of it was making sure that I was present enough around the school that no conclusions could be drawn for me showing up in a space, and then also just working with the students and seeing like, “What are you comfortable with? When do you want me around? How do you want me around?” And having that as an ongoing conversation, so they could change their mind and our setup whenever they needed to.

So a student being seen with you wasn't necessarily a sign they were part of the study.

Yeah, I spend a lot of time with many students who are not part of the study.

You write that some of these kids became your friends. You're an adult, they were minors; you're the researcher, they're the research subjects. How did you work with those boundaries, while also making friends?

Power dynamics are always present in a research project, and especially with an adult and a young person. Part of it is always being clear that that is happening, that it is informing our dynamics. The young people that I became friendliest with always were very aware I was doing research, was a graduate student, was a person who left the school and went into an adult queer community.

Also I was the only trans adult at the school, and relationships among queer people are different than relationships in the heterosexual community. A lot of the work I was doing was responding to what the youth I was working with wanted and needed, what they asked of me and trying to show up and be present for that.

Not every trans kid is “out” to their parents. How much involvement or knowledge did their parents have about your research?

Their parents knew whatever the students decided to tell them.

Informed consent processes are an important early step in a research project. There is often the idea that teenagers cannot consent for themselves and that you need to get parental permission. I petitioned the university research ethics board to permit the young people to consent for themselves, in part because not all young people are out to their parents.

If you're only talking to the young people who have good enough relationships with a supportive family, that they would be able to get signed consent from them, that's a really specific population.

Many of them did share and some didn't. It's also important for young people to be able to make these decisions. We often devalue and diminish young people's capacity to articulate their own lives, make their own decisions, be people.

What impact do queer and trans adults have on the risk framing of the lives of queer, Two-Spirit and trans kids?

Part of what inspired the project is that this risk narrative is so prevalent. We see it a lot in the response to the anti-trans legislation that is being pushed across the U.S. and Canada right now. Think about what happened in Saskatchewan or Alberta, New Brunswick, pieces of legislation that make it impossible for young people to declare their pronouns and their names unless they're over 16 or have parental permission.

When trans advocates respond, there can be an overemphasis on harm, saying this legislation is going to endanger trans young people. It's not that it's not true: this is going to make young people's lives much more difficult.

But I don't want our response to hateful laws to be just focusing on harm that can happen to young people, as if they're just these passive victims of institutions that wish they didn't exist. The reason for not having this piece of legislation isn't just that it will harm trans young people.

We don't want these pieces of legislation because being trans is a great way to be and that's a different response.

How do we create an education system that supports both kids whose gender falls along the binary and those who don’t?

Often when doing advocacy around queer or trans youth, there's this idea that it is exclusively benefiting queer and trans young people. But in fact, having less cis heteronormativity in schools benefits all young people.

It's not just trans people that can struggle with limited ideas about what it means to be a girl or what it means to be a boy. Having a more open and inviting approach to gender in schools actually frees up space for young people to live, to exist without feeling that they always have to align with constrained ideas around gender.

The first chapter opens with a teacher disclosing that a student, a girl, had been repeatedly sexually assaulted by boys in her cohort. The student took medical leave while the boys remained at the school. I wrote about a similar case in another district.

That struck me because safety comes up a lot during discussions about trans kids in school. We're often talking about cis boys victimizing everybody, including other boys. But detractors will argue trans people accessing washrooms alongside cis girls and women in particular is unsafe for those girls and women. How do we get to safety for all the students without segregating them through the gender binary?

When people get really upset about trans folks using the washroom and their argument is that it's not safe, what is the actual danger there? We can help schools foster increased safety for all young people by being a little bit more clear on what the threat is. ’Cause there's no danger in a trans person using a washroom. And this idea that people are trying to infiltrate washrooms in order to commit crimes is really just fear mongering.

But there are real safety issues that happen in school. We see a lot of sexual assault, different forms of harassment in schools, and often it is very connected to toxic masculinity, to misogynistic and patriarchal ideas about how to perform masculinity that don't serve anyone. Shifting the way that gender operates and is understood in schools would actually make everyone more safe.

In addition, how are we teaching young people about sexual assault? There's been a long history of separating out sexual health education classes, of relegating this type of learning to these one-off workshops or weeklong sessions in physical education.

What if we integrated ideas around how to live in a safer, more respectful society into our classrooms, and didn't think, “Only girls need to learn how to protect themselves”? If, instead, we were trying to think about the structural oppressions that uphold a rape culture.

The book takes a very intersectional research approach, talking not just about transphobia but also about ableism and racism in schools. How do we get from the lip service of diversity and multiculturalism to actually having an education system that reflects and respects everybody?

An early step of this is acknowledging and reckoning with schools being historically violent institutions. Talk around diversity in schools is premised on this idea that schools can be these safe institutions with just some tinkering.

There are many people who are not really supposed to thrive in a school. We have set timetables, and if you're late, you're in trouble. Turn in work by this time, and it has to be exactly as I, the teacher, tells you. If you're not looking at me, you're not paying attention.

We have all these ideas about what it means to be a good, successful, thriving student and, likewise, ideas about what it means to fail to live up to that promise. Those ideas are quite harmful: very white coded, ableist, and they inform how adults understand the young people they interact with and what they're capable of doing.

There's a lot about how schools materially operate that could be changed to make it feel a bit more possible. A lot of young people feel like they can't really succeed in schools, and that's because schools weren't designed for them to succeed.

The book doesn’t hold back on your criticism of some teachers and administrators. I have noticed in my own reporting that when teachers are called to account, other teachers will respond with “This is anti-teacher” or “You're not acknowledging teachers are under-resourced, overworked and stressed out.”

What would you say to a reader who views this book as “teacher blaming”?

I really endeavour to not teacher blame. I don't think individuals in the school were responsible as individuals for harmful things I noticed. There were certainly pretty violent things I noticed, and I was critical of how people responded. I always tried to also situate that within a larger analysis of what feels possible.

Teachers are supremely overworked. What I'm interested in is less “I think that this individual teacher made a bad decision” and more “What is going on in schools that teachers don't have the time or capacity to show up as they want to show up?”

There are real issues with how our schools are funded, how they're organized, that puts a lot of burden onto teachers. They're working before their school day and after their school day, time they're not paid for. Classes are too big. There's a plethora of issues that teachers are confronting.

And there are issues with our education system, and while I don't think it is the responsibility of or even possible for an individual teacher to change that on their own, there are ways that we all uphold the systems that we live in.

You write about teachers at the school who refuse to believe racism exists in Canada, or, when police brutality against Black and Indigenous people comes up, they say Canada is not America. How do we bust that myth?

One thing is to teach about Canada. If, whenever we're teaching about enslavement or police brutality, we situate those lessons within the U.S., it perpetuates this myth that this only happens in the U.S., or it's not as bad in Canada.

Multiculturalism is really important as an idea to schools and to a lot of Canadians. We need to talk more honestly about the structures and institutions that exist in this nation, and how legacies of violence are still very present and current in how the nation operates.

It's a tough question, because schools are really primed to be “nicer spaces” without deep conflict and controversy; we want everyone to get along, have access to learning and be included in school. It's often important to educators to stress that perspective, because the alternative is scary, right?

But the alternative is also true, that actually not everyone does fit into mainstream schooling. And there are structural reasons for that, that if we were more honest we could start to address.

There's a stereotype about this generation of young people being super progressive, very woke. What did you see at this school?

I saw a great spectrum. Because of the work that other generations have been doing to open up language and space, young people are stepping into that space, using that language. I didn't learn about trans issues until I was in university. And now people can go on TikTok and watch someone talk about how they figured out they were trans, what it's like to do a hormone injection. That's amazing.

People get really worked up about “social contagion; so many kids think they're trans.” Well, that's a possibility that a person can be queer, can be trans.

When I was growing up, I did not know that was a possibility. It didn't make me not trans, it just meant that I didn't step into my trans-ness, so to speak, until I had the awareness of it, the language of it.

Young people have access to that so much earlier now, and that's beautiful. But at the same time, generations are not a monolith. Absolutely there were very racist, homophobic students at the school.

Who should read this book?

It's a bit more accessible than some academic books, because it's story based. I would love for people who work in education and who work with queer and trans youth to read it.

It's a specific study, specific young people, a specific school culture. At the same time, there are lessons that move beyond the specificity of the project itself, and my hope is it would challenge people to think about this risk narrative that has become so dominant, and consider how — in their work with young people, in schools, their research about gender, sexuality and education — they could reframe some ideas.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Something important for me is that the real focus of the book is on the work that young people are doing to transform schools. Part of what's fascinating, what is so critical for me, is that young people are doing work already to create the space they need in schools. And I think part of adults' work is to pay attention to that and take it seriously.

A lot of the kids doing the work are non-binary and people of colour. They're going to school to get an education. Should we have an expectation that they will be doing this much work?

Of course not. They're doing it because otherwise it wouldn't happen, and they need it to happen. My hope is that the work they're doing becomes unnecessary.

It's not their responsibility to make space for them to exist in schools. But if adults aren't doing that work, if we as a society aren't doing that work and are even going in the other direction — young people are still agents in their lives. They're going to make that space for themselves to exist.