In comparison to their cisgender peers, gender creative students are more vulnerable to develop mental health problems, poor psychological well-being and negative peer relationships (Baams and al., 2013; Bennet and al., 2019; Gordon and al., 2018; Jewell and Brown, 2014; Rieger and Savin-Williams, 2012; Roberts and al., 2013; Zosuls and al., 2016). Ehrensaft (2011, p.5) defines a gender creative person as someone who “transcends the normative male/female definitions of culture to creatively weave a sense of gender that does not come entirely from within (the body, the psyche), nor entirely from without (culture, others' perception of one's gender), but resides somewhere in the middle”. Gender creative students deviate from the gender identity or gender expression that is culturally associated with their assigned sex at birth (Airton and Meyer, 2014). Thus, those students deviate from gender norms, i.e., they do not follow socially prescribed rules of conduct regarding roles, behaviours, activities, and characteristics deemed appropriate for their gender, which traditionally must correspond to their birth-assigned sex (Heise and al., 2019). Schools play a key role in the development of young people and in promoting their mental health. Since gender creative students are more vulnerable to developing poor mental health and since schools represent an environment that can convey gender norms (Weber et al., 2019), it seems important to look upon these topics inside secondary schools. This research will therefore try to answer the following question: How do gender creative secondary students perceive their mental health at school? Mental health is more than the absence of mental health problems (Gilmour, 2014). To see mental health fully, it is important to take into account positive mental health. Positive mental health has three dimensions: emotional well-being, psychological well-being and social functioning (Keyes, 2007). Meyer (2013) developed a minority stress model to explain the factors influencing mental health in minority individuals, i.e., the additional stresses experienced by these people. According to Martin-Storey (2016) and Rieger and Savin Williams (2012), the minority stress model could be a key to understanding low psychological well-being among gender creative youth as it would explain the discrimination, stigma and stresses experienced by them due to their minority status. The present study’s objectives are to explore the perception of gender norms in the school environment as well as the perception of mental health of gender creative secondary students. This study takes place in Canada, and more specifically in the province of Quebec. In Quebec, students in secondary school are between 12 to 17 years old and stay normally five years in these schools, from secondary one to five. The United Kingdom equivalent would be college from year 7 to year 11. Data were collected through narrative interviews with six gender-creative Quebec secondary school students, average age 15.5. Through their accounts of their school experiences, the students revealed that gender norms are still present in their respective school environments. Qualitative analysis by themes grouping revealed the sampled students' sense of well-being at school, the stressors they felt in the school environment, the coping strategies they developed, and the social support felt inside and outside school. In summary, the life stories highlight the different paths and varying levels of mental health of the students interviewed. Most of them reported overall positive mental health, despite previous literature generally attributing different indicators of negative mental health to gender creative students. The results allow to propose a model that incorporates additional stressors (Meyer, 2013) and elements of positive mental health (Keyes, 2007) experienced as a result of minority status, thus influencing the mental health of gender creative students.

In order to achieve the research objectives, a descriptive qualitative approach was adopted, i.e., this research focuses on the subjectivity of the participating students in order to describe the phenomenon (Gaudreau, 2011). The qualitative data collection method selected is the narrative interview, i.e., an interview in which the person participating in the research is asked to narrate part of their lived experience (Bertaux, 2016). The perception of mental health as well as the perception of gender norms at school of gender creative students was obtained with the following prompt: “I would like you to tell me about your experience at school”. Gender creative students were then invited to share their representation of their own journey through school (Tétreault, 2014). The narrative interviews were approximately 60 minutes long, in person or online, according to the students’ preference. The recruitment was carried out with the help of a community organisation called Gender Creative Kids, which published the research proposal on its social networks. The final sample of this study consisted of six gender creative secondary school students aged between 14 and 16 years. In terms of grade levels, one person was in secondary two (Y8), on in secondary three (Y9), three in secondary four (Y10) and finally one in secondary five (Y11). Half of the sample attended a public school while the other half went to private school. This sample included young people who identified as trans, non-binary, fluid and cisgender. Specifically, there were two cisgender people with gender non-conforming gender expression, one non-binary person, one gender fluid person and two trans people. In this way, all the young people in the sample were gender creative as they transcended the traditional binary conception and creatively wove their gender (Ehrensaft, 2011). In addition, these students all identified themselves as part of the LGBTQ+ communities. No student in the sample were ethnically diverse and none were visible minorities. When all the narrative interviews were completed, a thematic analysis was done using NVivo software (QSR International, 2020). Specifically, a comparative analysis was done, i.e. the data from the different cases were compared in order to develop a thematic tree containing codes which themselves are associated with different information obtained during the interviews (Bertaux, 2016).

The results suggest that the school environment appears to play a significant role in the development of young people's mental health (Weare, 2019). The students in this study who attend a school environment perceived as positive and open experience more positive emotions and well-being and fewer additional stressors, thus positively influencing their perceived mental health. Several actions need to be taken by the education community to create open and truly inclusive schools in order to contribute to the mental health of all students. As suggested by the young people in the sample, changes to the building, for example with gender-neutral toilets, and changes to the organization, for exemple with a gender-neutral dress code, are desired in secondary schools. Also, the creation of safe environments in secondary schools for LGBTQ+ and gender creative students, such as inclusion committees, seems important. Furthermore, the additional stresses experienced by the gender creative students, but also the importance of feeling supported by school staff, opens up the reflection on the implementation of changes at the pedagogical level, for example with the development of inclusive pedagogy and queer pedagogy in the classroom (Hakeem, 2021, Richard, 2019). Inclusive pedagogy is about adding more diverse representations into the current curriculum (Richard, 2019). In queer pedagogy, gender norms and social norms that contribute to the exclusion of gender creative people and of LGBTQ+ people are questioned and challenged (Hakeem, 2021). In addition, from a broader perspective, the changes put forward by both the participants in this research project and the literature reviewed in this project highlight the need for upstream changes in the initial training of future teachers and in the adjustment of curricula from a queer pedagogy perspective.

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