Research Question: What are the schooling experiences of trans and gender diverse children and young people in Australia? How do these experiences compare to those of TGD children and young people in European Schools? What core educational policies across both jurisdictions impact these experiences?

Theoretical Framework:

Core to this research is acknowledging childhood as a socially constructed category and recognising children as critical, thoughtful, and agentic subjects who make valuable contributions to knowledge production. Within this context dominant discourses of childhood constitute the child and young people as white, middle-class, cisgender and heterosexual. Childhood, gender and the lived experiences of trans and gender diverse children and young people are framed within feminist poststructuralist, queer and trans theories. Theorists such as Alex Sharpe, Judith Butler, and key trans theorists are influential to the discussion and to viewing gender and how it is embodied and negotiated as a relationship between the material and discursive. Trans theory integrates this embodiment with the self and socially constructed aspects of identity through lived experiences, challenging essentialist ideas. The significance of social values and expectations about gender and how it shapes perceptions of ‘normalised’ gendered bodies is central. Schools are largely cis-heteronormative sites that perpetuate and police gender norms and bodies through schooling structures, curricula, pedagogy and the (not-so)hidden curriculum. However, schools can simultaneously be sites of resistance, in which children and young people challenge normative gender discourses. 

This presentation is based on two research projects. One is a current and ongoing qualitative pilot study, involving focus groups and interviews with trans and gender diverse children aged 7-12, and with their parents/carers. Interviews and focus groups are held either face-to-face or online. Experience of schooling is one key component of a broader study exploring TGD children’s and parents’ experiences of social gender affirmation, social networks, health and wellbeing, educational experiences and outcomes, access to support services, and perceptions of children’s future lives. This study also involves creative methods including using cultural probes and children’s arts-based activities. Cultural probes included images depicting a broad range of representations of gender and gender diversity found in popular culture, advertising, media, and children’s literature. The creative arts-based activity provides children with an alternative additional means through which to represent their experiences. A brief discussion is held with children about their artwork, and they are also given the option of providing a brief written description of their creative pieces. The second study informing this presentation is an Australian Research Council grant titled Gender Matters (CI’s Gannon & Robinson), which explores the changing nature of gender equity and policy in secondary schools. The experiences of TGD young people in senior secondary colleges and those attending first or second-year university, recalling their high school experiences are explored. This study also involved focus groups and interviews with students, and interviews with teachers, school executives, and key policymakers. A Foucauldian discourse analysis is/was conducted in both studies identifying discourses arising from participants’ narratives. This critical analytical approach combines social theory and discourse analysis to describe, interpret and explain the ways in which discourse constructs and represents participants’ knowledge, beliefs and ways of constructing their social worlds. It explores the complex power relationships operating in interrelationships between text, discursive practice, and social practice, and demonstrates the extent to which the interrelationships between systems of signification (in particular, written, and visual texts) and other social systems (e.g., families, schools, healthcare settings) function in the constitution of subjectivities and the production of meanings. A thematic analysis is conducted on children’s artwork, and a discursive analysis is conducted on children’s discussions and written comments on their artwork. Children’s artwork serves as a cross reference with the children’ and parents’ focus group data.

The findings across both studies show that TGD children and young people encounter serious discrimination and equity issues from early ages - through primary and secondary schooling. Cis-heteronormative and transphobic discourses are foundational to these experiences, which also intersect with discourses of childhood and childhood innocence, impacting interventions to these problems. Transphobia and homophobia are fuelled by broader social politics in Australia that influence school policies and practices. TGD children and young people and their families negotiate everyday practical school matters that can become stressful experiences, for example, accessing appropriate toilets, attending school camps, and pedagogical practices that reinforce binary gender. However, changing attitudes about gender amongst many young people generally, has opened up more positive and supportive spaces for TGD young people, indeed all young people, to do gender differently. Schools that have policies, structures, and practices in place to support TGD children and young people, are making important differences to their health and wellbeing and to the e/quality of schooling experiences. Supportive school leadership, teachers’ positive practices, cisgender peer support, and state and federal policies are foundational to more inclusive practices.

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