In recent years, transgender children and adolescents have gained increased visibility in Israeli culture, and the education system faces the need of coping with students’ gender transition in the school arena. The parents, and especially the mothers of these children, function as key figures who navigate their children’s transition and mediate between them and the school. The proposed paper is based on a study that explores parents' practices and experiences in the encounter between the school and family environments. Our research explores the experiences of contemporary Israeli mothers of transgender and gender-variant children focusing on their roles as actors who negotiate their children's preferences and performances and mediate these to others in the family and school settings. The family and school are the most important institutions of gender socialization (Thorne, 1993). Yet, very few studies have investigated parent-school relations in the context of transgender and gender-variant children. Our aim is to investigate how parents of transgender and gender-variant children interact with various actors in their children's schools in the process of mediating their children's gender performance or navigating their transition.

 Currently, no formal policy exists concerning gender-variant students in Israel, despite the trans community’s efforts to work with the Ministry of Education to formulate guidelines for schools concerning the treatment of transgender students. Our research sets out from the premise that parents of transgender and gender-variant children play an important role in navigating (i.e., interpreting, mediating, and advocating) their children's gender variance/transition in the encounter with educational institutions. Therefore, they may promote educational personnel's awareness of gender variance, impacting educational policy. This approach to educational policy resonates with what Levinson et al. (2009) define as the "sociocultural approach." Unlike traditional policy research, which attempted to understand how and why a given policy succeeded or failed, the sociocultural approach analyzes how a policy defines reality, orders behavior, and allocates resources (Levinson et al., 2009). Within this framework, formal policymakers, and other social actors, such as parents and civil society bodies working with the educational system, can participate in policymaking around transgender children or atypical gender expression.

Following Rahilly (2015; 2018) who examined parents’ negotiations with the gender binary and its regulatory effects during everyday discursive interactions, we focus on parent-school relationships as an increasingly important and under-investigated arena of "doing (trans) gender" politics in contemporary Israel.

Assuming that parents' interactions with educational institutions are shaped by local social (religious, communal) constraints and values, we wanted to find out whether and in what ways parents’ participation in shaping policy around transgender children differs between different educational contexts. For this purpose, we distinguished between 3 types of schools in the Jewish sector: state schools, state-religious schools, and independent schools. The three types of schools differ in several respects. For the purpose of this study, a highly pertinent characteristic of Jewish state-religious schools is that most are gender segregated, beginning in 4th grade and sometimes earlier (Finkelstein, 2021). Independent schools (i.e., democratic, arts, experimental, private, and Steiner approach schools) are often characterized by progressive agendas, as well as a higher degree of parental involvement in school governance than the other state schools (Nir & Bogler, 2012).

The research is a qualitative study based on 30 semi-structured in-depth interviews with mothers of transgender and gender variant children aged 6-20. The participants were recruited through social media, based on snowball sampling. As Haim Noy (2008) argues, this method is essentially social, as it uses and activates existing social networks. In this case, snowball sampling enabled us to leverage the relevant social networks and allowed access to mothers of gender variant and transgender children. The interviewed mothers were from different generations, different geographical areas (central cities and peripheral towns in Israel), and from different socio-economic status. We note that it was extremely difficult to find religious mothers who were willing to participate in the study. The interviews lasted approximately one hour face-to face or via Zoom software. They began with broader questions about mothering a transgender or gender-variant child, and moved on to more specific questions about the parents-school relation in the process of mediating their child's gender performance or navigating their transition, such as: What was your expectation from the school? When you chose a school for your child, to what extend have you considered the gender issue? Did you feel any need to be involved in shaping school attitude regarding your child's gender? Mothers were invited to talk about their experiences with school staff, including the challenges they had to face and decisions they have made. Interviews were recorded and transcribed, and were coded using the atlas.ti program. To analyze the interviews, we have used Grounded Theory. Grounded Theory’s emphasis on meaning without assuming the existence of a unidimensional external reality (Charmaz, 2014) is particularly suited to this project, as it aims to grasp the meaning-making processes. Open coding of the transcribed protocols of the interviews was done to identify and define the key categories emerging from the data. The paper presents preliminary results.

Our findings indicate that in state schools and independent schools the differences in mothers’ experiences are largely unrelated to the characteristics of the educational stream. The exception are religious schools, where gender transition within the bounds of the school is impossible and students who come out as trans inevitably leave this educational stream. We propose that the degree to which the educational space is gendered is a more adequate lens for analyzing educational policy regarding transgender and gender variant children. The notion of “gendered educational space” refers to the ways in which ideas concerning gender inform and organize both institutionalized and spontaneous educational practices, pedagogical responses and every-day interactions in various school arenas (Francis, & Monakali, 2021). In the absence of formal institutional policies concerning gender transition, schools – or rather individual educators – enact what Stephen Ball’s terms “policy as discourse”. Although we have found differences between public and alternative schools in the degree of gender rigidity and in their handling of the temporality of gender transition (ranging from immediate acceptance and cooperation to delay and inaction), the more prominent finding is that such differences largely result from practices by different actors in the field – educators and parents alike. The interpretations and interventions of these actors, who hold differing premises regarding the roles of teachers, parents, and students, as well as concerning the meaning of gender, exemplify how educational policy is shaped also from the bottom up.

Ball, S. J. (2015). What is policy? 21 years later: Reflections on the possibilities of policy research. Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education, 36(3), 306-313. Charmaz, K. 2014. Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis (2nd ed.). London: Sage Publications. Finkelstein, A., (2021). The National-Religious Society in Data. Ne’emanei Torah Va’Avodah [Hebrew]. Francis, D., & Monakali, E. (2021). ‘Lose the Act’: pedagogical implications drawn from transgender and non-binary learners’ experiences of schooling. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 29(5), 715-731. Levinson, B. A., Sutton, M., & Winstead, T. (2009). Education policy as a practice of power: Theoretical tools, ethnographic methods, democratic options. Educational Policy, 23(6), 767-795. Nir, A. E., & Bogler, R. (2012). Parental involvement in school governance and decision making in Israel. Journal of School Public Relations, 33(3), 216-236. Noy, Haim. 2008. “Sampling Knowledge: The Hermeneutics of Snowball Sampling in Qualitative Research.” Social Research Methodology 11 (4): 327–44. Rahilly, E. P. (2015). The gender binary meets the gender-variant child: Parents’ negotiations with childhood gender variance. Gender & Society, 29(3), 338-361. Rahilly, E. P. (2018). Re-interpreting gender and sexuality: Parents of gender-nonconforming children. Sexuality & Culture, 22(4), 1391-1411. Thorne, B., (1993). Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. Rutgers University Press.