One person's journey at one school Πpreventing transgender discrimination


18 Race Equality Teaching © IOE Press 2014

There were some people, only about three 
lads, who would deliberately call me my old 
name, even though they knew that I wanted 
to be called Robert. And they used to ask me 
really horrible questions like how big my dick 
was, and there was just nothing I could say 
back to that, so… 

(Young trans man)

I was always on my own a lot, and just sort 
of yeah, something wasn’t right. I remember 
getting told [by a teacher] ‘you’d get less 
hassle if you were more normal.’ 

(Young genderqueer person quoted in 
McNamara and Stewart, 2007)

In this article we present a case study of good 
practice. We show how a school can meet the 
public sector equality duty (PSED) to provide 
support for young people who are expressing 
gender variance or identifying as transgender or 
genderqueer. 

First, a semantic note. The term genderqueer 
describes someone who identifies their gender 
as other than ‘man’ or ‘woman’, or someone 
who identifies as neither, both, or some 
combination thereof. Some genderqueer people 
may identify as non-binary, a third gender or 
move between gender descriptions in a fluid 
way. Genderqueer can also be a political term 
which challenges the binary of gender and 
heteronormativity (see McNamara and Stewart, 
2007, for a fuller discussion of semantics and 
terminology).

In this article we identify common examples of 
practice in schools where discrimination on the 
basis of a young person’s gender identity occurs. 
These concrete examples enable a reflection on 
how procedures, policies and practices relating 

to the PSED, with specific regard to gender 
reassignment, can impact positively on young 
people’s individual experiences of being part 
of an institution’s community. The examples 
also seek to demonstrate the detrimental 
impact that poor practice, or a lack of support 
and intervention, can have on young people in 
school settings.

The report Youth Chances Summary of First 
Findings: The experiences of LGBTQ young 
people in England states:

We are very concerned about what we have 
found. The high levels of discrimination, 
abuse and mental health issues that young 
LGBTQ people face should be a wake-up call 
to all of us, whether we are involved in the 
day to day lives of young people as parents 
or carers, family members, teachers, youth 
workers, or we are shaping the responses 
and support young people can access as 
providers or commissioners of services or 
policymakers. Our young people are badly 
served. (Metro, 2014: 2)

Gendered Intelligence is an organization that 
aims to increase the quality of trans people’s 
life experiences, especially those of young 
trans people. It works with young trans people 
across the UK through arts-based programmes, 
creative activities and one-to-one mentoring 
to explore identity, community and the wide 
range of factors that affect lived experiences. 
In addition Gendered Intelligence supports 
professionals who are looking for guidance 
and information with regards to trans issues. 
It delivers workshops in schools and other 
settings to engage young people creatively 
with the themes of gender identity and sexual 
orientation.

One person’s journey at one school
– preventing transgender discrimination
Catherine McNamara and Jay Stewart



Race Equality Teaching © IOE Press 2014 19

The law with regard to gender 
identity within schools
The general equality duty sets out the equality 
matters that schools need to consider when 
making decisions that affect pupils or staff with 
different protected characteristics. Gender 
reassignment is a protected characteristic under 
the Equality Act 2010 and it protects those who 
propose to undergo, are undergoing or have 
undergone a process, or part of a process, of 
reassigning their sex by changing physiological 
or other attributes of sex. A person does not 
have to be under medical supervision to 
have the protected characteristic of gender 
reassignment and does not need to be over 
18-years-old.

Young people who identify as transgender 
frequently report that they face disadvantageous 
circumstances and discriminatory attitudes 
during their schooling. Things happen to 
them that are in breach of the law. To date, no 
case has yet been brought against a school for 
discrimination on the basis of gender identity or 
gender reassignment, although many instances 
of discrimination have been reported informally 
both internally to the school and externally to 
other organizations. It has been reported, for 
example, that:

 ■a young trans person was not allowed to 
participate in residential trips; instead, the 
school and the student decided it would be 
simpler for all if the student did not go

 ■teachers repeatedly fail to use the correct 
pronoun and name for a young person who 
has notified the school of their intention to 
transition 

 ■a school limited a student’s timetable in an 
attempt to reduce the extent of their anxiety 
and negative experiences, rather than tackling 
the bullying behaviours causing them. These 
things constitute discrimination because of 
the young person’s gender identity. 

Most of the young people who are involved with 
Gendered Intelligence take the view that school-

based learning related to gender is limited, 
conservative and heteronormative. Discussion 
about human biology could include a more 
complex range of gendered bodies than it 
currently does. The subjects of gender diversity 
and transgender identities could be included 
in the Personal, Social and Health Education 
curricula – but they are not. Consequently, 
negative behaviours such as bullying, 
harassment and discrimination arise. Young 
gender-variant people testify to withdrawing 
from the learning process because they feel 
their lived experiences are not reflected or 
represented within the curriculum and they are 
therefore marginalized in school. 

In a study carried out by Keogh and colleagues 
(2006), 75 per cent of the trans people who 
responded to the survey said they experienced 
problems at school. This is significantly 
higher than the lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) 
respondents (21 per cent). The problems 
reported included perceived harassment from 
teachers and students, being prohibited from 
using toilets, being expelled because of gender 
identity and a lack of trans protection policies in 
the school. 

Research carried out by Whittle et al. (2007) 
indicates that young trans people are suffering 
high levels of violence and abuse. Their research 
shows that many of the people working with 
young trans individuals – the teachers, school 
psychologists and social workers – have 
received no training in trans awareness and 
perpetuate negative attitudes and transphobia, 
possibly through their lack of confidence or 
awareness of how to think about and work with 
this group.

Gender non-normativity 
in school settings
Schools can be, though are not always, highly 
policed environments in terms of gender. 
There are general social ‘rules’ or norms 
relating to how a ‘man/ boy’ or a ‘woman/ girl’ 
should present themselves. Some would claim 
that gender expressions and presentations 



20 Race Equality Teaching © IOE Press 2014

are becoming more diverse, that society is 
becoming more tolerant (Stonewall, 2012; 
Drake, 2013). Others argue that there is still a 
long way to go to reach a point where gender 
norms no longer constrain people. Our 
experience at Gendered Intelligence is that a 
school’s environment tends to actively enforce 
gender normativity through, for example, 
uniform specifications, hair length, gender-
specific sports and so on. 

The Department for Education document, 
School Uniform: guidance for governing 
bodies, school leaders, school staff and local 
authorities (DfE, 2013) includes a section on 
human rights, equality and discrimination 
considerations, pointing out that a school’s 
uniform requirements must not put certain 
people at a disadvantage as a result of their 
connection with a protected characteristic. Most 
schools operate uniform policies that enable 
pupils to wear clothes they feel comfortable in, 
regardless of their gender identity, while also 
conforming to the school’s ethos of engendering 
a sense of belonging to that community, a sense 
of order etc. However, there can still be a culture 
within a school that fails to tackle inappropriate 
behaviour directed at, for example, a female 
student who is masculine-identified and 
chooses to wear trousers and a ‘masculine’ top 
and have a boyish haircut.

The Crown Prosecution Service’s resource 
pack for schools on lesbian, gay, bisexual 
and transgender hate crime (2014) offers 
activities and guidance for teachers. This is 
an educational resource aimed at tackling 
homophobic and transphobic bullying and 
hate crime among young people. One of the 
short films for use in a lesson on developing 
an inclusive classroom and a supportive peer 
group shows a young person who has disclosed 
a wish to transition from female to male and 
has returned to school after a break, appearing 
as male. The film shows the young person’s 
peers mocking him and questioning his gender 
identity, undermining his assertion that he is 
male and wishes to be referred to accordingly. 

This clip is not about school regulations on 
uniform, and it looks as though the student 
has been free to choose his uniform. What it 
emphasizes is the behaviours, showing how the 
culture of the peer group needs to be monitored 
and indicating that interventions are needed if 
people police each other’s gender expressions 
in ways that are discriminatory, hostile and 
offensive. 

In 2007, Gendered Intelligence was 
commissioned by the Anti-Bullying Alliance to 
carry out research into young transgender and 
genderqueer people’s experiences of bullying 
at school. A wide range of issues were covered 
during focus group conversations. One was 
about uniform, in which a young trans man 
said:

At my school, the uniform for PE is the biggest 
challenge. It’s always, no matter what sport it 
is, it’s a hockey skirt. And I refuse to wear it so 
I went up to the teacher … and I said ‘I refuse 
to wear this, and I will refuse to do PE unless 
I get to wear the jogging trousers.’ So I got to 
do that and then my other teachers gave me 
a load of hassle ’cause I’ve been made fuss of. 
(McNamara and Stewart, 2007: 18)

The barriers that exist for trans and genderqueer 
young people are not limited to school 
environments. Whatever the setting, we as 
professionals should be making interventions 
to prevent such experiences – these breaches of 
equality legislation – from happening.

Positive intervention to meet the 
needs of a young trans person
Staff at a school in Oxfordshire were working 
with a student in Year 8 who was planning 
to return after the summer break to Year 9 
as female – her self-identified gender. They 
contacted Gendered Intelligence for advice 
and guidance via the assistant head teacher in 
charge of the lower school who was also the Key 
Stage 3 Co-ordinator. 



Race Equality Teaching © IOE Press 2014 21

Early on in the process of planning to support 
the transgender student, Jay Stewart, co-
director of Gendered Intelligence, delivered 
a training session with the assistant head, 
the student’s head of year, the deputy special 
educational needs co-ordinator, the school 
nurse and another teacher who was due to 
become the tutor of an older trans student 
who had planned to join the sixth form the 
following September. The session focused on 
key terms such as transgender, transsexual, 
gender variant, genderqueer, masculinity and 
femininity, heteronormativity, and so on, to 
help staff develop their understanding of the 
issues around transgender. It also considered 
compliance with the law around gender 
reassignment, specifically the Equality Act 
2010 and the Gender Recognition Act 2004. 
Conversation centred on what discrimination 
and harassment around gender identity could 
look like in a school, to enable the staff to think 
through some scenarios they wished to avoid 
arising.

The group constructed a projected timeline for 
supporting students who wish to attend school 
in their self-identified gender. They considered 
what steps the school, parents and other people 
could take to best support the students. The 
school made a commitment to support the 
Year 8 student’s transition, ensuring a safe and 
supportive environment. 

After the training session, the staff began by 
drafting an action plan, meeting with the young 
person and her parents several times while 
she was still in Year 8 to share information and 
discuss anxieties and, chiefly, to plan together 
how to support her in sharing her trans status 
with the school.

Before informing other students in the school 
of the student’s intention to transition, the 
assistant head informed all teaching staff about 
the decision in a staff meeting and followed this 
up with an email to all the staff, teaching and 
non-teaching. A decision was taken to support 
the student’s peer group friendships as a way 

of helping her with her transition. The assistant 
head and the head of year worked initially 
with a group of her friends in Year 8, before 
disclosing her trans status to everyone in the 
school. The idea was to create a safe network 
among the student’s friends by ensuring that 
they were aware that she would be transitioning 
from male to female and what that would mean 
at school.

When the time came to think about informing 
the year group the assistant head and head 
of year planned a workshop for all the Year 8 
students, delivered by tutors to their groups 
when the trans student was absent. The 
workshop introduced the students to what it 
means to be transgender, how a transgender 
person might feel, and how the school and each 
of its individuals can support the transgender 
student. The workshop drew on a statement 
written by the trans student titled ‘What does 
transgender mean?’ to discuss how she was 
feeling. In another activity, each student 
wrote down a question for the trans student to 
respond to and a message for her to read. At 
the end of the session, the head of year led an 
assembly for all of Year 8, pledging the school’s 
support for the trans student.

At the end of the day, Year 8 was again called 
together for a second assembly, at which 
the trans student was present. She was 
accompanied to the front of the hall by her 
parents, brother and the assistant head. She 
replied to the main questions that had been 
posed by her peers in the morning’s workshop. 
The Year 8 students were clearly moved by 
her ability to communicate coherently and 
positively about her trans identity. 

The school emailed a letter to all of the Year 
8 students’ parents to inform them fully and 
clearly about the student’s transition and 
the measures that had been put in place to 
support the process. It also gave relevant 
website addresses for anyone who wanted more 
information on transgender identities.



22 Race Equality Teaching © IOE Press 2014

With regard to practical arrangements for the 
student, it was agreed very early on by her, 
her parents and the school that she should be 
allowed to use private toilet cubicles usually 
reserved for staff. She felt more comfortable 
doing this, at least for the initial stages of 
coming out to the school. The longer-term plan 
would be for her to use the female toilets when 
she felt ready. Similar arrangements were in 
place for PE in that the student was allowed to 
change for PE in a private cubicle. From the 
start of Year 9, she attended girls’ PE lessons, 
and continued to change privately until she 
felt ready to use the female changing rooms. 
It is perhaps important to note that this was 
agreed with her as something she preferred, not 
a requirement by the school. Legally, a trans 
person must feel entitled to use the facilities 
of the gender they self-identify as. It would 
be discriminatory to require a trans student 
to use the toilets designated for people with 
disabilities.

All the work with the student’s year group took 
place in the penultimate week of the school 
year. The idea was that any sensation and 
excitement would die down by the start of the 
next academic year. At the start of Year 9 the 
trans student came into school on an inset day 
to meet her new teachers so she would feel 
less anxious about facing everyone when she 
began the new school year. On the first day that 
the students came into school, all the tutors 
in Years 7 through 11 read out a notice to their 
tutor groups about the school’s commitment 
to protecting every student from harassment 
and discrimination on the first day of the new 
academic year. 

Conclusion
Bullying behaviour towards someone who is 
expressing their gender differently to the norm 
is complex, and approaches to tackling it need 
to be specific and carefully planned so they 
make a real impact on the lives of trans people – 
or whoever the school is trying to help. It is clear 
that bullying related to gender expression affects 

many people, not just trans and genderqueer 
people. Ideas generated through the report by 
Gendered Intelligence (2007) on bullying and 
more recently in the Youth Chances survey 
stressed the importance of using clearly set out 
systems to report bullying in a safe way, and for 
those reports to be acted upon by staff who have 
a good understanding of gender diversity. 

In this article we have highlighted the specific 
actions taken by one school to support one of 
its students. There are many other strategies 
and approaches. One-to-one mentoring for 
young trans, non-binary and gender variant 
people in full-time education is increasing. All 
the mentors working at Gendered Intelligence 
are transgender identified and they can give a 
young person exploring their gender identity 
or coming out as trans or non-binary the 
opportunity to gain support and advocacy or 
to work together with them to ensure their 
learning environment is safe and productive. 
Matters such as undergoing a medical or social 
transition, can be discussed with a mentor, 
as well as looking at difficult and challenging 
aspects of living and studying as a transgender 
person. Mentoring is funded by the school, 
college or university and sometimes by the local 
authority. 

Experience to date indicates that a trans student 
is far more likely to complete their programme 
of study and thrive within a school environment 
if they have access to this kind of support, and 
the support of their staff and peers in the school. 
Equality of opportunity to make good academic 
progress can be advanced and enhanced for 
transgender students in specific and concrete 
ways.

As practitioners, the Gendered Intelligence 
team want to provide spaces, projects and 
opportunities that can enable young people 
with a complex relationship to gender engage in 
creative arts practice – as they might at school – 
among a group of peers and facilitators who are 
not hostile, uninformed or ignorant but positive 
about gender diversity and constructive and 



Race Equality Teaching © IOE Press 2014 23

respectful towards each other’s differences. 
Gendered Intelligence wants also to support 
staff and students in school settings to make 
the school environment more trans-inclusive 
and better informed about gender diversity so 
they can make young people’s lived experiences 
more positive and enable schools to meet 
their legal duties to remove disadvantage and 
eliminate discrimination.

References
Crown Prosecution Service (2014) Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual 

and Transgender Hate Crime Schools Project Resource 
Pack. Manchester: Crime Prosecution Service.

Department for Education (2013) School Uniform: 
Guidance for governing bodies, school leaders, school 
staff and local authorities. London: DfE.

Drake, M. (2013) ‘How LGBT adults see society and how 
the public sees them’. Research summary. Washington 
DC: Pew Research Center.

Equality Act (2010) Online. www.legislation.gov.uk/
ukpga/2010/15/contents

Gendered Intelligence and GALYIC (2007) A Guide 
for Young Trans People in the UK. Online. http://
webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/www.dh.gov.
uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/publications/
publicationspolicyandguidance/DH_074258

Keogh, P., Reid, D. and Weatherburn, P. (2006) Lambeth 
LGBT Matters: The needs and experiences of lesbians, 
gay men, bisexuals and trans men and women in 
Lambeth. Online. www.sigmaresearch.org.uk/files/
report2006c.pdf 

McNamara, C. and Stewart, J.(2007) Issues of Bullying 
Around Trans and Gender Variant Students in Schools, 
Colleges and Universities. Online. http://cdn0.
genderedintelligence.co.uk/2012/11/17/17-43-56-trans_
youth_bullying_report1108.pdf

METRO Youth Chances (2014) Youth Chances Summary 
of First Findings: The experiences of LGBTQ young 
people in England. London: METRO.

Stonewall (2012) The School Report: The experiences 
of gay young people in Britain’s schools. London: 
Stonewall.

Whittle, S., Turner, L. and Al-Alami, M. (2007) 
Engendered Penalties: Transgendered peoples 
experience of inequality and discrimination. Online. 
www.pfc.org.uk/pdf/engenderedpenalties.pdf

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/
http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/publications/
http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/publications/
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http://cdn0.genderedintelligence.co.uk/2012/11/17/17-43-56-trans_youth_bullying_report1108.pdf
http://cdn0.genderedintelligence.co.uk/2012/11/17/17-43-56-trans_youth_bullying_report1108.pdf
http://cdn0.genderedintelligence.co.uk/2012/11/17/17-43-56-trans_youth_bullying_report1108.pdf
http://www.pfc.org.uk/pdf/engenderedpenalties.pdf