Beyond Bathrooms: The Educational Policies, Practices, and Health of Gender-Expansive Students

McQuillan, Mollie T

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-zc33-jy60

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Beyond Bathrooms: The Educational Policies, Practices, and Health of Gender-Expansive Students

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As national, state, and local educational leaders grapple with how to effectively address the needs of gender-expansive students, more research is needed to inform policy. Gender-expansive youth experience high rates of chronic social stressors such as victimization, discrimination, and rejection. These stressors have academic, mental and physical health consequences; however, implementing protective and affirming school policies may alleviate some of the stressors gender-expansive students encounter. This dissertation is composed of three interrelated but independent studies examining these intersections between the educational policies, social relationships, and health of gender-expansive students. Chapter One is a description of the policies local school districts adopted in response to Illinois state discrimination and bullying laws. This study also examines whether and how districts implement these policy protections in schools through documents called “administrative guidance.” This chapter describes one of the first studies to explore the use of administrative guidance concerning transgender and other gender-expansive students as a tool for enacting policy in a representative sample of high school districts. I found that all districts comply with the adoption of state legislative mandates pressing districts to adopt protective policies, but there were limited policy protections when not mandated. Further, 27% of districts began to implement these protections through administrative guidance, which included instructive definitions related to gender and could provide specific options for school leaders working with transgender youth. This administrative guidance imposed constraints on administrators’ behavior in some districts, while enabling administrators in other districts to offer a wider range of accommodations to more students. I investigate another aspect of policy implementation, professional development for educators, in Chapter Two. This descriptive study used evaluation survey data from employees (N=1,425) across 80 schools participating in gender-inclusivity professional development sessions. The results indicate that educators wanted even more training on gender diversity and believed the professional development provided was useful and relevant. Additionally, I found differences by educators’ roles in schools and across schools in how capable educators felt in engaging parents, relevance to self, and usefulness. In Chapter Three, I evaluate the feasibility of adding measures of inflammation and describe the baseline characteristics of participants in a prospective clinical study of transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) youth (ages 9 - 20 years) initiating affirming medical therapy at a large, urban children’s hospital. This is the first study to explore how gender identity, social stressors, and social supports contribute to poorer health in TGNC youth through inflammation and immune deregulation pathways. The results from this study show that adding dried blood spot samples to assess inflammation were feasible and acceptable in a clinical sample of TGNC youth seeking affirming-medical interventions. The study results also revealed that transmasculine youth reported greater gender-based stress and less support from their gender identity. I did not find statistically significant differences in CRP associated with either gender-based supports or stressors. Overall, the qualitative and quantitative evidence produced by this dissertation will provide a comprehensive and more in-depth understanding of the academic and social contexts of gender-expansive youth, an area of critical concern for educational policy.

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