Supporting Transgender Students: Understanding Gender Identity and Reshaping School Culture, Myers Alex

We school people remember well the first time a student or a parent or guardian requested support for their or their childs gender identity. Few things better reveal the character of a community than how it responds when a transgender or gender non-conforming child and their family asks this of us.
When Alex Myers came out to his high school dean twenty-five years ago, teachers and administrators were on their own; there was little literature, no frameworks, just caring adults stumbling through and leaning on their foundational commitment to keep students safe.
I remember the first time I addressed a faculty about pronouns and shared the GLSEN Safe Space Kit. This was nearly ten years ago, when we had to remind faculty, staff, and students not to assume that everyone in the classroom was heterosexual and not to assume one could know someones sexual orientation or gender identity by looking at them. Its 2021 now, and although many of our schools have removed gendered pronouns from handbooks, created all-gender bathrooms, and modified administrative tasks to make name and pronoun changes more seamless, some schools still need a lot of help just getting to the other side of boy or girl.
This book is the help we need. It provides a guide for how we can help raise other peoples children and keep them safe, specifically when were working to support transgender and gender non-conforming students in our schools. It is about how to get from here to there, covering practicalities and their implementation; it shows us how to address systemic issues and modify the way our organizations communicate about gender altogether.
Most importantly, this book is written by Alex Myers, and he has a story to tell. A graduate of Phillips Exeter and Harvard, he was the first openly transgender student at both institutions. He now runs workshops and speaks at schools across the country on the topic of gender identity and supporting transgender students. It has been my pleasure to know Alex for many years both as a colleague and as a consultant in our efforts to design policies and facilities that are more gender inclusive. Two of my own school communities are better for his work.
Our communities can get polarized quickly, even in their supportive responses and solutions. But gender is fluid and exists on a continuum for many of our students, and some of their gender identities will evolve throughout their years with us. Myers offers a way forward from wherever your school community is on this journey. If you dont know where to begin, Myers reminds us that all students benefit when a school initiates a gender audit guided by his good questions: Where do we make mention of gender in our school? Why do we want to highlight gender here? What is our purpose in seeking to know or control gender in this context? Although bathrooms and sports teams most often require interventions when we first begin to ask questions about gender in our schools, Myers calls our attention to a broader set of concerns. If you arent yet sure why the proliferation of inclusive terminology and language is important, Myers will remind you: it can save lives.
Some of our schools have been engaged in this work of inclusion and belonging for years, and 2020 has coaxed others into recognizing the experiences of transgender people for the first time, most prominently through the e