Schools Often Fail to Expect Trans and Nonbinary Elementary Children: What Gender Independent, Nonbinary, and Trans Children Desire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background/Context: This article is drawn from a doctoral research study that involved co-research between as adult trans academic and their child, a nonbinary 11-year-old. It mounts an epistemic challenge to education that assumes children to be cis, and either boys or girls. GIaNT children (Gender Independent, and Nonbinary, Trans) are often talked about but seldom directly engaged about their wants and desires in education, but my study addresses this problem and centers their agency. Purpose/Research Question/Focus of Study: The purpose of the study was to generate knowledge and insight into how 2SLGBTQ children, and children from 2SLGBTQ families, envision education spaces and programs that meet their needs. It also investigates the potentiality and significance of a parent-and-child researcher team to engage caregivers and children in co-imagining liberatory education spaces as 2SLGBTQ cultural spaces. Participants: Participants were 17 children (ages 4–12 years) and 12 adults from 11 households; the focus in this article is on the 12 children who identified their gender as other than cis. Research Design: A qualitative, arts-based participatory research methodology was employed. While the parent-child research team of a trans adult and a nonbinary 11-year-old conducted semi-structured interviews with both children and parents, the focus in this article is on the former. Participants were also invited to draw their ideal learning space. Interviews were video recorded, transcribed, and coded. Findings/Results: GIaNT children in this study desired learning spaces that are ready for them, that affirm their self-assigned genders, and that understand that people define their own genders. They wanted to be believed as who they said they were. They wanted safe access to bathrooms and schools to be communities, not just places of learning, and they recognized that learning happens outside of school. They desired an end to gender policing in schools, and in online learning, participants wanted schools that were safe and celebratory of all their identities and of all their peers. They wanted schools that are antiracist and decolonizing, that practice universal access, that teach queer and trans history and culture, and that provide meals and transportation. Conclusions/Recommendations: The study highlighted the creative potentialities of GIaNT children to provide generative insights into gender-affirming school spaces. It advocates for children to be engaged in processes of creating their own learning experiences. GIaNT children called for schools to be more equitable, antiracist, and decolonizing, committed to practicing universal access, teaching queer and trans history and culture, and providing meals and transportation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".