“A world of trans vibrance and trans liberation”: how schools support trans educators
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Research indicates that trans people are at a high risk of experiencing harm in school environments. At the same time, scholars and activists have urged for a renewed focus on “trans joy” in the face of increasing transphobic backlash to humanize and present more positive narratives of trans life. Drawing upon three case studies of trans educators who felt supported in their transness in their schools, this paper describes how school leaders, peers and structures contributed to positive workplace experiences for trans school workers. We also discuss how these factors influence employment decisions. Design/methodology/approach We use close reading and flexible coding to analyse three in-depth interviews representing outlier cases from a more extensive mixed-methods study with trans school workers in Canada and the United States about their working conditions, job satisfaction and well-being. These cases were chosen because participants described overwhelmingly positive experiences in locations, policy contexts or types of schools we did not anticipate would likely support such experiences. Findings We identified three key factors that led to positive experiences for these workers: autonomy and support, belongingness and an institutional valuing of trans people and trans pedagogies. Notably, we also found that participants anticipated negative experiences in schools related to being trans and that this impacted their career choices. Originality/value Our findings extend and enrich research on gender-inclusive leadership by demonstrating how trans educators experience gender-inclusivity, which may not always overlap with gender-inclusivity efforts targeting students. This is an original contribution, as existing studies focus on how administrators understand gender-inclusivity or how such leadership has been experienced by trans students or parents of trans students. This study also contributes to the small but emerging literature on trans and gender nonconforming educators, who remain under-represented in teaching and leadership, and the scholarship concerning the complexities involved in centring trans joy over other narratives.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.025 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".