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By Mallory Brabrand

The Transgender flag. Photo credit: Wikimedia user AinhoaUriSae.

Over the past few years, as the political climate of our country falls into division, regulations and laws focusing on people that identify as transgender, including those under 18, have gained traction around the country. In many cases, these policies actually target minors who identify as transgender. The National Center for Transgender Equality defines transgender individuals as “people whose gender identity is different from the gender they were thought to be at birth.” This term includes both transgender women and men, but also non-binary people who don’t identify as male or female. 

The Human Rights Campaign defines gender identity as “One’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither – how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves. One’s gender identity can be the same or different from their sex assigned at birth,” and adds that one’s sexual orientation, or their “inherent or immutable enduring emotional, romantic or sexual attraction to other people,” is “independent of their gender identity.”

This recent surge of anti-trans policies started in 2016 with North Carolina’s “bathroom bill.” Entitled House Bill 2 (HB2), the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, one of the bill’s main goals was to ban transgender North Carolinians from using the public bathroom that aligned with their gender identity, if it differed from the one they were assigned at birth. In addition, the bill limited the abilities of cities to pass nondiscrimination ordinances, “saying state laws preempt any local ordinances,” according to CNN.

This North Carolina bill sparked fury amongst activists, politicians, and regular citizens across the nation, as the bill was perceived as biased against transgender people. Following this bill, North Carolina cities could no longer pass nondiscrimination ordinances to protect the LGBTQ+ community. The bill was repealed in two parts. First, in 2017, HB2 was replaced with a new law that undid some of the original HB2, such as the bathroom regulations, but left the restrictions on nondiscrimination ordinances in cities. Later, the restriction of nondiscrimination ordinances and other remaining pieces of HB2 were repealed on December 1, 2020. However, the lasting effects of HB2 had already begun to spread in the political discourse. 

There are hundreds of instances of discrimination against transgender students nationwide. Transgender adults, especially those who work with children, such as teachers and counselors, have also been targeted. An argument often weaponized against transgender individuals is that they are unsafe to have around cisgender students. The term cisgender “refers to a gender identity that a person, or society, deems to match the sex that a doctor assigned them at birth.”

In Oregon earlier this year, students were sent home early from a school camping trip due to the presence of nonbinary camp counselors. According to the area’s superintendent, Stefanie Garber, “some students had expressed discomfort with staying in a cabin with a nonbinary person, particularly with dressing and showering in front of the high school-aged counselors.” However, over the course of the weekend-long trip, students would not actually be showering and would have private restrooms available. Students were sent home only a few hours after arriving at Camp Tamarack, and many were incredibly disappointed to be leaving so early.  

In this scenario, a question arose: Should Camp Tamarack have alerted the school district that there were nonbinary counselors? Garber’s answer was yes. But the clearer answer came from the camp’s Executive Director, Charlie Anderson, who said that telling Garber about nonbinary counselors before the weekend “would’ve been discriminatory and violated state law.”

The Utah House of Representatives. Photo credit: Flickr user Steven Vance.

Earlier this year, Utah passed “House Bill 11, a bill that discriminates against transgender youth in participation of school sports,” according to the Human Rights Campaign. After passing HB11 through the state Senate and House, Utah lawmakers proceeded to override Governor Spencer Cox’s veto of the bill. Despite taking effect this past July, the law was reversed this August by a judge, since the ban was “pending legal challenges from parents,” as reported by PBS. Replacing the original ban,“transgender girls will now go before a state commission of political appointees who will determine on a case-by-case basis if they are eligible to participate [in female sports].” Utah Republicans created this commission “as a fallback plan,” in the case of “an injunction against the law.”

Republican State Representative Judy Weeks Rohner argued that HB11 was a “good policy,” there to “protect all children,” during a Utah legislative session, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. Human Rights Campaign State Legislative Director and Senior Counsel Cathryn Oakley says “Transgender students are kids – kids who, like their classmates, deserve the opportunity to experience the benefits of participating in school sports. Opponents of LGBTQ+ equality have manufactured a non-existent crisis and this bill, while it engages in a more nuanced way than similar legislation in other states, is still a solution to a fabricated problem.”

According to The Washington Post, “In 2018, 19 [anti-transgender] bills were introduced.” Since then, the number of these policies and pieces of state legislation that have been introduced has risen dramatically, with 131 and 155 bills being introduced in 2021 and 2022, respectively.

One of the most prevalent arguments used against transgender kids is that they are unsafe to have around their cisgender peers and create unfair and immoral situations, such as advantages in sports. This sort of moral panic, described by The New York Times as “Unhinged hysteria [that] sows fear and suspicion by inflating unusual ideas and lifestyles into social and political emergencies,” has become a weapon against transgender youth. In Utah, before HB11 even went into effect, parents of two female athletes complained that the winner of a “state-level sporting event” might be a transgender female with an advantage over their two cisgender daughters. Administrators then “tracked down her academic records without informing her or her parents,” before discovering that she too was, in fact, a cisgender girl. These parents and administrators were so desperate to find some reason why the other girl won that they let their suspicion and discriminatory bias win. 

However, moral panic is an ideology that has been used for decades. From comic books, to jazz, to Dungeons and Dragons, there has always been suspicion against certain aspects of youth culture. So as a new understanding of gender emerges in society, it’s not surprising that there are negative reactions. Yet, right-wing activists have weaponized moral panic and made transgender people seem like the issue, when they are not, hurting the cause for equality and rights. Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times writes, “This sort of fixation imputes to trans people an outsize role in American culture and politics. It pretends that they pose a threat to our institutions — whether women’s sports or academic journals or civilization generally — that overstates their place in society beyond all rationality and recognition.”

Anti-trans legislation and policies tend to target trans youth in situations such as school sports, naming preferences, bathrooms, and more. Though there are laws targeting trans adults as well, those affecting children have become more of a central issue nationally. 

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R). Photo credit: Gage Skidmore.

In September, the administration of Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) announced a new set of policies for transgender students in public Virginia schools. These policies include requiring parental approval for a student to change their preferred pronouns and name usage at school, restricting trans students’ usage of bathrooms and locker rooms that align with the gender they identify with, and restricting trans students from participating in some school-sponsored events. 

This directive is Youngkin’s attempt to replace a 2020 directive put in place by Democratic Governor Ralph Northam’s administration for the purpose of protecting the rights of transgender youths. Northam’s policies “allowed students to use school facilities that align with their gender identity and required school districts and teachers to accept a transgender student’s name and pronouns without consent from the student’s family.” However, the governor’s office had yet to fully implement and enforce these inclusive policies when Northam left office in January of this year. 

Opponents of Younkin’s proposal note that the legislation is “vague” and may be “unenforceable” according to The Washington Post. For example, under this directive, teachers would only be allowed to call a student by their given name and pronouns assigned at birth, unless told to do otherwise by a student’s parent. However, it is not always obvious what gender a student was assigned at birth due to “ambiguous names and clothing styles.”

Critics also contend that Youngkin’s new policies directly target transgender students in Virginia public schools by creating unsafe and unethical learning environments for them. Although the 30-day commenting period has expired, the implementation of Youngkin’s policies have been pushed back another month due to the sheer number of comments made that imply that the policies could violate “existing state law.”

These policies would affect public and private schools differently, and as a private school, Collegiate is able to set many of its own policies. Youngkin’s model policies will only apply to public Virginia schools. The 2022-2023 Collegiate Family Handbook, which is signed by every parent, has a section on “Gender Non-Binary And Transgender Students.” It states:

The School will work closely with transgender and non-binary students and their families to strive to honor their wishes with respect to use of School facilities, participation in athletics, accuracy of student records, awards, use of preferred name and pronouns, and privacy, in accordance with applicable law, and to the extent that the School’s campus facilities reasonably permit.

Nat Lurie (‘23) is a transgender student at Collegiate. Although he has attended Collegiate since 2010, his experiences as a transgender youth still reflect many of the struggles of transgender students that attend public institutions.

Lurie “identifies as male but was born female.” When asked how long he’s known his true identity, he responded with: “I don’t think you’re a person until you’re at least in Middle School. Like, you don’t really know yourself. So I didn’t know anything until I was like 11 or 12. That was… the earliest.” Lurie describes his transition as taking “a super long time.” Despite starting conversations, first with his friends and then his parents, in early Middle School, he didn’t get his name legally changed until August “between freshman and sophomore year.”

To start his legal transition, Lurie had to first change his name and legally recognized gender. Then, he could turn his focus to Collegiate. Commenting on his process at Collegiate, Lurie says, “It’s kind of annoying, because the name and the stuff that was in the school system, that human being doesn’t exist in the government anymore. But… it had to be a double process, to do it in the American government, and then I had to come to the school” and explain, “this is all changed. We have to fix this. And it all took a long time to actually change everything.”

Grover Jones Field. Photo courtesy of Collegiate School.

Lurie commented that at Collegiate, he sees the most pushback in his sports activities, like many transgender youth across America. Despite having talked with his coaches and doctors about competing with the boy’s cross country team, the League of Independent Schools’ policy “is that you have to compete, regardless of anything, with the gender you were assigned at birth. In every system, I am part of the guys’ cross country team, I go to the guys’ meetings, but in every competition I still have to run with the girls,” according to Lurie, who competes with the girls team in meets. He said that he struggles trying to explain that to people, since “what people don’t really understand, what I had to explain to a lot of people, even my friends, is that just because I’m trans and I transitioned to male, doesn’t mean that’s the main thing that’s important to me in my life.” 

Even after changing all of his school and government documents to align with his gender identity, Lurie still faced, and faces, struggles over his gender at Collegiate. He talks about his experiences with bullying over his identity, saying “Especially at a school where you’ve been there your whole life, like everyone knew [I transitioned], everyone knows, or they don’t know, and still call me a girl, or they do know and they still call me a girl… That’s what happens with some of the kids in our grade, which has happened before… in smaller classes, where there’s an opportunity to even reference me, they’d make the conscious decision to call me a girl, and it’s not fun.” 

One of the most pressing issues surrounding the fight for transgender equality is the mental struggle placed on these children. Lurie says, “I didn’t start having massive mental health issues until I came out, like until I knew what was going on… there’s a lack of understanding and treatment that doesn’t happen when you come out, which is super isolating.”

According to the Cleveland Clinic, although not all transgender individuals struggle with mental illness or may have mental illnesses unrelated to their transgender identity, “for some, mental health and gender identity are related. Generally, this isn’t due to being transgender, but to the social stigma that often exists.” Many transgender people also struggle with gender dysphoria, which is defined by the Human Rights Campaign as “Clinically significant distress caused when a person’s assigned birth gender is not the same as the one with which they identify,” or by the Cleveland Clinic as “a sense of unease regarding the mismatch between assigned sex and gender identity — and it can occur at any point during life, from childhood to adulthood. Left untreated, gender dysphoria can lead to severe emotional and psychological distress.”

Transgender individuals are also more likely to experience harassment. The Cleveland Clinic found that “More than half of transgender students who are out (publicly open about their transgender status) in K-12 school experience verbal harassment. One in 4 experience a physical attack, and more than 1 in 10 are sexually assaulted.”

Despite the fact that “a 64% majority of Americans favor policies that protect transgender individuals from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces such as restaurants and stores,” transgender individuals are seeing real, tangible restrictions put in place that limit them and hurt their mental health. The movement to discriminate against transgender people, especially children, is gaining traction in state legislatures around the country. Transgender rights are a major topic in today’s political atmosphere, which is why stories like Lurie’s are essential to understanding the journey of transgender individuals.