Supporting Transgender Students is a guide to help schools learn the basics of what gender is and why it matters in education. Drawing on the author's 25 years of experience working with schools and transgender students, this book considers how transgender and gender non-conforming youth experience the classroom, the playing field, and other school contexts. Supporting Transgender Students provides a clear roadmap and practical examples for how to take action in your school to effect change and create a gender inclusive community.



Foreword



We school people remember well the first time a student or a parent or guardian requested support for their or their child's 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 someone's sexual orientation or gender identity by looking at them. It's 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 people's children and keep them safe, specifically when we're 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