Gender, privacy, and belonging at school

In 2021, as a candidate for my local school board, I started a blog. I continued writing throughout my four-year term, which ended last month. I enjoy writing and believed it was important to share my questions, ideas, and perspectives with the community I was elected to serve.

There are two more blog posts I want to write; the first is below. I intentionally waited until after leaving the school board to write them. This first post addresses transgender students' use of school restrooms and locker rooms. The second will examine how, in Northern Virginia, this issue got conflated with a separate matter in some public discourse and local reporting last year. To avoid perpetuating that mistake, I'm keeping the posts separate.

​I want to be clear that I'm not speaking on behalf of the school board or division, especially given the ongoing legal dispute between Arlington Public Schools and the U.S. Department of Education. I won't comment on that active litigation—those seeking information on that case should visit the APS website. The views below are mine alone as a private citizen.

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I am a mom, and like other parents I love my children fiercely. Like other parents, I have wanted to do everything in my power to keep them safe, healthy, and happy.

​When I was pregnant with my oldest child, a friend shared Anna Quindlen’s beautiful essay “On Being Mom”. Over the years, I have soothed myself more than once by reading this passage:

Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, What did you get wrong? (She insisted I include that.) ​

My kids have their own litany of my lapses: the things I forgot to do, the (many) times I lost my cool,  the succession of strategies I inexpertly applied after reading the parenting self-help books.

Of course these moments matter—but maybe not as much or in the way that we think they do. Our inner monologue says perfect parenting creates perfect children. The most humbling, yet liberating, part of parenting is accepting that we don't have this level of control.

​Quindlen writes:

Even today I’m not sure what worked and what didn’t, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I’d done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be.

Sometimes children choose different paths than their parents: a different religion or political party, a career outside the family business, or different cultural traditions. Other times, children are simply born different. Deaf children are born to hearing parents. Prodigies are born to parents with average abilities. Transgender children are born to cisgender parents.


Transgender Youth and Their Families

If you believe that being transgender is a choice, a fad, or an illness, you won’t be interested in anything else I have to say here. I believe that a person’s gender can be different from their sex assigned at birth, a view shared by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the World Health Organization, among others. Beyond the medical consensus, the lived experiences of transgender people are equally compelling.

The parents of transgender children in my own extended family and community are some of the bravest people I know. Their journey is emotional and scary. Emotional, because it meant releasing their assumptions about who their child was and would become. Scary, because they did not know other parents with transgender kids and because they grasped that a great many people would not love and accept their child.

These parents are brave, yet also completely ordinary—they want what all parents want and will do everything in their power to keep their children safe, healthy, and happy.

That's no easy task. For transgender and nonbinary youth, the stakes are life and death: they attempt suicide at four times the rate of their cisgender peers. This distress stems not from their gender identity, but from rejection and mistreatment by family, teachers, classmates, and community.  More than half are bullied, and one in ten lacks stable housing—often after their parents turn them away.*  Many conclude that the world has no place for them and they will never belong.


Transgender Youth at School

Like every other student, transgender students do better in school when they feel welcomed, safe, and affirmed. 

Affirming involves using the names and pronouns requested by these students, in the same way we would for a student who tells a teacher “I go by my middle name” or “I’m Will, not William".

Affirming also means these students can use restrooms and locker rooms that correspond with their gender identity. Some people are uncomfortable with this idea because they fundamentally reject the idea that gender identity differs from sex assigned at birth. Others worry that this violates the privacy of cisgender students or makes them unsafe.

If safety or privacy concerns arise in a restroom or locker room, we should handle them as we do any school behavioral issue—by addressing the specific individual whose actions are problematic. I promise you there are thousands of transgender students who use school bathrooms and locker rooms every day without incident. 

We can address restroom-related concerns in other ways, too.  In new construction and renovation, many school divisions are creating gender-inclusive restrooms that feature floor-to-ceiling stall doors for increased privacy and sink areas that are more visible from school hallways. Here’s how they look at Johnson Senior High School in Minnesota.

The new design solves other problems, too: Students can't reach over or under stall doors to take photos of others using the toilet, and with the sink area more visible from the hallway, there's less opportunity for fighting, bullying, or vaping. The American Institute of Architects provides a good overview of the school-wide benefits.

Until a school division is able to offer inclusive restrooms, it can address privacy and safety concerns by allowing all students to choose between a traditional gendered, group restroom (e.g., “the boys bathroom”) and a single-occupancy bathroom. There are lots of reasons why a cisgender student might prefer the more private option, too. 

Many school divisions including my local school district are addressing another pain point by eliminating the requirement that students “dress out” for PE in school-issued gym uniforms. It makes sense for students to wear comfortable, nonrestrictive clothing on days they have PE—but that’s something they can plan for and wear all day. Many of us can remember both our gym uniforms and the requirement to shower after every gym class: my middle school PE teacher stood by the group shower, clipboard in hand, making check marks by our names to enforce compliance.

It's easy to imagine how uncomfortable this would be for many students. They're self-conscious about being underdeveloped, overdeveloped, too heavy, or too thin compared to some perception of what a “normal” body should look like. They don't want anyone seeing their scars, birthmarks, or menstrual pads. Few adults would tolerate being forced to undress in front of others and reveal so much of themselves.



At the heart of all the talk about restrooms and locker rooms, we find this question: “Is there room for you - trans kid - in this world?” Our values teach us that there should be only one answer to that question. All faiths value children. Even for people of no religious faith, if we observe the natural world, the duty to care for the next generation can be seen all around us. 

​I reject the idea that we can’t find ways to value and include students of all gender identities. The world is big enough—and we are compassionate and capable enough—to build the spaces and systems that make it so. 

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*For information about bullying and suicidality among transgender youth as compared to other groups, see the peer-reviewed research articles and national survey data compiled in The Trevor Project Research Brief: Bullying and Suicide Risk among LGBTQ Youth.  For information about housing instability, see Suarez NA, Trujillo L, McKinnon II, et al. Disparities in School Connectedness, Unstable Housing, Experiences of Violence, Mental Health, and Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors Among Transgender and Cisgender High School Students — Youth Risk Behavior Survey, United States, 2023. MMWR Suppl 2024;73(Suppl-4):50–58. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.su7304a6.