Education Issues
Deadnaming — What Elliot Page’s Public Transition Can Teach Us
Elliot Page, an actor known for roles in Juno, X-Men films, and their current Oscar-nominated role in The Umbrella Academy, has started a flurry of online discussions after coming out as transgender. These discussions focused on the practice of “deadnaming” a transgender person. Deadnaming means referring to a person who is transgender by the name they used before they transitioned. Not everyone likes that terms, so you might also hear it called (and you can say instead) their “birth name,” “given name,” or “former name.” When we know that someone has transitioned, it can be a mental challenge at first to adhere to a trans...
Read MoreSpeech to the NEA GLBT Caucus about creating supportive schools
I’m in Washington, D. C. today after having delivered the keynote address at the NEA GLBT Caucus dinner, an impressively large event that takes place during the NEA’s national conference each year. It began with 10 teachers a couple of decades ago, and last night more than 940 education professional attended! Several people introduced themselves to me last night by saying, “I’ve never taken notes during a speech at a dinner before until tonight.” Other’s said they couldn’t write things down quickly enough and asked if I could put the speech online for easy reference. I’m glad it had such a profound impact on the audience....
Read MoreMaking Schools Safe for Transgender Children
We are fortunate that by homeschooling our kids, we don’t have to worry about unsupportive administrations, mishandled paperwork, or other children (or their parents) bullying our AJ and her brother. But for a lot of parents, their children are already in a school system when they come out as transgender and start their transition. So what can you do as a parent to ensure your child is safe in a school? You have a few options. First, you must decide if your child will stay in their current school or if you will transfer to a different school in the district. If your child wants to be stealth, changing schools is probably the only way to make that happen. I have...
Read MoreExtraordinary Happenings
Whew! A lot has happened in the last three weeks, to put it mildly. Since posting about a little video of me from the Listen To Your Mother show and crossing my fingers that it would reach a couple hundred people with transgender or gender-nonconforming kids so they would know they aren’t alone, it’s actually been viewed a lot. A lot. More than I could have envisioned, and frankly, more than I could have planned for. After receiving a bit of hate mail and frantically worrying if we had done enough to protect our daughter’s privacy, the good mail started rolling in. Thousands of personal messages from six continents are now saved in my Inbox. Some are...
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