Experiences of trans and gender diverse young people

For the most part, every single teacher I’ve had is angelical. My teachers are brilliant. Every single one of them are brilliant from, the ones I had in year seven who knew me by my dead name first before my name now. They, they very quickly were able to deal with. Okay, you’re called [name] now, nice like Gucci ma dude that’s fine. And for the most part all my teachers have been very, very good with it. They’ve just gone, ‘cos my school sent out an email to all of them just saying, Oh yeah, this kid is called [name] now. On the registers it’s [name] now, you know? It’s [name] now. It was, it was drilled into their heads. There was one teacher, one god damn teacher who just didn’t really click with that. She was all like, no, I’m going to dead name you and use the wrong pronouns and I was just sat there like, for the love of God, just read your—she read the email like in the class once and then just like dead named me when is this referring to you and I was just like, oh my God, please, please just get it right. And I think there was a couple of times when she dead named me when I wasn’t in the class and then like my class mates actually corrected her. They were like, ‘Yo, lady you gotta stop.’ Which was really like nice. It took her like two years I think like I know I started dreading her classes, ‘cos I knew that I was gonna get dead named and anyone whose trans and who knows that when you’re like, when you’ve got your like actual name being referred to you and you’re like, you’ve got your actual pronouns and it is banging. It is absolutely like wonderful. And then when you have this one person who won’t like just, just follow the rest of the crowd. The one sheep who decides to turn the opposite direction and go away like it, it sometimes it feels like a slap to the face, ‘cos you’re just chilling out, doing your thing and then boom you’re like being dead named and wrong pronouns and you’re just like, that’s not brilliant. Please don’t do that. But, yeah. They came around in the end. I’m on fairly good terms with them now. I don’t really see them much anymore, ‘cos they’re not my teacher anymore. I think they just, I don't know, maybe they, I don’t think they just click that well with trans people, because they find it very confusing and all a bit much. I don't know how to explain it. One of that, those people.

Well, the first person I told, I told them during the summer holiday before the start of year eleven so the yeah, so before GCSEs and everything. So, then at school nobody used my name or pronouns ever because almost nobody knew and then the only time that anybody would know was in the after-school LGBT group with like the friend that I first told and the trans people and my other friends from that group. But even then, I didn’t use my name and pronouns with them because it was still in the school building and nobody did the group in a classroom and so nobody was teaching in it or anything so after school, occasionally the teacher would come in and get something and go out again. The risk of accidentally outing myself to like other members of staff or to the staff member who was like supervising the group to make sure everything was okay and everything. Not wanting to be out to them beforehand was an issue, especially because when I previously came out before realising I was trans that information managed to, I mentioned it to, I think it was the head of year or something and then a couple of days later my sociology teacher was congratulating me on coming out and I was like okay, I never told you. Don’t know how that information managed to make that jump that quickly. Yeah, so that experience and just generally negative experiences with like the pastoral people at school, hugely put me off wanting to be out to any member of staff, so, because of that I didn’t use my name or pronouns until before the run up to GCSEs when I eventually got fed up and everyone just used my name and pronouns in the group and then wasn’t out to anyone apart from one member of staff who worked with like a team that wasn’t to do with anything that I was involved in that still sort of wasn’t that much of a risk of it spreading. So, for most of that year it was just, yeah, dead name and wrong pronouns.

I was at an all girl’s school, so it was very gendered environment. You would like, there’d be like, “Good morning ladies,” and stuff like, “we don’t want ladette behaviour in our school.” It was very gendered and very not me but the uniform was actually quite good. It was you could wear like trousers, skirt whatever but you had like a jumper and a shirt. There was like no tie or anything, so it was quite nice; I didn’t mind it. They’ve changed it now but before it was really nice so I could wear what I felt comfortable in so the uniform wasn’t really an issue and like P.E. wasn’t obviously wasn’t gendered it was all girls and like all my friends we all came out to each other in Year 9. So we’d been friends since like Year 7 and we all came out to each other in year 9 as like various LGBT identities and I came out as, “Oh I might be feeling like not cis,” and they were like, “Okay,” and I didn’t say anything until Year 11. So, I felt, so the school, I was staying on for Sixth form, like, and I was like bullied throughout school, but it wasn’t like intense. It was kind of just like, we can tell that he’s different so we’ll bully him kind of thing and it didn’t help that I had undiagnosed ASD so I wasn’t getting any pastoral support, academic support. I was just like left to my own defences which and I wasn’t doing very well so.

But I managed to pass all my GCSEs with really good grades so I did that and then I came out in the, to the school just before my A level results, no, my GCSE results came in and they were like, “Well we want a deed poll before we use his name for Sixth form,” which forced me to do my deed poll a bit earlier than I wanted to because I wanted to like wait until I was ready but I was like if I need it now, I need it now. So that made me do my deed poll early and I got my GCSE results in my own name which was really nice and then I came out and most people were actually really nice about it so I came to prom as [name] and that was fine. There was no panic or anything and they talked to me about toilets, and like, “You can use the men’s that’s fine.” There’s only like one men’s toilet in the whole building so, [sigh] so and, so Sixth form was kind of okay, it was fine. I didn’t really have any problems in Sixth form just with like some teachers not, because I got my ASD diagnosis at the same time so they were kind of like and it was kind of a struggle to keep me in school and my attendance up, so yeah, so a lot of teachers weren’t really understanding in that respect but they were understanding in the gender identity respect which I found quite nice and if there was any transphobia it was kind of only from one or two people, there wasn’t anyone that was like overt to me about it so I found that, so I found it on like the whole gender identity kind of side of things fine. Like, there wasn’t any big issues.

Well when you’re in lower school you kind of don’t really think about genders, you’re all just like out playing, but I think it was when I went into Year 3 and we started going to these swimming lessons, and obviously it was like wearing a different swimming costume and stuff like that. And that’s when everyone else kind of started to realise, and so did I. And I was like, “This isn’t really right, I don’t feel right.” And so I felt really insecure, and I just didn’t really like where I was at, and I got like worry and quite a lot of anxiety at that time, thinking like I don’t want to go swimming, and stuff like that. And then obviously because I noticed that, then that summer and stuff my Mum started making me wear school dresses in the summer time, and then I was just like, “Oh this is too much,” cos I really didn’t like it. So yeah, that went on for pretty much all of year 3, and then year 4 I said to Mum that I didn’t really feel comfortable, and so then we got me to get changed in the disabled toilet, and it was like a vest top as well, so it wasn’t just the swimming costume. And so, like little changes to help with it. And then so we got through year 4, and then I went into the middle school and I just told my Mum like, “I’m trans,” like basically. And we got on it from there.

Make things a lot easier for trans kids because I know a lot of people who came out during like high school period, they had to stop doing P.E. and sport and stuff which I think’s really bad because I’m a really big advocate for like trans people doing sport and I feel that a lot of the time trans people are just put out of their education a lot when they’re not able to do these things because schools don’t under-, don’t know what to do, don’t know what changing rooms to put them in or they don’t have the guidelines already in place and I feel like, if they have the guidelines in place, even if they don’t have the trans student it makes it a lot easier for when they do have a trans student because they probably will now. People are coming out younger and I feel that it’ll be useful for schools to have these guides just in case like because legally you can, like a school can change your name without a deed poll but a lot of them don’t want to and won’t and it’s not until you actually show them the actual laws and stuff that they actually do something because a lot of the time they’re like, “Oh but we don’t have to.” I was like, “legally you have to.”

So I spoke to the school before coming out publicly so I’d spoken to my parents and with CAMHS about it for about seven/eight months before speaking to the school and trying to organise a, you know, get them in on it, make them aware and trying to organise coming out as such to try and make it as good as it could be I suppose. So I spoke to the school and they organised it saying yeah we can do our best, they were confused and didn’t know what to do just like everyone else at the time and stuff like that and there weren’t guidelines in place of what schools are supposed to do and stuff like this. But it was very much quite, it wasn’t so much a smooth kind of gradient into transitioning it was very much quite a cliff edge. Which I don’t know, whether that’s better or worse way to do it than a gradient really.

I really wouldn’t know what’s better but it to some extent worked, I think it worked maybe the best it can work but of course it wasn’t a good experience but I don’t think it would be possible to have a good experience transitioning in high school.

So what did you actually do?

So after that cut-off day I just, I was essentially a female student, it would be wearing a female uniform, referred to as she [name] that would be it really yeah just outright transition like I say it was quite a cut off I suppose looking back it may have been jarring I suppose but it wasn’t like I went from this hyper-masculine cis het guy who was out there playing rugby to doing this, I was very much already kind of had that reputation as oh that’s a like camp, gay guy you know, the not masculine and stuff like this so, yeah.

Well there’s PHSE, which is basically, do you know about that? Yeah. So that’s also kind of to do with a lot of other things as well, but yeah, we do a little bit on that but we’re actually in class having that. And this, like the class started discussing how they’d be able to easily tell if a trans person was there. And so I was sat in the corner like mm, and there was this really annoying guy in my class who was like, “Easy,” and I was like, “Really so you think you’d be able to spot one?” And the teacher kind of like looked at me and winked, and she was, he was like, “Yeah obviously,” and I was like, “Oh okay.” Cos I was like, I kind of just felt like you know what, I’m just going to come out and everyone will be like “Aah,” kind of thing, but I didn’t. I held myself back, but it’s going to be funny seeing his reaction like if he finds out so yeah.

Because my whole friendship group we were sort of like I guess like the outcasts of the school, we were really, when I think about it we were really weird and I think I was sort of oblivious to how people viewed us or talked about us behind our back because we like used to sing, we used to make up songs, sing songs, we had our own language which again made us seem really weird [laughter] but we had that language purely so that we could talk about like things and people wouldn’t get funny with us. But it was like a really sort of odd friendship group and we had about two or three of my friends like are Transgender that have come out now from the school and it’s kind of funny how it was like an all-girls school but I know at least about just over a quarter of people who are identifying as male or non-binary. And I sort of got to, sort of like a year out from school because I had no idea what I wanted to do, then I went to Uni and I still like sort of went under like female pronouns and everything but I had like a different name, went under like a nickname like [nickname] because I just seemed a bit easier and I had like a whole friendship group of people who just had like all different identities, sexualities and like because it’s like a creative arts university so there was a lot of like diversity and like, you know, just accepting yourself for what you are, accepting others for what they are. So it was really nice and I’m still friends with a lot of people there and I think that definitely helped a lot.

I think in my experience you know obviously we talked about I grew up under section 28, and etcetera, etcetera, having, the shame of having, the shame that I think a significant portion of the shame that prevented me ever coming out, some of that was to do with overt transphobia in the world, that’s absolutely true, there is a lot of overt transphobia, or homophobia etcetera. And some of it is, was to do with just not having any of that counterbalance, so there was no positive representation, or positive affirmation or even kind of like value signalling, at being trans being okay, or there being other trans people. And so, I think like you don’t have to teach a class about trans people to reference a trans person, or to validate an experience. And then I think also to create spaces in which kids can just express themselves freely. Which may or may not be because they’re trans, but it’s going to help them either way.