For some time now, many people have shared their opinion on the thorny issue of gender identities at school, including intellectuals who speak of the good of children of whom they could be grandparents, but above all call on society to take a break on this question. On Wednesday, Minister Bernard Drainville announced the creation of a scientific committee on the issue of transidentity. And what do we hear from the students? Nothing.
However, there have been lesbian-gay-bis-trans-queer-intersex and other (LGBTQ+) student committees for years, including in elementary schools. These committees can include more than twenty students accompanied by adults, sometimes a sexology trainee. We meet there to reflect, exchange and organize awareness-raising activities. Straight peers can join in out of empathy and solidarity and to fight against injustice.
The creation of the committee is sometimes the initiative of trans students, and organizations help to train them, such as the Regional Social Intervention Group of Estrie with its Generation5+ project, Interligne with its Gender, Identity and Sexuality Alliances program and the Fédération des Jeunes Francophones du Nouveau-Brunswick, which since 2016 has offered a Guide on the creation and implementation of a sexual and gender diversity committee and their allies in French-speaking schools.
On the English side, we talk about Gender and Sexuality Alliance or Gay-Straight Alliance committees. In 2018, in the United States, charismatic student X González (then named “Emma”) was a member of such a committee when she launched a national mobilization against guns, after a shooting at her school. The following year, in Alberta, thousands of students demonstrated in front of their schools against a Conservative government bill that would require schools to inform parents if their children joined such a committee. “Young people have the right to their privacy at school”, could we read on their signs.
All this is less new than people say. In the 1990s, parents in Los Angeles called for keeping their children home during Pride month celebrated in schools. More recently, in Missouri, around a hundred students demonstrated, with their parents, against the use of girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms by a transgender student. For her safety, she had to retreat behind a locked office door.
Last June, in Los Angeles, parents again called to keep children at home, in addition to demonstrating in front of the school with sweaters emblazoned with the slogan “Leave our children alone” and banners against “indoctrination », shouting at the heads of LGBTQ+ students waving the rainbow flag.
In Quebec, the Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia was this year an opportunity to express intolerance: some students dressed entirely in black to protest against the call to wear colored clothing (in Coaticook), Others launched a petition against “symbols or advertisements related to sexual orientations” (in Sherbrooke) or tore down the rainbow flag in the main hall before trampling it, in front of a crowd of students shouting with joy by filming the scene with their phone (in Pincourt).
Tolerance
That said, our research on student mobilizations indicates that they rather express tolerance for diversity on these issues, at the risk of sanctions by management. In Alberta, students protested in front of the school against the management’s decision to erase a rainbow drawn at the entrance to the establishment in chalk. Management called the police.
In the United States, students went on strike to protest against anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech. Management suspended 11 strikers. At a private girls’ school in Britain, a teacher refused to call a non-binary person identifying as “hey” by her chosen first name (they Or them, in English). Students aged 11-12 then demonstrated in the school and the teacher finally apologized.
More empathetic, the headmaster of Brighton College changed the dress code dating from 1846 to accommodate transgender people, explaining that “if boys and girls are happier identifying with a gender different from the one they were born with, then my work is to accommodate them. My only interest as director is their well-being and happiness.”
This decision would perhaps have prevented around a hundred students from Lille from gathering to respect a minute of silence in memory of Fouad, a transgender classmate who committed suicide. A few days before, the principal had sent her home, under the pretext that she was making other students uncomfortable by wearing a skirt. On social networks, his young classmates launched the Come in a Skirt movement, to denounce transphobia, and reminded that “trans rights are human rights”, including at school.