teaching while transgendering
or, why i never came out at school
Content note: this piece includes discussion of Lucy Meadows, i.e. media harassment, transmisogyny and death by suicide.
A few months into my ex-wife’s transition, I could no longer avoid telling my teaching colleagues it had happened. It’s not normally the kind of thing I would have wanted to share at work, with schools being such powerfully heteronormative and cisnormative places. That’s why I wasn’t out myself - as bi, or non-binary, or anything else. But that heteronormativity was exactly why I had to tell people about my ex-wife. Everyone knew we were due to get married the following summer. I’d even been given a pot plant to mark my engagement, such was the cultural commitment to heteronormative life milestones. My colleagues saw asking about my upcoming wedding as a way to show care and interest in me. And I couldn’t keep pretending that I was getting married to a man.
So I told them, in stages. I told the few colleagues I’d call friends first, then senior management and my headteacher. Then I braced myself for telling the people who arguably most needed to know: the team of teaching assistants I worked with all day, every day. Braced myself, because I knew one of them might be difficult about it. Jackie, let’s call her, was a deeply caring woman when it came to her colleagues and their families, but her care didn’t extend to groups she’d been convinced were her enemies. Unfortunately, after several years of watching GB News and being fed brain poison by the Facebook algorithm, these groups were numerous, and I had no doubt trans people figured among them. It was a toss-up, then, to see which instinct would prevail when she found out that her colleague’s fiancée was trans: care for colleagues and their families, or hatred and fear?
I took a deep breath and told them all one afternoon after school. I told them what I’d told everyone else: this was good news, this didn’t change anything for me, it’s just that my wedding was going to look a little different.
There was a long pause.
Jackie said, “But you didn’t sign up for this!”
I said, does anyone sign up for what will happen years into a relationship? I could leave if I wanted to, like anyone could. She didn’t appear to have thought of this.
After a while, she said, “Well, I don’t understand it. But I suppose it isn’t my job to, is it?”
That was a surprisingly good response, and I was gratified. But Jackie wasn’t quite finished:
“… as long as you don’t go and transgender and become the man! I couldn’t cope with that.”
I tell this story now, and it always gets a good laugh, as it should. It’s very funny. The use of ‘transgender’ as a verb? The idea that there must always be one (1) man in any relationship, and if the position is vacated it must be automatically filled, like a vacuum? Beautiful stuff. I usually add, as a post-punchline, that I didn’t think that was the moment to introduce to Jackie the concept of non-binary people. If the idea of a couple of binary trans people was so horrifying to her, what about the idea that a person could simply renounce binary gender all together? So yes, it’s all very funny. But it had a function, too. Until then, a part of me that had been wondering whether it would be worth it to come out at work myself - but now I had an answer.
It’s true, of course, that Jackie was just one person, and not everyone at school would have said such ridiculous things. But she had given voice, I think, to a general feeling. As a school, as an institution, as a normative society, we can cope with this much deviation, but not this much. Each deviation needs to be carefully packaged and presented; we can’t have too many at once.
If you already know the name Lucy Meadows, you will know the story that I am about to tell. Before the Christmas holidays in 2012, Lucy came out as a trans woman in her job as a primary school teacher. Her school, broadly supportive, sent a letter home to parents announcing her new name and title. A parent was upset, started a petition, contacted the press. The story hit the desk of Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn, who still writes a twice-weekly column for the Mail today. Littlejohn wrote one of the vilest columns I have ever read about Lucy, of which I will not even recount the headline, let alone the text. In January 2013, Lucy complained to the Press Complaints Commission about it. In March 2013, she died by suicide.
Littlejohn’s column is gone from the Daily Mail website. I could probably find it with the Wayback Machine, but I don’t need to: it is burned brightly and painfully into my brain. Of course, it misgenders her violently and repeatedly, implies she is a danger to children, robs her of all dignity. It was ten years ago, but it’s the worst fear of every queer teacher writ large - and who can really say things have got much better?
One seemingly inconsequential line that I still remember is Littlejohn’s objection to Meadows having chosen a new surname, as well as a new first name. “Why not just Lucy [here Littlejohn uses her old surname]?” he asks. Good question, Richard. Why not? Because Meadows is a beautiful name? Because it might be nice, as a teacher, to have the children you teach - who do not know your first name - call you something different to mark a break with your previous name? Because we are all fucking free, Richard Littlejohn, to live our fucking lives?
Meadows’ treatment, and Littlejohn’s continued ability to make a livelihood in spite of it, is a grave injustice, and I would not compare the bizarre remarks by some of my colleagues to the horrendous vilification Meadows faced in the press. But I think a lot about Littlejohn’s disingenuous objection to Meadows’ new surname, and what it gestures towards. I would have been fine with this whole trans thing, he implies, if Lucy had simply kept her old surname. Of course, he wouldn’t - the rest of his column stands as evidence of that. On whatever scale, there is always an implication that trans people are always simply asking too much - that being tolerated is just out of reach, if we would only tone down our demands. Just one name at a time. Just one transition at a time.
Danny Lavery expresses this sentiment very well in his essay, Let Me Save You Some Time: On Transitioning Like You're Opening A Candy Bar In A Crowded Movie Theater With A Really Loud Wrapper, describing those who always have just one objection to a part of someone’s transition:
Their common refrain is “What’s another six months?”
“You’ve waited this long – you can’t wait until after the baby is born/after Grandma dies/after the job search is over/after the kids are older/after we’ve had a little more time to adjust?”
And the transitioner, who very often believes they are enormously lucky to be on the receiving end of such polite and affirming disagreement, considers a few more months, or a few more holdouts, to be a reasonable asking price. “I’m getting this transition at a fraction of the cost – what a steal,” they might say to themselves at first, suffused with the same pleasure as a bargain shopper who finds an unexpected double-markdown.
This is not just a phenomenon for teachers. But as Lavery says, it is “most frequently encountered when an adult transitions in an otherwise-cis environment” - schools being an excellent example. Schools are on the front lines of enforcing the gender binary, and they are where most of us will first encounter it - changing rooms, seating plans, sometimes even the entire school itself is an act of gender segregation. Miss/Sir, line up boys and girls, dinner ladies and lollipop ladies and boys will be boys and, and, and. There are so many gendered defaults in schools that escaping each one needs to be carefully negotiated, and each negotiation risks an objection, a holdout, a polite and affirming disagreement.
The spectre of transgendering and becoming the man hung over me for the remaining time I spent in that school job, as I became less and less comfortable going to work each day and playing the part of a cisgender woman. As I started to feel less agender and more yes, a gender, just a different one. Of course, there was part of me who simply didn’t want Jackie to say “I knew it!”. But there was more to it than that. Like I said, the remark tapped into deeper things. I knew everyone knew my wife was trans, and I knew that schools are saturated in discourse about trans young people, including the notion of social contagion. I was haunted by the idea of confirming those biases, and pre-emptively exhausted at the prospect of trying to explain them away. I couldn’t bring myself to do all the negotiations I would need - here is a pronoun, here is what it means. I couldn’t bring myself to negotiate everyone’s feelings about it. And of course, there is the lingering danger that there is something worse beneath the benign confusion. There is the hope that benign confusion is the very worst you’ll get, because underneath that are all the implications that you are a danger to the children you care for. If all you get is endless exhausting apparently well-meaning obstruction, well, better be thankful.
I keep thinking that if I’d been braver and come out before I quit, I would have made it easier for the next person. But it’s more complex than that. In a lot of ways, I couldn’t come out fully to myself until I quit. The processes of having possibilities shut down for you, and shutting them down for yourself, are intertwined and reciprocal. As Lavery puts it,
There are many of us who preemptively foreclose upon a number of possible identities, actions, behaviors, changes, pharmacological and medical interventions out of an unshakeable, if difficult-to-articulate conviction that the only available way to transition is
as little as possible,
as slowly as possible,
while repeatedly seeking permission and buy-in from partners, parents, relatives, roommates, and various other authority figures (whether real or imagined).
The idea of pre-emptively foreclosing a possibility because someone else might not approve is, unfortunately, one that’s all too familiar to me, and one I’m trying to unlearn. In the meantime, I think it’s helpful to name it. I’m truly grateful now to be moving towards ways of being in community which open possibility rather than close it.
