The purpose of this article is to provide insight to the multiple ways that school leaders resist, avoid, or block LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, queer, and questioning) professional development for their staff and, thus, resist the conversations around school responsibility to these students and families. Research Method: The data presented in this article include interviews and field notes drawn from evaluation studies of the Reduction of Stigma in Schools© professional development program and are related to a single emergent theme. Findings: School leaders who resisted LGBTQ professional development claimed such training was not relevant to their school contexts, the training would attract community backlash, the school board would not approve the training, or school personnel would not be interested in learning about LGBTQ students. Implications: The authors conclude that increasing LGBTQ content in educational leadership training is a necessary step for convincing school leadership that LGBTQcompetence is necessary for creating a positive school climate for all.

Increased visibility of transgender children requires elementary school professionals to take on issues of gender diversity, sex and sexuality, which are considered taboo in elementary school spaces. School professionals who have worked with transgender children were interviewed about their experience with these students, perceptions of their school's success in supporting them, and recommendations for information and resources needed by schools to provide support. Findings indicate that fear and anxiety are common educator responses to the presence of a transgender child and the disruption of the gender binary, and these emotions are limiting the possibilities for schools to affirm transgender identity.

No abstract

Dominant understanding of LGBTQ students’ school experiences has been shaped by discourses that reduce “the problem” to bullies who express homophobic attitudes by targeting LGBTQ peers. In turn, interventions typically focus on eliminating bullying behaviors and providing protection for victims. Within this framework, cultural privileging of heterosexuality and gender normativity goes unquestioned, LGBTQ marginalization is reproduced and re-entrenched in new ways, and schools avoid responsibility for complicity in LGBTQ harassment. This paper explores educators’ stories of LGBTQ harassment and how dominant bullying discourses are shaping educators’ understandings of the needs of LGBTQ students. We propose a new definition of bullying to create a more useful framework for understanding the social nature of peer-to-peer aggression and designing interventions to address the cultural roots of this aggression. Finally, we take the position that a majority of peer-to-peer aggression in U.S. public schools is some form of gender policing , and we believe bullying must be redefined to account for relationships between peer targeting and structural inequalities.

No abstract