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The Regulation of Inclusion: An Exploration of School Culture, Pride Narratives, and the Limits of in the National Imaginary

by

Jillian Stagg

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Social Justice Education University of

© Copyright by Jillian Stagg 2019

The Regulation of Inclusion: An Exploration of School Culture, Pride Narratives, and the Limits of Queer in the National Imaginary

Jillian Stagg

Master of Arts

Social Justice Education

2019

Abstract

The following study provides a critical examination of the current landscape of 2SLGBTQ+

(two-spirit, , , bisexual, trans, queer) inclusion for high school students in several major Canadian provinces. In order to locate particular strengths and limitations within the predominant framework of inclusion, this study uses a comparative analysis to highlight the

(dis)connections between institutional narratives of inclusion (i.e., school policies; school climate surveys; political discourse; and mainstream Pride narratives) and individual accounts of inclusion in school (i.e., 2SLGBTQ+ perspectives and experiences). Findings highlight the various ways in which the prevailing framework of inclusion remains heavily influenced by heteronormative, colonial, and ableist standards of belonging, which consequently, continues to exclude 2SLGBTQ+ voices and lived experiences. The included perspectives from 2SLGBTQ+ youth, families, and educators offer unique opportunities to both re-examine and reconceptualize how prevalent notions of ‘inclusion’ and ‘well-being’ are being reproduced, operationalized, and experienced by all students in school.

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Acknowledgments

I am eternally grateful for the opportunity to recognize and give thanks to the wonderful, inspiring, and endlessly supportive people in my life.

To my ever-growing family, all of whom dreamed my dreams alongside of me, and provided me the inspiration, the courage, and support that I needed, every step of the way.

To the person who I have been co-creating with in the tiny apartment that we’ve made a home, my laydee, my love, and my light, Rebecca Rose. Also, to our weird, curious, hyper, beautiful kitten, who always keeps us laughing and always makes us feel whole.

To my supervisor, Dr. Gillian Parekh, and co-supervisor, Dr. Vannina Sztainbok, your genuine interest and encouragement is the spark that makes me and this work feel boundless.

To the student walkouts; Toronto; the incredible, and tremendously formative professors at OISE and Saint Mary’s University, I am so lucky to have shared space and ideas with you. To the youth I have had the privilege to work with, and learn from, at Leave Out ViolencE (LOVE) and the Youth Project in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who continually push for a better world and ways of living in it.

Further, to the entrance bursary I received at the beginning of this momentous program, the incredible support of the Graduate Scholarship (OGS), and the Keith A. MacLeod Bursary. The following forms of financial support made the constant practice of writing and researching more possible.

Ultimately, this study is for the students in school we have lost, and are currently losing, to bullying, , and systemic exclusion. Student voices, in particular, queer, trans, and two-spirit voices need to be both heard and fundamental to our understandings and efforts in building more equitable, inclusive, and affirming schooling environments.

We have so much to learn and unlearn community, inclusion, acceptance, and leadership from the voices of students living and learning today.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments...... iii

Table of Contents ...... iv

A Note on Language and Land ...... v

Introduction Queer Encounters and a Sense of One’s Place...... viii

Methodology ...... xv

Chapter 1 Contextualizing School Climate and Culture ...... 1

1.1 Access, Acceptance, and Attitudinal Belonging ...... 1

Chapter 2 Situating the Pride Movement in this Study ...... 7

2.1 The Pride Effect: Unsettling the Politics, Performances, and Perceptions of Inclusion ...... 7

2.2 Pride (Dis)Orientations as Incentive for In-School Research ...... 22

Chapter 3 The Dilemma of Queer in School and Society ...... 33

3.1 Inclusion, Intent, and the Politics of Belonging ...... 33

3.2 School Policy and the Limits of Queer in the National Imaginary ...... 45

Chapter 4 Student and School Accounts of Gender and ...... 62

4.1 Narrative Preservation in School Climate Surveys: Examining Institutional Accounts of Belonging ...... 62

4.2 First-hand Accounts of School Climate and the 2SLGBTQ+ Experience ...... 76

Summary ...... 93

Findings and Recommendations ...... 99

Future Directions: Queering Measures of Inclusion ...... 106

Developing an Anonymous Survey Tool: Implications for Future Practice...... 111

Works Cited ...... 113

Appendices: (Appendix A) Anonymous Student Survey Tool...... 134

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A Note on Language and Land

To begin, I would like to acknowledge the land that I have been able to write, work, and live upon over the past 3 years. I would also like to respectfully recognize the many Indigenous peoples and nations who are immersed in a longstanding fight to be acknowledged and valued on their own lands, and within their own cultural practices and languages.

The place of which I am currently writing, known as Tkaronto (Toronto), has been and continues to be cared for by the Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Huron- Wendat. It is home to many Indigenous peoples and nations. I would also like to acknowledge the current treaty holders, the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation. This territory is also subject to the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement to peaceably share and care for the Great Lakes region.

As a white settler of Scottish and English heritage, whose ancestors predominantly settled in Newfoundland and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia (where the bulk of my family currently resides), I carry with me a sentiment from Solidarity Halifax, an active community group in K’jipuktuk (Halifax) where I moved to Tkaronto from, and where Peace and Friendship Treaties cover the unceded territories of the Mi’kmaq and the Wabanaki Confederacy.

The group reflected that:

To say that we are on unceded Mi’kmaq territory is a simple affirmation. Yet, it seems for many to affirm a complex and confusing reality. All of us in K’jipuktuk (Halifax) are standing or sitting, reading, talking, living and going about our daily routines on unceded Mi’kmaq territory. [But] What does that mean? What does that mean for whom? And what do we do about it?

The following sentiment is something that echoes throughout this study, and continues to move me towards new understandings, responsibilities, actions, and continuing the work of social justice from a place that resists ongoing colonization, which continually seeks to position whiteness as fundamental to conceptions of inclusion, acceptance, equality, and wellness. Therefore, the following study seeks to bring forward various ongoing accounts and lived experiences that illustrate the ways in which our educational systems continue to replicate old

v patterns, behaviors, and ideological frameworks that deny Indigenous and two-spirit people recognition, rights, respect, justice, and equitable access to inclusion and belonging.

Ultimately, it is crucial that my work, as a settler of this land, upholds this acknowledgment by continuing to show up and call-out colonial celebrations, and hold accountable colonial systems that contribute to the ongoing violence and dispossession experienced by Indigenous peoples, their communities, their knowledges, and their lands.

………

I would also like to note that when speaking to the 2SLGBTQ+ community, I have intentionally chosen to use the language ‘queer, two-spirit, trans, and questioning’ throughout, in an effort to encompass a broad and diverse range of non-dominant experiences, expressions, and ways of being in the world.

As a through line in this study is a critical and contextual interrogation of the ideological pathways that inform the use and circulation of particular narratives and policy rhetoric, the study of language provides a pivotal entry point into deconstructing and resisting heteropatriarchal, colonial, and ableist forms of oppression, which manipulates language in foreclosing queer possibilities.

Reflecting upon a highly formative term spent with Tara Goldstein, benjamin lee hicks, and Austen Koecher in their graduate course on Gender, Sexuality and Schooling, language and its evolving, personal, culturally specific uses was an ongoing point of arrival and dialogue for every student and educator in that classroom. This approach to language allowed me to witness and participate in a learning environment that deeply understood and respected the power and impacts of language, both within and outside of schooling environments.

In respecting language as a living, breathing, evolving entity, this course critically questioned, destabilized, and reclaimed the myriad ways institutions seek to utilize language systems in measuring and regulating queer bodies and lived experiences.

To echo the sentiments of Goldstein (2019):

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I’ve learned that the ways people describe their gender and sexual identities are always evolving. This means the list I’ve put together…will change over time. I’ve also learned that, when I talk about people’s identities, I show respect by using the names and pronouns people use themselves. If I’m not sure how people identify, I’ve learned to ask. (p. 1)

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Introduction Queer Encounters and a Sense of One’s Place

What difference does it make what we are oriented toward? - Sara Ahmed, Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology

When I began researching and writing about the inclusion of gender and sexual diversity in schools, I began with a focus on Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) in high schools and an interest in student affect. I was particularly interested in the role these spaces played in orienting students and staff around notions of gender, sexuality, and inclusion. What I quickly realized, however, is that a critical exploration into the purpose and implications of GSAs in school would be incomplete without a deeper focus on the educational landscape within which these spaces were situated.

The importance of re-ordering my methodology to gain a more contextualized understanding of schooling environments was further confirmed during my discussions of 2SLGBTQ+ inclusion with others. My ensuing conversations often focused on the expected outcomes of my research, i.e., what the end results would be, what I was going to find, and what I was planning to do after the completion of my study. Apart from conversations with those already invested in gender, sexuality, inclusion, and equity in education, I rarely came across someone who was interested in the process of my work, i.e., the more fluid, unexpected or often unknown aspects of researching the inclusion of diverse genders and sexualities in school.

What I failed to understand at the time, however, is that such interactions not only provided an integral foundation for my research – in recognizing the ways in which social encounters are often nestled within preconceived notions and expectations – but the desire for a known outcome over an ambiguous process provided an important entry point into society’s oft inability to accept and acknowledge the uncomfortable, the unexpected, and the potentially unknown.

As this research study began from an interest in how students experience and understand gender, sexuality, and inclusion in relation to GSAs in school, a critical through line in this study will focus on a critical, comparative analysis of first-hand encounters with institutional and societal discourses of inclusion (i.e., school policies, practices, political rhetoric, and mainstream Pride

viii narratives) that dictate and often foreclose the possibilities of diverse gender and sexual identities and expressions.

Therefore, this study provides a more macro-level analysis of institutional and societal processes of inclusion in order to lay critical groundwork for future research focused on smaller-scale encounters between individuals and their surrounding discourses and practices of inclusion (such as GSAs in school, for example). In future, it is my hope that this current research study will provide the foundation needed to critically examine connections between macro- and micro- levels of social and institutional forces that consciously or unconsciously organize and inform student perceptions, behaviors, and wellness. In particular, the macro scope of this study aims to unsettle the “LGBTQ” subject position1 within stabilized and popularized notions of inclusion in order to trouble expectations surrounding gender, sexuality, and diversity.

As a queer researcher, I have always been interested in the organization and maintenance of the social. Specifically, how social spaces and encounters call towards and organize bodies in particular ways that maintain dominant ideologies or a “system of representations” (Althusser, 2010), which serve social and political ends. In looking towards the social spaces that exist within and outside the public education system, for example, that dictate the place of non- normative gender and sexuality, my research seeks to provide a deeper understanding into how hegemonic structures and systems of power and legitimacy (Gramsci, 2010) operate within discourses and practices of inclusion. Specifically, in ways that limit and hinder how diverse populations come to understand and value their layered experiences, identities, and social positions in relation to others.

Having begun my studies in Social Justice Education at OISE shortly after Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO) orchestrated an instrumental sit-in at Toronto Pride in 2016 (further discussed in Chapter 2), the courses I invested in thereafter were pivotal in shaping my research and reconsiderations into inclusion, equity, and progress, as narrated and practiced within educational settings, especially for those who continued to experience systemic oppression due to their

1 In speaking to the 2SLGBTQ+ community, I will often use the language “queer, trans, and two-spirit” in an effort to more broadly address those who exist outside of society’s dominant and acceptable expressions of gender and sexuality. ix intersecting identities and lived experiences. BLMTO’s sit-in at Pride in 2016 was a moment that not only demanded a re-examination of the conditions that have led to Pride becoming a mainstream entry point into gender, sexuality, and inclusion, but also the conditions that have led to the continued displacement and disrecognition of racialized, trans, queer, two-spirit, sex- working, immigrant, and poor members of the imagined ‘LGBTQ’ community.

After researching and writing within a culmination of courses that critically questioned and deconstructed educational discourse and practice, more specifically, the role of identity in education (Lauren Bialystok), in education (Rinaldo Walcott), race and knowledge production (Vannina Sztainbok), disability in the classroom (Gillian Parekh), approaches to anti- and anti- education (Tara Goldstein), and major concepts and issues in social justice education (Terezia Zoric), Tara Goldstein’s graduate course focusing on “Sexualities, Gender and Schooling: Approaches to Anti-Homophobia and Anti-Transphobia Education” was the last course I took at OISE, and was fundamental in piecing together cumulative ideas and concerns surrounding the ways in which colonial, ableist, and heterosexist standards of normality manifest in inclusive discourses and practices.

As will be outlined in my Methodology, Goldstein’s critical examination of school policies and practices, which interrogated the biases that implicate and often foreclose the work of inclusion and equity in schools, further cemented my concerns that queer, trans, and two-spirit youth (in particular queer and trans youth of color) were navigating school cultures that upheld heteronormative and colonial parameters of belonging and wellness. In order to further explore the dissonance between inclusive policy and practice, the scope of my research entailed a specific focus on the various ways in which institutional accounts of student inclusion and wellness corresponded or conflicted with queer, trans, and two-spirit first-hand experiences (as illuminated by personal narratives, and 2SLGBTQ-focused school climate surveys). From this perspective, a key question framing my research was: What could be learned from examining school policies and practices from an intersectional and comparative lens? How can the incorporation of first-hand accounts of inclusion help to identify and challenge the limited parameters of belonging in school? And ultimately, the imagined student within discourses of inclusion, gender and sexual diversity?

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From my personal experiences working with queer, trans, and two-spirit youth, educators, activists, and artists, I have learned that intersectional encounters with schooling environments can illuminate a great deal about the roots of hostility, exclusion, and harassment in schools. In doing so, intersectional accounts further highlight what is at stake when school climate surveys, for example, overlook minority voices and experiences when assessing the relationships between students and their schooling environments.

Considering the field of social geography (as the study of social structures, spaces, and their impacts on the social), and of phenomenology (as the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness), the crux of my research stems from a steadfast belief that the narratives and social practices that aim to communicate belonging and non-belonging require ongoing, critical, and intersectional deliberation. In speaking to the Pride movement, for example, I will explore what it is at stake when narratives of gender, sexuality, and inclusion become popularized and static, and thus normalized and withdrawn from critical view. In the section that follows, I will examine the (mis)uses of gender and sexual diversity within the current political landscape of Ontario under a Progressive-Conservative (PC) government, and situate the as a highly politicized structure, that when questioned, nuanced, and destabilized, threatens the hegemonic order of a colonial, heteropatriarchal, and capitalist nation- state.

In moving towards a comparative analysis of the dominant discourse of gender and sexual diversity, as demonstrated in school climate surveys, school policies, and several key studies focusing on safe, inclusive, and positive schools, I will compare institutional accounts of non- normative gender and sexuality alongside student responses and their own experiences of institutional and societal narratives of gender and sexual diversity. In doing so, I will interrogate the persistent tensions between heteronormative frameworks of belonging (which dangerously foreclose diverse possibility) and the experiences of students and staff who tirelessly fight for the language, practices, and spaces for which to expand possibilities of belonging.

As will be further discussed in Chapter 4, in response to a recent institutional study focusing on the School Resource Officer (SRO) program and its impacts on school culture and climate, TDSB executive superintendent on engagement and well-being reflected that: “…reviews like Ryerson’s miss the mark… universities may crunch and find that the majority of

xi students react positively to the SRO, like in a recent Carleton University review of Peel Regional Police’s program. But what about the students who don’t?” (Rattan, 2017). Indeed, as this study argues, when our discursive and structural frameworks of inclusion primarily consider dominant voices and experiences, students who have historically remained outside the parameters of belonging will continue to experience a prevailing reality of fear, exclusion, and isolation from their schooling environments.

In looking towards other institutional studies and climate surveys focusing on issues of hostility and exclusion in school (such as bullying, both physical and verbal; discrimination; suicidality; and risk), the root causes of oppression based on , , and is often linked to homophobia and transphobia, without examining how fear and is reproduced on institutional levels. In other words, while overarching categories, such as homophobia and transphobia, help to locate the specific fears and underlying an oppressive attitude or behavior, such categories do not adequately account for the particular ways in which 2SLGBTQ+ students are targeted based on race, class, and disability in conjunction with sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.

Following the insights of social worker and sociologist Robert Wright, who has been at the forefront of critical work surrounding trauma, sexual violence, and cultural competence for close to three decades, what he continues to encounter in working with queer and trans youth of color is this persistent feeling of fear when navigating their multiple identities within more conventionally socialized spaces, such as the school, for example. This fear, Wright recalls, is in large part due to “the fear of being identified; and that fear is about the fear of hostility, the fear of rejection, the fear of judgement, the fear of being written out… and unfortunately many, many, many of us still fear that” (CBC Radio, 2019b). Therefore, as this study argues, when intersecting identities are neither expected nor validated within prominent discourses and practices of inclusion, a prevailing reality of fear and hostility will continue to encompass the lives and experiences of marginalized youth in school.

In the final section, I draw upon the insights of critical pedagogy, queer studies, and critical disability studies to focus more exclusively on inclusive policies and procedures put forth by the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) and the Ministry of Education. In this section, I will argue that such policies, which focus on inclusion and equity in education, merely advocate for

xii the inclusion of marginalized and “at-risk” students, while continuing to cite and valorize heteronormative, ableist, and colonial values as the benchmark of inclusion and belonging.

In an attempt to respond to this concern, I will also draw upon the term queer as a verb throughout this study; an action word that provokes the ongoing practice of questioning, reconfiguring, and reimagining social frameworks, practices, institutions, and our positions within particular narratives and spaces. As hicks (2017) demonstrates in their essay, “Gracefully unexpected, deeply present and positively disruptive: Love and queerness in classroom community,” the ability to queer the classroom experience is not solely based on hicks’ identity and expression as a queer person, but rather, their actions as a teacher, and the possibility models made available in which to envision diverse expressions of gender, sexuality, and identity. As a queer educator, hicks (2017) emphasizes that “any adult who has the privilege to work with children also has a responsibility to help them learn about a multidimensional universe of intersecting identities before all of the false binaries…become their automatic default for everything from math problems to washroom use” (p. 15).

As taken up by Ahmed (2006) in her seminal approach to phenomenology, as being “full of queer moments,” the following research study seeks to provoke a deeper understanding of “the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of nearness or what is ready to hand, and the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds” (p. 544). We all come to an understanding of gender and sexuality based on varying reference points, and orient ourselves accordingly based upon these understandings, or as Ahmed (2006) puts forward, what is near or “ready to hand” (p. 544). Thus, what this study aims to reveal is not only an awareness of the dominant narratives made available for students (the what), but the intentions of students when identifying and positioning themselves within such narratives (the why).

In an effort to dig deeper into the logics and values that inform institutional interactions, it is also important for me to critically examine how heteronormative and colonial norms have influenced my own ability to perceive and value diverse identities and expressions of gender and sexuality. That said, in exploring student response in relation to institutional and societal perceptions of gender and sexual diversity, I am careful and intentional when drawing attention to particular narratives and student responses that are often disregarded in school climate surveys and data collection processes.

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It is my hope that an increased understanding of student perception and intentionality will lead to new understandings and directions for the inclusion of gender and sexually diverse students in schools. In questioning the mainstream narratives of gender and sexuality that emanate from dominant discourses and practices of inclusion, it is also my hope that schools can better foster a sense of belonging and well-being for all students. Ultimately, as will be further illustrated in this study, when student experiences of inclusion, access, and well-being are only measured within binary, heteronormative, and colonial frameworks of belonging, the dominant conceptions of marginalized students will continue to be positioned within narratives of risk, exclusion, and inadequacy. As will be demonstrated by alternative studies (2SLGBTQ-focused) and personal narratives, when educational frameworks of inclusion (which exist on the structural and discursive levels) are welcoming, expecting, and affirming towards intersecting realities and experiences in school, it can make all the difference – for all students in school.

Therefore, drawing upon student voice and experiences concerning the inclusion of diverse genders and sexualities will thus provide critical insight into the effectiveness and limitations of practices that advocate for students most at-risk in schools. It is also my hope that the findings and discussions that emerge from this study will provide an opportunity for teachers, administrators, and policymakers to question and re-evaluate how secondary schools are fostering a sense of belonging and inclusion for all students in schools. In order to better address school cultures that continue to be hostile towards 2SLGBTQ+ students, there needs to be new discourses and practices available for which to envision change.

This research study is one attempt to do so.

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Methodology

As touched upon in my Introduction, a formative juncture for this study occurred in the Fall of 2017 while I was immersed in a graduate course entitled, “Sexualities, Gender and Schooling: Approaches to Anti-Homophobia and Anti-Transphobia Education” taught by Tara Goldstein, benjamin lee hicks, and Austen Koecher. The course was designed to equip Masters of Education (MEd) and Master of Teaching (MT) students with the language of gender and sexual diversity (both within and beyond school cultures); key conceptual frameworks for thinking through anti- homophobia, anti-genderism, and anti-transphobia education; as well as providing tangible practices for students, staff, and administrators to thoughtfully and effectively address the ways in which , homophobia, transphobia, , and ableism intersect and manifest in school settings.2

Through its critical interrogation of policy documents for LGBTQ staff and students within the TDSB, such as the TDSB’s Equity Foundation Statement (2000); Guidelines for the Accommodation of and Gender Non-Conforming Students and Staff (2013); and Caring and Safe Schools Report (2017); as well as provincial policies in Ontario such as, Creating Safe and Accepting Schools (2012); Equity and Inclusive Education Guidelines (2014); and Ontario’s Well-Being Strategy For Education (2016), Goldstein and her co-educators provided a crucial starting point into researching the inclusion of 2SLGBTQIA+ students in school settings. Moreover, the thoughtful incorporation of 2SLGBTQIA+ guest speakers (who experienced first-hand the limitations and successes of inclusive discourse and practice) provided the language and conceptual frameworks for which to articulate and define my own research question and methodology.3

Upon witnessing the backlash BLMTO received (as a group predominately consisting of cis black, queer, trans, and disabled people) after demanding equitable access to resources, space,

2 A more detailed overview of Goldstein’s course outline can be found here: http://www.lgbtqfamiliesspeakout.ca/news/archives/06-2015

3 Goldstein, T., Russell, V., & Daley, A. (2007). Safe, positive and queering moments in teaching education and schooling: A conceptual framework. Teaching Education Journal, 18(3), pp. 183-199.

xv and visibility during Pride and within the broader LGBTQ community, my research began with the following questions: How were these intersecting experiences and expressions of gender and sexual diversity being celebrated, meaningfully included, and honored within the mainstream narrative of Pride and 2SLGBTQ inclusion? In what ways were schooling environments influenced by this particular notion of Pride and 2SLGBTQ inclusion?

In an effort to respond to such questions, my methodological approach consisted of an extensive review of existing practices, policies, and climate surveys pertaining to the inclusion of gender and sexual diversity in schools. A review of the current educational landscape for gender and sexual diversity also took into account inclusive practices, policies, and school climate surveys that missed the opportunity to include gender and sexual diversity in measuring school climate and student wellness. The purpose behind gathering educational documents that either included or dismissed gender and sexual diversity was to illuminate the ways in which inclusive rhetoric imagines a particular type of student body when referencing gender and sexuality. In analyzing school climate surveys, for example, a key consideration was on the role of the question, i.e., what was being asked in order to measure and determine a positive school climate. Moreover, how were predominant framings of gender and sexuality reveal expectations surrounding diversity and belonging.

That said, a driving force in analyzing the particular narratives and values that uphold inclusive policies and practices has been Bourdieu’s (1989) notion of habitus, which underlines how social practices and structures organize a “sense of one’s place” as well as a “sense of the place of others” (p. 19), in order to better understand how diverse student bodies encounter, navigate, and perhaps internalize certain notions surrounding gender and sexual diversity and inclusion.

Further, in conducting a comparative analysis of effective and/or limited approaches to inclusion from an intersectional perspective facilitated the necessary rejection of frameworks that continue to position queer, trans, and two-spirit expressions and experiences within notions of deficit, exclusion, and risk. In applying Bourdieu’s (1989) notion of habitus with the consideration of , I was able to refine my research intent, and question: What does it mean to perceive yourself as included and belonging in school? What are the prevailing limits of inclusive rhetoric within school policies, practices, and school climate surveys? Which students remain outside of predominant notions of gender and sexual diversity in school?

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In responding to these questions, my methodological approach consisted of analyzing inclusive school practices, policies, and school climate surveys alongside queer, trans, and two-spirit perspectives of inclusion in order to locate particular strengths and limitations within the predominant framework of inclusion in education. In conducting a comparative analysis of institutional and personal accounts of inclusion, the differing perspectives that emerged surrounding gender, sexuality, inclusion, and wellness highlighted the ways in which the prevailing framework of inclusion remains heavily influenced by heteronormative, colonial, and ableist standards of belonging, which consequently, continues to exclude intersectional voices and lived experiences.

As demonstrated in the final report by Human Rights Trust, “Every Class in Every School: The First National Climate Survey on Homophobia, , and Transphobia in Canadian Schools” (2011); the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network’s (GLSEN’s) “National School Climate Survey: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth in our Nation’s Schools” (2014); Peter, Taylor, and Chamberland’s (2015) “A Queer Day in Canada: Examining Canadian High School Students’ Experiences with School-based Homophobia in Two Large-scale Studies”; Gahagan’s (2016) noteworthy study, “Exploring the School Climate for Gender and Sexuality Minority Students and Staff in Nova Scotia: A Survey of NSTU Teachers”; the TDSB’s “Caring and Safe Schools Report 2016-2017” (2017); and lastly, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s (CAMH’s) report on “The Mental Health and Well-Being of Ontario Students 1991-2017” (2017), the following surveys – although significant regarding perceptions of school climate for at-risk youth and staff in Canadian schools – such approaches to data collection and analysis remained grounded in singular or binary frameworks, which consequently, failed to address the effects of school culture on intersecting identities, as well as the heightened risks of oppression and marginalization for those students in school.

More specifically, in Gahagan’s (2016) “Exploring the School Climate for Gender and Sexuality Minority Students and Staff in Nova Scotia” as well as CAMH’s report on “The Mental Health and Well-Being of Ontario Students” (2017), a common (and significant) issue that arose was a general disregard for intersectionality, and thus, a dismissal of the ways in which perceptions of school climate and well-being – in relation to sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression – differs when considering other identity markers such as race, disability, class, xvii citizenship, nationality, creed, etc. Therefore, a comparative analysis of institutional climate surveys (such as those conducted by CAMH; EGALE; GLSEN; and the TDSB) placed alongside non-conventional surveys (Genovese, Rousell, & The Two Spirit Circle of Edmonton Society, 2011; Kempf, 2017; Portelli et. al, 2007; Saewyc et. al, 2011, 2013), and first-hand accounts of 2SLGBTQ+ inclusion in schools (Goldstein et al., 2014-2020; Hernandez, 2017; Sylliboy & Young, 2017; Wolowic et al., 2017) revealed significant limitations within the prevailing discourse of inclusion, wellness, and belonging in education.

This became further evident when researching various approaches to measuring and analyzing the overall health and well-being of gender and sexual minorities in school. When examining the following policies and initiatives put forth by the TDSB, such as: the Equity Foundation Statement (2000); Student Dress Code (2012), Caring and Safe Schools (2013); Guidelines for the Accommodation of Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Students and Staff (2013); Accessibility Policy (2018); Equity Policy (2018); and the Appropriate Dress Policy (2018); as well as policies from the Ministry of Education, such as: the Accepting Schools Act (2012); and the Ontario Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy (2016), a common through line was a discourse that strongly advocated for the inclusion of historically marginalized students and staff, while continuing to position non-white, disabled, and/or queer students within conceptualizations of marginalization, risk, and exclusion.

Guiding my critical analysis of the above policy documents were various community concerns and calls to action, as put forward by BLMTO, the End Dress Codes Collective (2018), and other community activists and academics who were also invested in more equitable and innovative approaches to understanding and including gender and sexual diversity in schools. Of particular interest to my research were the community consultations with the TDSB to address the oppressive language systems still operating within their Appropriate Dress Policy (2018). The ensuing consultations focused on the use of language within the policy document (which reproduced racist, heterosexist, and classist prejudices) and left unclear how the policy would facilitate a more equitable and inclusive schooling environment – and for whom? Thus, in focusing on the perspectives outside of dominant institutional frameworks, community concerns and criticisms helped broaden and complexify conventional approaches to measuring the inclusion and well-being of gender and sexual minorities in school.

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As a key focus of my research was shaped by a concern in the disconnect between institutional and personal accounts of inclusion in relation to gender and sexual diversity, an intersectional and multi-layered (national, institutional, personal) approach revealed innovative and nuanced understandings that spoke to the lived experiences of queer, trans, and two-spirit youth in school. As stated, in my review of existing school policies, practices, school climate surveys, and several large-scale studies focusing on the experiences of gender and sexual minorities, the research on inclusion and well-being for minority youth predominantly focused on the discourse of accommodation, bullying, suicide, risk, and achievement levels when evaluating school experience, without a deeper consideration into how such narrative structures uphold discriminatory and damaging biases. In my review of the literature on 2SLGBTQ+ youth in schools, researchers and organizations rarely examined the underlying impacts that binary, colonial, and heteronormative discourses and practices have on upholding hostile and negative schooling environments for queer, trans, and two-spirit youth.

One notable study, however, effectively highlighted how various forms of institutional and structural narratives intertwine and negatively impact school climate and culture for LGBTQ students, such as the oppressive use of school policies and practices, binary bathrooms, heteronormative curriculum, and educator bias.4 In doing so, the latest National School Climate Survey (2018) by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) found that the “vast majority of LGBTQ students (87.3%) experienced harassment or assault based on personal characteristics, including sexual orientation, gender expression, gender, religion, race and ethnicity, and disability” (p. 5). Within GLSEN’s (2018) entire report, this finding (87.3%), was one of the highest and most concerning statistic, and further emphasized the value in considering the combination of discursive and institutional influences in order to adequately address the roots of discrimination, hostility, and social inequity in school.

Moreover, for the first time GLSEN’s (2018) National School Climate Survey also included insights on the experiences of LGBTQ students with disabilities, and experiences of LGBTQ

4 To view GLSEN’s (2018) infographics that further illustrate the negative impacts of school environments on queer and trans youth, see: https://www.glsen.org/sites/default/files/NSCS-Infographics-Trans-Good-News-1200x630.png xix

immigrant students.5 Such an intersectional examination of school climate and culture, as this study puts forward, is a crucial component in providing a holistic assessment and understanding of the prejudices and obstacles students experience in obtaining a positive and welcoming school.

In my search for similar studies that interrogated hostility and exclusion as both structurally and discursively produced, Out in the Fields (2015) clearly communicated the disconnect I was exploring in terms of institutional and student accounts of inclusion and well-being. As the first and largest international study on homophobia in sport, Out in the Fields (2015), conducted by lead author Erik Denison, explored the glaring disconnect between homophobic attitudes and behaviors prevalent in team sport, and the contradictory belief that such spaces were still inclusive and accepting on an institutional and structural level. What Denison (2015) found was that while “80% of these players admitted to either using or hearing homophobic language within the last two weeks,” the same respondents also indicated that their “locker room and supporters would be accepting to a player who would come out…” (CBC Radio, 2019c).

Such findings affirmed my concerns that although anti-2SLGBTQ+ attitudes and behaviors are reproduced on the individual level, school climate surveys and other large-scale studies need to acknowledge the impacts of structurally and discursively produced cultures that maintain hostile and unwelcoming environments for 2SLGBTQ+ youth. As emphasized by gay hockey referee Andrea Barone in response to the Out on the Fields (2015) study: “…there is a disconnect there… They’re using [oppressive] language, yet they’re saying that the environment is accepting, so they don’t realize that the language is actually damaging…And that’s the biggest hurdle, to educate them that that language actually is extremely damaging” (CBC Radio, 2019c).

Therefore, as this study will explore, what is needed in order to push back against the damaging disconnect between institutional and individual accounts of inclusion is a more critical and intentional focus on “the way things get told and what the weight of telling is” (Brand, 2005, p. 283). As asserted by Sylliboy and Young (2017) in their research study focusing on Stories: Two Spirit Narratives in Atlantic Canada: “…narratives are powerful, insightful and

5 GLSEN’s (2018) full report and executive summary can be found here: https://www.glsen.org/article/2017- national-school-climate-survey xx knowledge building processes to understand how the coming out process is for Two Spirits and indigenous LGBTQ individuals. The collection of narratives is a primary source of expanding the analysis to explore how gender and sexuality can be further explored or understood” (p. 16). Moreover, deepening traditional understandings of gender and sexuality in the development of school policy and practice will increase inclusion, access, and well-being to the benefit of all students in school by creating an environment that is based on models of empowerment, resistance, and strength (Wilson, 1996).

Consequently, as long as the language of policy and climate surveys are rooted in conceptual frameworks that replicate and reify binary, heteronormative, and colonial frameworks of belonging, the dominant conceptions of gender and sexual diversity will continue to be measured within narratives of risk, exclusion, and inadequacy. Ultimately, the proliferation of a single-axis framework (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 139), and the discourse that emerges from data outcomes and analyses, fails to fully explain “how what appears to be a neutral system [such as the school] can produce different outcomes for people based on the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, age, citizenship status and other aspects of social identities” (Durfee, 2018). Which is why the incorporation of first-hand accounts from students, staff, and parent(s)/guardian(s) provided a critical entry point to address gaps in the literature, and provide new and imaginative practices and approaches to understanding and including gender and sexual diversity in schools.

The intersectionality of voices from students, teachers, parent(s)/guardian(s), and activists was thus a critical entry point into better understanding the role of education for intersecting identities, and suggested creative and humanizing interventions to better support, expect, and affirm the lived realities of gender and sexual diversity in school. As observed by Chamberland and Saewyc (2011): “the intersectional perspective, which focuses on the multiplicity of social identities that individuals may claim, or that are imposed upon them, which trace back to entrenched logics of oppression, intersections of gender, class, race, ethnicity, geographic location, disability, etc.” (p. 2) was an essential perspective to this process, and facilitated a greatly needed interrogation of new and innovative narratives and measures that queer, trans, and two-spirit youth require in schools in order to feel expected and affirmed in all their complexities.

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In a similar study to my own, conducted by the Stigma and Resilience Among Vulnerable Youth Centre (SARAVYC), entitled “Layers of Stigma Among Adolescents: Developing a Comprehensive Measure,” the researchers draw particular attention to the persistent and concerning use of single-axis frameworks found within stigma measures for vulnerable youth. When conducting their own scan of the literature on stigmatized youth and existing measures aimed to address behaviors targeting vulnerable youth, Saewyc et. al (2013) found that “most stigma measures are for a single characteristic, such as mental illness, or HIV/AIDS… [and] does not allow us to capture ‘layered’ stigma (i.e., the compound effects of stigma from multiple stigmatized characteristics).” A critical component of this particular study, which strongly resonates with my own survey measures, was the general stigmatization measure Saewyc et. al (2013) developed to unpack the “three dimensions of stigma: enacted stigma (rejecting hostile behaviours targeted toward stigmatized people), perceived stigma (awareness you possess a stigmatized characteristic and others reject you), and internalized stigma (acceptance of the dominant groups’ negative judgments about you)” (Saewyc et. al, 2013).

In critically unpacking the intersections of stigmatization through the development of a more comprehensive measure that considered the complexities of social inequality, exclusion, and hostility, Saewyc et. al (2013) provided a nuanced perspective and the language necessary for which to identify and express stigma, vulnerability, and exclusion in new and challenging ways. Additionally, the intentional focus on language in the development of general stigmatization measure to ensure that “wording was culturally and developmentally-appropriate” and beyond a single characteristic model helped to inform my comparative approach of existing measures of inclusion and belonging for gender and sexually diverse youth, and first-hand encounters of inclusion and belonging in schools.

The “LGBTQ Families Speak Out About School” (Goldstein et al., 2014-2020) project thus provided a timely and revealing entry point into further understanding the differing and complex experiences queer families experience when navigating the heteronormative and colonial landscape of schools. To date, Principal Investigator, Goldstein (2014-2020), and her research team (Baer, Ga’al, hicks, Koecher, Owis, Reid, Salisbury, & Walkland) have collected 37 interviews (and counting) from parents and families across Ontario, all of which are open access

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and available online.6 The “LGBTQ Families Speak Out” (Goldstein et al., 2014-2020) online database offers a wide array of first-hand accounts of inclusion based on the intersections of identity and education.

Several participant interviews were drawn from the “LGBTQ Families Speak Out” database for this particular study, with the intention of illustrating what is at stake when educators, school staff, parent(s)/guardian(s), and students fail to consider intersectionality in their conceptualization of inclusion and well-being in school. In conducting a comparative narrative analysis of several participant interviews, I chose to specifically focus on the interviews with Catherine and Nazbah (2017), Michael and Ernst (2017), and Victoria Mason (2016), to demonstrate the differing ways in which their first-hand accounts of interacting with and navigating school policies, practices, and mainstream perceptions of ‘LQBTQ’ either affirmed or obscured their sense of place in the schooling system, as well as the sense of place of others, given their positionalities.

Following the interviews pulled from the “LGBTQ Families Speak Out” project (Goldstein et al., 2014-2020), Catherine Hernandez’s (2017) narrative fiction, Scarborough, provided a critical examination of queer encounters with school systems throughout Scarborough, Ontario. The novel authentically captures the varying experiences of queer, racialized, low-income families as they navigate inequitable access to education, health care, housing, and appropriate support. Hernandez’s (2017) narrative accounts of schooling environments as largely heteronormative, colonial, and classist spaces offered important insights into the realities of school cultures that are often unacknowledged or dismissed.

As demonstrated in a recent study focusing on the School Resource Officer (SRO) program in TDSB’s schools, and the resulting impacts on school culture and climate (which was undertaken by the Toronto Police Services Board and researchers at Ryerson University), TDSB executive superintendent on engagement and well-being reflected that: “…reviews like Ryerson’s miss the mark… universities may crunch numbers and find that the majority of students react positively to

6 For more on the “LGBTQ Families Speak Out About School” project, visit: http://www.lgbtqfamiliesspeakout.ca/ xxiii the SRO, like in a recent Carleton University review of Peel Regional Police’s program. But what about the students who don’t?” (Rattan, 2017).

Thus, in order to ensure that future school climate surveys, policies, and practices do not “miss the mark” (Rattan, 2017) on minority voices and needs in education, the following study utilizes an intersectional and comparative approach to meaningfully explore the relationship between institutional reports of student inclusion and well-being (as measured and defined through school climate data) and the prevailing perceptions of gender and sexual diversity (as illustrated in school policy rhetoric, inclusive practices, and mainstream Pride narratives). In exploring the commonalities and contradictions that emerge from institutional and personal accounts of 2SLGBTQ+ inclusion and well-being, an intersectional and comparative approach allows us to move beyond binary, heteronormative, and colonial frameworks when conceptualizing inclusion and belonging, both in education and beyond.

Other guiding influences for this study are rooted in queer moments and encounters (Ahmed, 2006; Butler, 2010; Erevelles, 2000; hicks, 2017; Thobani, 2007); repetitive school practices and tendencies that inform the process of ‘knowing’ and ‘becoming’ (Butler, 2011; de Beauvoir, 2011; Erevelles, 2011, 2014; Sedgwick, 1994; Spillers, 1987); the role of ‘cognitive structures’ such as school policies and practices, in narrating and determining symbolic power and social capital (Lacan, 2010; Bourdieu, 1989; Nast, 2000); the lost art of ‘the question’ (Hernandez, 2017); and lastly, in terms of future directions and possibilities for change, this research is inspired by past and present efforts from communities, families, students, teachers, activists, and academics who continue to work towards “reconstructing and strengthening our understanding of identity” (Wilson, 1996, p. 303), in spite of hostile political, social, and economic forces.

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Chapter 1 Contextualizing School Climate and Culture 1.1 Access, Acceptance, and Attitudinal Belonging

As an increasingly publicized culture of measuring of students, questions have arisen about whether schools are measuring the right things in order to best support students and student success. – Arlo Kempf, The Challenges of Measuring Well-Being in Schools

As the following research study seeks to better understand how students conceptualize gender, sexual diversity, and inclusion in relation to prominent narratives of 2SLGBTQ+ identities in school and society, it is necessary to first consider and contextualize the environments in which schools and their varying accounts of gender and sexual diversity are situated. Within the schooling environment, there are both visible and non-visible ways in which narratives of human activity and culture are communicated and asserted onto the landscape.

As previously stated, there are also various approaches to measuring and analyzing the overall health and well-being of such activity, which predominantly takes the form of School Climate Surveys (Centre for Addiction and Mental Health [CAMH], 2017; Gahagan, 2016; Kempf, 2017; Kosciw et. al, 2014; Peter et. al, 2015; Portelli et. al, 2007; Taylor et. al, 2011; TDSB Caring and Safe Schools Report, 2017); Students Census Reports and Census Portraits (TDSB Student Census 2011-2012; TDSB Census Portraits 2011-17; Stigma and Resilience Among Vulnerable Youth Centre [SARAVYC], 2018a; SARAVYC, 2018b); as well as revised policies and discourses on the inclusion and acceptance of gender and sexual diversity in school.7 While such prominent approaches to measuring school climate offer a standardized framework for which to consider an overall picture of school health and student experience, a reliance on standardized measures fails to account for the layers of stigma (Saewyc et. al, 2013) operating within and beyond the schooling environment.

7 Similar to the lack of inclusion of two-spirit and queer Indigenous knowledges and lived experiences in schooling environments, school climate surveys and student census reports within the TDSB, and other boards across the province, still largely exclude two-spirit and queer Indigenous students from survey data and analysis. This further excludes two-spirit and queer Indigenous identities and expressions from school discourse and practice.

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As will be discussed in Chapter 4 (which explores differing methods of surveying and measuring school climate), schools do well when their research tools are able to locate and identify the compounded effects of stigma and exclusion from multiple stigmatized characteristics (Saewyc et. al, 2013). By providing a more complex and multi-dimensional framework for which to consider oppression as operating from multiple vantage points (such as personal, institutional, and structural), we can better understand the layered impacts this may have on students in school. Through a deeper understanding of stigma, for example, we can better understand the layered impacts of oppression on 2SLGBTQ+ students, and address the underlying narrative structures that maintain hostile and unwelcoming spaces for gender and sexual minorities.

Of note, while researching quantitative and qualitative data on two-spirit and queer and trans Indigenous youth to better contextualize their specific encounters with institutionalized expressions of gender and sexual diversity, such information, as well as resources on the topic are disparate. Given my limited knowledge, I understand that the erasure of Indigeneity and the intersections of gender and sexuality is in large part due to the ongoing colonization and dispossession of Indigenous knowledges and cultural practices in what is widely known as Canada (Turtle Island) and elsewhere. That said, as a white, cisgendered, queer settler, I also recognize that dominant quantitative and qualitative research practices exist within Eurocentric and colonial frameworks, and it remains important to recognize the multiplicity of ways in which knowledge is produced and mobilized outside of society’s valorized practices.

In an effort to include the voices and experiences of queer Indigenous and two-spirit youth, I wanted to draw upon an important research study conducted by the Wabanaki Two Spirit Alliance (W2SA) with the support of the Urban Aboriginal Knowledge Network (UAKN) entitled, Coming Out Stories: Two Spirit Narratives in Atlantic Canada (2017), as well as a Two-spirit web booklet entitled, Safe and Caring Schools for Two Spirit Youth: A Guide for Teachers and Students (2011) authored by Maddalena Genovese, Davina Rousell, the Two Spirit Circle of Edmonton Society, and the Society for Safe and Caring Schools & Communities.

In Toronto, where I am currently located, I also recognize the pivotal work surrounding decolonization and the re-centering of Indigenous knowledge systems and lived experiences, especially in regards to colonial and Eurocentric conceptions of gender and sexuality. My knowledge of this work comes from the various Indigenous youth organizations across the city

3 of what is widely known as Toronto (Tkaronto), such as the Native Youth Sexual Health Network (NYSHN), the Native Youth Resource Centre, and the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto, just to name a few of the vibrant spaces that are contributing to the repossession and reclamation of Indigenous identities, practices, and worldviews in Tkaronto.

Importantly, the Indigenous resources included in this study were written by and for Indigenous youth, which I believe to be a crucial approach when assessing, contextualizing, and respectfully responding to the specific needs of Indigenous communities. This approach extends to other historically marginalized communities, and my own thinking and practices of radical and meaningful inclusion as well. In order to interrogate, undo, and decolonize the narratives and practices that allow exclusion and oppression to occur (Sykes, 2014), the voices and experiences of communities from which inclusive discourses and practices are intended need to remain central in this work. While this study seeks to interrogate the prevailing narratives and practices of inclusion to better address the needs of queer, trans, and two-spirit youth, central to my argument is the recognition that in order for organizations and institutions to move towards more equitable and socially just spaces, there needs to be a radical shift away from frameworks and practices that re-centre white settler and heteropatriarchal values and ideologies.

In order to do the work of inclusion differently, this work needs to begin from a place that does not imagine whiteness and heteronormativity as fundamental to conceptualizations and configurations of belonging, safety, restoration, activism, queerness, history, productivity, knowledge, power, etc. Such a paradigm shift, as put forward by Walcott (2019), is essential in order for us to move towards more equitable and socially just conditions of being. For when we allow a paradigm shift to occur, something different can emerge and give way to new conditions, encounters, and points of arrival (Walcott, 2019).

Thus, in an attempt to better contextualize the ways in which notions of safety, inclusion, well- being, and belonging are measured and determined as positive or negative in school, the following study centers an intersectional analysis when examining: key studies focusing on school climate and the LGBTQ+ student experience; inclusive policies and practices put forth by the TDSB and the Ministry of Education; and first-hand accounts of students experiencing systemic and structural barriers in school. In troubling the various ways in which school climates and cultures influence and sustain particular narratives, reference points, and possibility models

4 surrounding gender and sexual diversity, a shift in focus will also provide differing entry points for which to reconsider the defining principles that determine a “positive” climate and its continued conflation with school culture.

As observed by Smith and Payne (2016): “Culture and climate are often conflated in educational discourse, collapsed under the umbrella of school climate” (p. 75), which ultimately forgoes the opportunity to examine culture and climate as interdependent, yet powerfully separate elements operating within the ecosystem of schools. Moreover, in collapsing school climate and culture as a singular determinant of the health and well-being of students, educational discourse and practice upholds a dangerously limited framework for which to recognize and address the positive and negative experiences of students and staff in school. Such “reductionist discourses of inclusion” (Liasidou, 2012, p. 176) also disregard the necessity of responding to student needs through an intersectional lens, which not only undermines the importance of examining the intersecting impacts of exclusion on diverse student populations, but also continues to dismiss the presence of intersectional narratives and lived experiences within conceptualizations of queerness that are already susceptible to erasure.

Within the TDSB’s Equity Policy (2018),8 for example, school climate is defined as: “The learning environment and relationships found within a school and school community” (p. 37), following the definition of a positive school climate, which occurs when: “…all members of the school community feel safe, included, and accepted, and actively promote positive behaviours and interactions” which are best manifested when “Principles of Equity and Inclusive Education are embedded in the learning environment to support a positive school climate and a Culture of mutual respect” (p. 35). However, what is important to consider regarding the available definitions, and the Equity Policy’s glossary overall, is the absence of school culture and a deeper understanding of the social norms and practices that may contribute to, and uphold a negative school climate for students and staff.

8 A revised guide for teachers, students, and staff, which underwent several community consultations, and offers an extensive glossary of terms and definitions to ensure educational discourse and practice is equitable, respectable, and relevant.

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Where culture is defined as a broad category, which could include: “economic systems, political ideologies and processes, ways of life and social mores, educational institutions, social programs, the environment, technological systems, recreational practices, customs and traditions, artistic and heritage activities, transportation and communication industries, and religious and spiritual activities” (TDSB Equity Policy, 2018, p. 27), it remains unclear how such “ways of life and social mores” come to impact the overall climate of the school, and ultimately, the health and well-being of students and staff. Therefore, when originally designing the anonymous student surveys for this study, it was important for me to consider questions that not only addressed perceptions of school climate, but also acknowledged the various ways that certain behaviors, interactions, attitudes, and practices influence said perceptions and reactions towards the inclusion of gender and sexual diversity in school.

In order to critically interrogate the relationship between school policies and practices of inclusion, and student experiences of gender and sexual diversity (as generated from institutional discourse and other mainstream narratives of gender and sexual diversity, i.e., Pride), a critical component of this study in future will be to disseminate a student survey that illuminates the various narratives, reference points, and possibility models surrounding gender and sexual diversity for youth in school. In an effort to shed light on the prevailing perceptions of gender and sexual diversity, and the ways in which certain understandings influence particular patterns of behavior within schooling environments, an exploration into the relationship between the rhetoric of inclusion, school climate and culture, and student experiences of acceptance and belonging will remain a pivotal entry point into larger discussions surrounding hegemonic norms, desires, and anxieties in school.

Although the anonymous student survey originally designed for this study was not implemented in practice, my overall methodology stems from a larger interest in deconstructing the discursive elements of social spaces, i.e., exploring and interrogating the prevailing narratives, reference points, orientations, intentions, expectations, and behaviors that emanate from social/socialized spaces when examined more critically. Echoing Spivak (2010), the work of interrogating “networks of power/desire/interest” not only reveals the various impacts of social spaces upon bodies and their imagined/unimagined arrivals, but also “enable[s] one to glimpse the track of ideology” (in Morris, 2010, p. 23) in order to better understand the particular values and belief systems that are upholding such spaces. In considering our education systems as social/socialized

6 spaces, for example, glimpsing “the track of ideology” through institutional and student accounts of gender and sexuality provides an entry point into the prevailing narratives and perceptions of inclusion and acceptance in school.

While this study offers a more macro-analysis of discourses and knowledge systems that allow oppression to occur, it is my hope that laying such a critical foundation will lead to my future work in examining how students experience inclusion through their school’s GSA (in terms of safety and belonging) and their knowledge of gender and sexual diversity (as generated from these spaces). In moving towards more specific spaces in schools to explore student affect, such as GSAs for example, the trajectory of this study aims to critically explore and deconstruct the particular pathways that lead all students in school to particular narratives, reference points, and possibility models surrounding gender, sexuality, safety, and well-being.

In doing so, providing a broader contextualization of schooling environments, through a comparative analysis of school surveys, policy rhetoric, political influence, and first-hand accounts, will ultimately allow one to better understand, and thus effectively speak to, the roots (or “tracks”) of positive or hostile schools.

Chapter 2 Situating the Pride Movement in this Study 2.1 The Pride Effect: Unsettling the Politics, Performances, and Perceptions of Inclusion

No Pride for some of us, without liberation for all of us. - Marsha P. (Pay it No Mind) Johnson

The initial inception of what would soon become globally recognized as ‘Pride’ is largely known as dating back to 1971 in Canada, following the formation of the first large-scale organization in 1964 – the Association for Social Knowledge (ASK) in (McLeod, 1996) – which began “the process of transforming homosexual identity from a private group consciousness into a public collective identity” (Armstrong, 2002, p. 3). This move towards a more “public collective identity” can also be seen in the oppositions towards the 1969 criminal code reform, whose mandate in policy decriminalized certain homosexual acts between two consenting adults, but in practice, narrowly operated within a heteronormative, liberalized framework, which supported state regulatory practices and prosecutions of same-sex acts within the public and private sphere (Kinsman, 2013).

Following a similar timeline in the United States, the origins of what was then recognized as the movement, which sought to achieve ‘sexual liberation for all’ against all of the state’s antagonists (McCaskell, 2016), emerged from a series of a brutal police raids in the Tenderloin district of , widely known as the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in 1966, and prior in 1959, for simply occupying physical space in Cooper’s Donuts in downtown Los

Angeles, which became one of the first recorded LGBT-related riots in U.S. history9 (although the legacy of state-sanctioned violence against queer and trans people of color, and queer Indigenous, two-spirit folks long predates 1966).

9 For these, and other significant moments in LGBT history, see: “Beyond : 9 Lesser-Known LGBT Uprisings” https://www.advocate.com/pride/2015/06/25/beyond-stonewall-9-lesser-known--uprisings

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The “,” which are widely cited as the backbone for present-day discourses of resistance and liberation struggles, especially towards state regulation of gender and sexual diversity and the ongoing resistance towards the presence of police in Pride, made its first political intervention in 1969, following a violent police raid at the , a popular “homosexual ” (Armstrong & Crage, 2006, p. 724) in the neighborhood of , New City, which incited a fight-back from the gay, lesbian, queer and trans community, which evolved into “three days of rioting” (McCaskell, 2016, p. 9). Again, others have argued that gay and lesbian collective efforts to achieve social change (particularly when considering the intersections of race, class, and disability) long pre-dates these commonly cited socio-political timelines (Armstrong & Crage, 2006; Driskill et al., 2011; Dryden & Lenon, 2015; FitzGerald & Rayter, 2012; Johnson et al., 2005; Muñoz, 2013; Walcott, 2016; Ware, 2017).

Indeed, as a rights-based movement grounded in sexual liberation and the pursuit of equal access and inclusion into society’s pre-existing economic, social, and political structures and systems, Pride marches and have witnessed many gains for some self-declared members of the

LGBT community.10 Although a more detailed account of the broader 2SLGBTQIA+ movement, and the evolution of Pride more specifically, is beyond the scope of this study (and one person’s perspective), I feel it important to outline several social and economic factors that have led to the movement’s fundamental shift from a political march challenging systems of oppression and advocating for gender and sexual minorities (although Pride has always had its damaging limitations), to a growing embodying all of the tenets of a neoliberal, homonormative, and patriarchal model of inclusion, which seeks to advocate for equality, diversity, and acceptance, while maintaining systems and structures of oppression and inequity.

Examining Pride’s continued investment in growth (in terms of size and capital) and neoliberal forms of belonging is integral in my efforts to interrogate the relationship between Pride narratives, and dominant conceptions of LGBTQ+ inclusion and well-being as produced by

10 Throughout this study, I intentionally use ‘LGBT’ or ‘LGBTQ+’ instead of ‘2SLGBTQIA+’ or ‘queer, trans, and two-spirit’ to contextualize the intended reach of a specific institution, organization, and/or movement.

9 school policy and climate data. As I will further outline in the next section, a major catalyst for interrogating the ways in which gender and sexual diversity is included and narrated in school policy and practice emerged from the critical intervention at Pride 2016 by Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO). In particular, was the noxious responses from the LGBTQ community and surrounding spectators, which exposed the gross impacts of ongoing narratives of “LGBTQ” as white, cisgendered (preferably male), and able-bodied. BLMTO, as a group comprised of cis black, queer, trans, and disabled people, created a significant disruption within dominant discourses of inclusion, as well as conceptualizations of LGBTQ bodies and expressions of gender and sexuality.

Thus, the contemporary trajectory of Pride provides a critical entry point into disrupting, reimagining, and expanding upon our dominant frameworks of gender, sexuality, and inclusion. By critically examining the ways in which our institutional and individual interactions are mediated through the trajectory of Pride, we can begin to question: To what extent do mainstream Pride narratives (as powerful and authoritative accounts of the LGBTQ experience) impact our social relations and conceptualizations of inclusion and belonging, both within and outside of educational spaces? What is at stake when our standards for 2SLGBTQ+ inclusion continue to rely on the trajectory of Pride as a mainstream, capitalist, rights-based movement?

Throughout Johnson’s (2005) expansive account of various Pride festivities in several major cities (where she examined the effects of Pride parades on cities, participants, and observers via interviews, visual and written media, and participatory research), she observed how “the promotion of parades as tourist events over the past decade or more, has meant that ‘being proud,’ out and visible, is also about entertainment, consumption, neoliberal forms of citizenry, and the establishment of relationships with multiple audiences” (p. 4). An established relationship, I would argue, that exists within hegemonic discourses of power and legitimacy, and are thus built upon a stabilized conception of ‘LGBTQ’ regardless of changing audiences and host cities (Sedgwick, 1994). The contemporary framework of Pride, therefore, has enabled a neoliberal, colonial, and capitalist understanding of what queer progress and queer belonging looks like, and for whom, which can have far-reaching and devastating implications (McCaskell, 2016; Muñoz, 2013; Nero, 2005; Puar, 2007; Ware, 2017).

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Consequently, such a conditional and idealized framework of inclusion has also stabilized the composition and purpose of Pride parades, and as a result, effects queer visibility and access to basic rights and citizenship for those unaligned with the gay rights movement (Johnson, 2005). Although this framework can be extended to both homosexual and heterosexual subjectivities – as both social categories are articulated and understood within the context of white settler colonialism and consumer capitalism – the insidious nature of colonization, white nationalism, and serves a particular function within socially subversive spaces and discourses, such as the Pride movement. In particular, what continues to be a source of contention and resistance within the Pride movement, specifically, and equity-seeking groups more broadly, is the evolution and dangerous co-option of language and intentionality (Fung, 2019; Khan, 2016; Payne & Smith, 2013; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018; Walcott, 2019; Ware, 2017; Wilson, 1996, 2015).

Indeed, the various ways in which Pride, as a socio-political movement, is able to repeatedly mobilize and marketize the rhetoric of inclusion, progress, and diversity, without actually tending to such notions in practice, is not unique to Pride alone. The importance of situating Pride in this study, however, is to examine the systematic processes and effects of Pride (as a site for the negotiation of sexuality, space, and celebration) and the pivotal use of language in maintaining a particular narrative of inclusion, progress, and diversity.

In a recent conference I attended on debunking the rhetoric and practices surrounding the 1969 criminal code reform, Richard Fung, an LGBTQI+ activist and co-founder of Gay Asians Toronto in 1980, spoke to the importance of recognizing language within the realm of affect. Drawing upon the aftermath of the 1969 reform, whose systematic processes still reverberate within the LGBTQ+ community, Fung (2019) emphasized the transformative potential of understanding and unpacking language as spatial, as text, as bodies, as discursive, and as a powerful tool in world-making. Thus, given the present-day context of Pride, it remains critical to examine the myriad ways in which language is learned and deployed in harnessing a limited, yet powerful framework of gender and sexual diversity and inclusion.

Johnson’s (2005) critique of Pride’s negotiation of sexuality, space, and celebration (and negotiation of race, class, and ability, I would add) highlights how the essentialization and

11 marketization of non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality has led to a “singular and static subjectivity” (p. 21), one that performs and complies with every day realities of colonial, capitalist, and heteronormative beliefs and values. In the beginning, McCaskell (2016) remarks that:

As we moved from the peripheries to the mainstream, there was a remarkable transformation in dominant LGBT politics, from one aimed at social transformation to one that celebrated social inclusion. Toronto’s now featured many of our traditional antagonists: the Conservative party, churches, some of the biggest corporations and banks, the police, and the military. (p. 1)

What is important to note about this socio-political trajectory, is that many believed such approaches to inclusion were contingent upon the development and survival of gay liberation as a larger, collective movement (Armstrong, 2002; Bernstein, 1997; Ferguson, 2005; Hennessy, 1995; McCaskell, 2016; Nero, 2005).

Reflecting on Pride’s transition from a liberation based struggle, from resisting and pushing-back against social norms and invisibility – to a rights-based movement aligned with all the social norms and acceptance models granted by the dominant heteronormative, colonial, and patriarchal society, McCaskell (2016) outlines his personal involvement in the gay liberation/rights movement in Toronto from 1974 to 2014. Of particular interest to this study, was what appeared to be an important turning point in the movement within Toronto Pride in 1984. That year, The Body Politic (TBP), an instrumental and controversial gay publication based in Toronto, released an article covering that year’s Pride celebration that exemplified the movement’s turning point.

Written by a volunteer at TBP, the article was appropriately headlined “Sonja Just Wants to Have Fun!” and had positioned Pride as a “fun” and “wonderful” experience, and portrayed resistance and oppression as more of a memorialization than a present day reality for those within, and outside of, the parade. In the article, Sonja posed the troubling question: “What does Stonewall mean to you if you were only seven when it happened?” (McCaskell, 2016, p. 208). This changing perspective of the movement represented a new generation of gay subjectivities – a generation focused on the celebration of inclusion into the dominant mainstream, and less

12 concerned with dismantling the oppressive social structures that continued to exclude and harm members of the wider community.

Although this shift from gay liberation to gay rights sought to end discrimination in housing, employment, rights, etc., this inclusion was conditional, and came with innumerable consequences for those not able to claim the same visibility or access to human rights. At that time, not only was 1984 the first year that “Pride celebrations took place in what was beginning to be referred to as the ‘’” (McCaskell, 2016, p. 207) but the entire framework and focus of Pride in Toronto, and beyond, was changing. The two-page spread in TBP remarked upon a generation that “wasn’t much interested in a revolution they couldn’t dance to. It had to be fun” (McCaskell, 2016, p. 208). In response to this growing detachment from Pride’s radical and political past, McCaskell (2016) stresses that the event “hadn’t started in the 1970s because we wanted to have fun. It was because without a movement, without change, our lives were intolerable” (p. 208).

As an event that positioned itself against social conceptions of gender and sexuality by showcasing radical forms of visibility and sexualities, Pride 1984 set the stage for the hypersexualized parades to come – an event that would inevitably work within dominant conceptions of gender, sexuality, class, and ability, rather than against, and “paint the gay liberation struggle against a static social canvas” (McCaskell, 2016, p. 3). As demonstrated by the dominant images and narratives used within LGBT tourism campaigns, Pride festivals, and the media during Pride, there is a sustained reliance on stable, repetitive, homonormative performances of subjectivity to market the gay community as a movement that is synonymous with white Eurocentric ideals of progress, liberation, and sexuality.

Charles Nero’s (2005) notion of “historical preservation” in “Why are Gay White?” is important in noting how certain aesthetic tastes and sexualities are marketed towards the gay and lesbian community within a white, capitalist, and heteronormative frame – a frame that inevitably leads to the exclusion or absorption of black bodies into a white mainstream (p. 232). Nero (2005) examines race as a “fundamental organizing principle” that predominantly benefits able-bodied, white cisgendered men within the gay rights movement, and a capitalist, heteronormative society at large.

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In further explaining the homogeneity of the gay , which mirrors itself in contemporary gay community formations, Nero (2005) deploys Omi and Winant’s theory of racial formation as a critical lens that “pays attention to the way that racial dynamics function at both individual (micro) and collective (macro) levels” (p. 229). The theory also emphasizes the “continuity and reciprocity between individual and collective social relations” to further unpack the implications of racial discrimination on both personal and political levels of meaning (Nero, 2005, p. 229). Thus, the proliferation of white homogenous spaces is a product of “continuous and reciprocal” exchanges between individual and collective social relations. These social relations also produce and perpetuate a racial consciousness that affects the movement and coherence of racialized bodies within a dominant colonial and capitalist society.

The racial and gendered homogeneity that Nero (2005) describes in gay neighborhoods while living in New Orleans is but one example of the ways in which Pride, as a powerful form of collective consciousness, influences the organization and regulation of social spaces outside of the parade. As Pride parades continue to transform cities into vibrant spaces of production and consumption, these recurring images of white gay sexualities continue to reproduce the “racial consciousness and racial dynamics” (Nero, 2005, p. 230) that socially construct the worth and mobility of white middle-upper-class cis-gendered male identities, over those who have differing abilities, and are from various class, gendered, racial, and sexual backgrounds.

Pride celebrations, both locally and abroad through tourism, are informed by social and economic gains, a process that “made the inclusion of whites and the exclusion of people of color appear normal and even natural” (Nero, 2005, p. 243). Thus, when white heteronormativity sees a reflection of itself in the gay community – a difference that is solely reduced to sexuality – white are more readily accepted and tolerated as the sexual ‘Other’ due to the continued reflection and maintenance of a dominant social order.

During Pride festivals, viewers on the sidelines and marchers within the parade participate in a collective and reciprocal exchange of social relations. The curated bodies in the parade and their audiences feed off one another’s expectations, and maintain the exclusive reality of the gay rights movement. For, as outlined by Nero (2005), it is the repetitive “controlling image of black gay men, which is produced by straights and gays, [that] provides ideological support for the

14 exclusion of black gay men from full participation in queer cultures” (p. 240). The amount of space afforded to white gay cisgendered men has reproduced itself outside of the gay housing movement and can be seen in the myriad representations of “gay life” and “gay liberation” that dominate discourses surrounding LGBTQ inclusion and diversity, as upheld by Pride celebrations, media representations, and the gay globalized market.

From the hypervisible and sexualized gay consumer, to popular gay personalities in film and television “with their overbearing images of gayness as whiteness and as correct taste,” such narratives of ‘LGBTQ’ have perpetuated the homogenous formations of gay communities, organizations, and institutional discourses and practices of inclusion (Nero, 2005, p. 243). As the globalized gay market and media strive to contain and preserve an image of gayness within a white, patriarchal, capitalist, heteronormative frame, yearly events such as Pride and tourism campaigns continue to reproduce a homogenous image of sexuality – one that perpetuates a social consciousness that upholds and normalizes the logics of colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy.

In 2007, created a point of tension within the queer community, specifically for racialized queer, disabled, and trans members of the community. In an attempt to expand the economic growth of Pride through corporate sponsorship and venues that encouraged capital gain and consumption, priority of space had been given to occupiers whose interests were essentially profit over politics, and aligned themselves with gay and lesbian members of the community who demonstrated similar interests. The image of Pride needed to reflect what consumers and businesses wanted – a guaranteed eccentric celebration of bodies that were both consumers, and the expected representations of the LGBT+ community. Organizers of Blackness Yes!, a black LGBTTI2QQ community-based committee that celebrates and ensures black queer, disabled, and trans visibility within Toronto Pride and year-round, experienced first-hand the divisive and exclusive reality of Pride as an organization that displaces queer, disabled, trans, and people of color in the interest of maintaining a static, profitable image of Pride.

For almost two decades, the Blockorama dance space, supported by Blackness Yes!, held a crucial space within Pride, and “recreated the spirit of a Trinidadian blocko party after the parade” which was “built on the stream of black community organizing” (McCaskell, 2016, p.

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423). Blockorama carved out an important space within Pride festivals that challenged the movement’s white corporate existence, and offered an alternative space for black queer, disabled, and trans people to feel affirmed and celebrated during Pride festivities. However, due to Pride’s persistent growth in size, popularity, and capital (largely due to white homo/heteronormative consumers), “in 2007, without consultation, Pride decided that spot would be given to a TD Bank-sponsored stage and beer garden” (McCaskell, 2016, p. 423).

Despite the effort on behalf of Blockorama to remain “open to all ages and welcoming to those with substance issues” the popularity of Blockorama was not enough to sustain its previous visibility and importance, as it “didn’t make money for Pride” (McCaskell, 2016, p. 423). The displacement of black queer visibility continued in the following years as Pride moved Blockorama again in 2009 and in 2010 without community consultation to increasingly smaller, unsafe, and inaccessible spaces, demonstrating a blatant attempt to exclude queer bodies from Pride based on race, class, ability, gender, and sexual expression.

As demonstrated by Pride’s steadfast investment in growth, in terms of both size and capital, the mobilization of particular gay bodies over others has caused some to move away from the margins and into the mainstream, inevitably perpetuating a rights-based narrative that liberates some at the expense of others. This inevitably has enormous impacts on Pride’s indifference towards marginalized members of the community in sustaining a mainstream consciousness that both historically and currently displaces and excludes those who do not conform to Canada’s multiculturalist and homonationalist values (Fung, 2019; Puar, 2007).

As McCaskell (2016) remarks, the gay rights movement in Canada “has consistently surpassed the United States in our gains in an imagined liberal and tolerant nation. But in doing so, we have also strengthened that bright image that hides the reality of the lives of Aboriginal, racialized, and marginalized people, regardless of their sexual orientation” (p. 2). This is further demonstrated through Pride’s involvement in international tourism campaigns, white homonormative portrayals of “gay life” in the media, and locally, Toronto Pride’s continued displacement of groups such as Blackness Yes!, QuAIA ( Against Israeli Apartheid), Blockorama, the March, and , to name a few.

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Speaking to the discord and the effects of pinkwashing11 and within the LGBTQ community, which is felt most along the lines of race, citizenship, class, ability, and transgressive expressions of gender and sexuality, Johnson (2005) argues that the continued growth of Pride parades, and by extension the LGBTQ tourism market, are crucial sites for examining the ways in which gender, sexuality, space, and power intersect and influence the processes of becoming and belonging within the dominant discourse of gender and sexual diversity. In her expansive account of Pride parades throughout various major cities, as well as LGBTQ marketing and tourism campaigns, Johnson (2005) examines the powerful interplay between bodies, language, symbols, and signs that communicate a sense of place and purpose for both spectators and performers alike.

Central to her argument is this powerful moment of bodily exchange, which she argues, is crucial in the process of subjectivity formation. In other words, the ways in which: “[t]ourist activities and experiences are directly mediated through bodies” (Johnson, 2005, p. 10). When considering Pride’s present day processes of economic and socio-political points of arrival, Johnson’s (2005) contextual framework provides a critical entry point into troubling popularized and expected moments of bodily exchange. In the context of the present day, however, Pride’s continued reliance on the inclusion of “traditional antagonists” and investment in growth (in terms of size and capital) is a model of LGBTQ+ inclusion that no longer works (and for some, has never worked) for a large number of communities still excluded, unexpected, policed, and oppressed by various assimilationist and capitalist systems and structures.

As the following section will argue, the significance of BLMTOs interjection and disruption of Pride’s ‘inclusive’ narrative and trajectory was exposing the fact that Pride was no longer an equity-seeking movement invested in strengthening those most impacted by systemic oppression, but instead, an equality-seeking movement driven by neoliberal discourses of diversity and inclusion, which not only measure progress and acceptance through colonial, heteropatriarchal,

11 Pinkwashing can be described as the process in which countries, companies, or political figures utilize the LGBTQ rights/equality narrative in the creation of a progressive and accepting veneer for their own economic and political gains. In utilizing an LGBTQ acceptance/equality model, countries, companies, or political figures are able to hide other human rights violations. For more on and its social, economic, and political implications, see: http://www.pinkwatchingisrael.com

17 and capitalist values, but effectively reinstates the dominance of such oppressive and exclusionary frameworks.

Of importance, is Toronto Pride’s current role in placating the prison-industrial complex and its racist, homophobic, transphobic, and ableist ideologies and practices. Since Pride 2016, when BLMTO put forward a list of demands to Pride Toronto’s Executive Director, Mathieu

Chantelois, and co-chair, Alica Hall,12 outlining a total of 9 recommendations from the 2SLGBTQIA+ community to make Pride feel safer, more inclusive, and diverse (with particular consideration towards queer and trans communities of color, who have been grossly disenfranchised and excluded from Pride’s practices13), Toronto Pride has been taking every opportunity to dismiss and undermine the needs and concerns of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community in an effort to secure funding from the police.14 As outlined in the following sections, where several school climate surveys are examined to expose the dominant, and damaging, conceptual frameworks of belonging and well-being, it is evident that Pride’s overarching conceptions of safety, risk, belonging, and well-being needs to be fundamentally rethought.

As the largest LGBTQ community event that provides exposure to hundreds of activities and social gatherings, especially for queer, trans, and two-spirit youth who have little to no exposure to queer content in school (Bidell, 2014; Crooks, 2014; Cummings, 2016; Epstein et al., 2013; Goldstein et al., 2008; McCready, 2004a, 2004b; Meyer, 2007; Peter et al., 2015; Short, 2017; Wilson, 1996, 2015), Toronto Pride (and corporate Prides globally) need to recognize the role Prides could play in restructuring a collective consciousness that refuses assimilationist politics, capitalist values, and white settler colonialism. Moreover, in looking towards Pride as a master narrative for LGBTQ inclusion, it is crucial for those invested in the positive development, well-

12 See Goldie (2017) for the full list of demands outlined by BLMTO, as well as BLMTO’s website that outlines the 9 demands for Toronto Pride, as well as other demands dedicated to structural and systemic change: https://blacklivesmatter.ca/demands/

13 See Martis (2017) for a detailed account of the Pride Toronto Annual General Meeting (AGM) where members voted to keep police out of the Pride parade. https://www.dailyxtra.com/pride-toronto-members-vote-to-keep-police- out-of-the-pride-parade-72858

14 See Keogh (2019) for an investigative report on Pride’s funding problem and focus on excessive growth as the real reason Pride invited Toronto police back to the parade.

18 being, and transformative potential of queer, trans, and two-spirit youth to be critical of the ways in which the limiting, mainstream Pride narrative is reproduced and institutionalized within inclusive discourse and practice.

In working towards the development of educational spaces that expect and affirm queer and trans youth – especially queer, disabled, low-income, trans youth of color, and two-spirit youth – educators and community organizers need to recognize and resist the insidious ways in which progressive and radical language is often co-opted and reinstated as a means of defusing and de- radicalizing the transformative potential of queerness. This is of particular importance within educational discourses and policies that label and organize bodies based on narrow and normative parameters of inclusion, which are often in the interest of maintaining the status quo (Epstein et al., 2013; Erevelles, 2000; Greenstein, 2014; Parekh et al., 2016; Portelli et al., 2007; Reid et al., 2006).

To echo the re-imaginative and transformative work of Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018), a queer disabled of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent who writes and performs from the intersecting experiences of disability, race, and queerness, when we reframe the intentionality of inclusion and centre the collaborative potential that emerges from being inclusive at every turn, the goal post of our movements and institutions become less focused on ensuring access (which should be a given), but prioritizing and valuing the leadership of those most marginalized from systems of oppression. As Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) puts forward: “Inclusion without power or leadership is tokenism” (p. 127), which was consequently revealed in the noxious, dismissive treatment of BLMTO when their inclusion (and ‘proposed’ leadership) in the parade did not comply with Pride’s intentionality, nor the mainstream narrative of gender and sexual diversity, which Pride has come to value and showcase.

To reiterate, I come to my critical analysis of Pride and the inclusive frameworks of gender and sexual diversity within our education systems (when not denied by those abusing power in

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government15), from a profound and steadfast belief in the ability to reclaim movements and knowledge systems so that they celebrate and affirm all of us. In reclaiming disability narratives, Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) positions disability as “a set of innovative, virtuosic skills…” (p. 126) which breathes new life and direction into movements and hierarchal systems of knowledge and being/belonging. Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) insists that:

…this innovation, this persistence, this commitment to not leaving each other behind, the power of a march where you move as slowly as the slowest member and put us in the front, the power of a lockdown of scooter users in front of police headquarters, the power of movements that know how to bring each other food and medicine and organize from tired without apology and with a sense that tired people catch things people moving fast miss – all of these are skills we have. (p. 126)

This powerful anecdote speaks to the shifts that are necessary in order to reconceptualize the traditional goal posts of inclusion and access provision. What Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) is calling for then, are meaningful and collaborative acts of inclusion that prioritize the leadership and lived experiences of those whose lives have been, and continue to be, impacted by systems and structures of oppression.

Such a model of inclusion is necessary – not on the basis that inclusive practice feels good, and is the right thing to do – but because incredible opportunities for collaboration and real change can occur when we centre the lives and lived experiences of those whose knowledges of inequity has been felt most acutely by systems and structures of oppression. The intentionality of inclusion, therefore, needs not be inclusion in itself, but the moments of collaboration, empowerment, redistribution, and deep learning/unlearning that emerge when a multiplicity of bodies and knowledges are present and prioritized in working towards social change and equity.

As Prides continue to collaborate with the police and other oppressive state actors in ensuring its own survival in a globalized market, over the survival of those most at-risk of economic and

15 See Benaway (2018a; 2018b) on how the Ontario PC Government’s debate on the validity of gender identity and expression directly impacts trans, queer, and two-spirit people, and how the deliberate nature of such attacks through harmful, dehumanizing rhetoric and policy are attempts to preserve power and privilege.

20 , state-produced violence, and , Pride’s current model of ‘inclusion’ and ‘sustainability’ communicates a narrative of inclusion and diversity that is unable to alter the conditions in which queer and trans youth of color, and two-spirit, queer indigenous youth live and access care, belonging, and wellness.

In speaking to Xtra, Alexandria Williams, one of the founders of BLMTO, outlines how the inclusion of fully armed and uniformed police officers in the parade (despite community concerns) does not make Pride feel particularly safe, inclusive, nor sensitive to the needs and well-being of black communities and other communities of color (whose encounters with law enforcement are often sites of violence, discrimination, and intimidation). Further commenting on the presence of police in Pride, Williams (2017) states: “Imagine what that would be like when you’re trying to celebrate and that symbolic representation of physical, mental, emotional violence is not only holding the flag but is taking up space in that celebration” (as cited in Goldie, 2017).

Reflecting upon the mainstream acceptance of uniformed police in Pride parades and the TDSB’s School Resource Officer (SRO) program, which also placed fully armed and uniformed police in vulnerable, historically policed and marginalized spaces (such as Toronto high schools with higher populations of black and immigrant students16), such practices of inclusion (under a liberalist, colonialist, and capitalist framework) are not dissimilar in their regulation of intersecting identities and desires within the violent and traumatizing parameters of white settler colonialism. As Ahmed (2006) puts forward, in thinking through the organization and regulation of bodies, desires, and subjectivities: “What is at stake here is not only the relation between the body and ‘what’ is near, but also the relation between the things that are near” (p. 558).

What is at stake then, when considering the intent and effects of inclusion, is not only the relation between the body and what is near for the body to claim (in terms of agency, acceptance, safety, self-governance, and leadership), but also the relation between what is near in terms of the “arrangements” that secure one’s place, as presented in the available frameworks and

16 See Gordon (2017) for a more extensive report on the SRO program, as well as community and staff recommendations on the discontinuation of having uniformed, armed police officers in schools.

21 narratives of diversity and inclusion (Ahmed, 2006, p. 558). Further implications can be observed in the myriad ways students learn from their educational environments to self-regulate outside of schools based on perceived ‘arrangements’ of one’s place.

Such ‘arrangements’ bring into focus the inconsistencies between inclusive discourse and practice, by revealing how the prevailing rubric of inclusion is unable and unwilling to make the structural and systemic changes necessary to redistribute school resources, shift established notions of power and privilege, and establish an affirming focus on queer, trans, indigenous, and two-spirit worldviews and leadership. As previously examined through Pride, and the ways in which ‘LGBTQ+’ became one of Canada’s markers of inclusivity through homonationalism (Puar, 2007), which reinstates heteronormative, colonial, and capitalist conditions of inclusion, our work needs to begin from a place that does not imagine nor position whiteness, ableism, and heteronormativity as fundamental to conceptualizations and configurations of belonging, acceptance, progress, history, knowledge, power, and leadership.

Examining the ways in which coloniality impacts narratives of multiculturalism, citizenship, and black culture in Canada, Walcott (2003) draws upon diasporic communities to call into question the ‘arrangements’ or “assumptions that place a limit on what being Canadian is imagined to be” (p. 12). As ushered forward by the re-imaginative and re-orienting work of Ahmed (2006), Bain (2017), Dryden (2015), E. P. Johnson (2005), Erevelles (2000; 2011), Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018), Titchkosky (2008), Tuck (2009), Walcott (2003; 2016), Ware (2017), and Wilson (1996, 2015), among other activists, educators, and artists focused on radically changing oppressive and exclusionary systems and structures: What could occur if we were to re-imagine our points of arrival and our processes of becoming in school? Or, as Ahmed (2006) questions, how could our ability to “consider how one’s background affects what it is that comes into view” (p. 547) inform and shift what/who is repeatedly relegated to the background to truly bring about powerful and affirming approaches to equity and inclusion?

For, as pressed by Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018), when our efforts of inclusion shift to a more meaningful focus on leadership and building relationships, the difference is transformational.

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2.2 Pride (Dis)Orientations as Incentive for In-School Research

What could they be but stardust, these people who refused to die, who refused to accept the idea that their lives did not mater, that their children’s lives did not matter? – Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

Reflecting on a particular transformative moment that brought me to this study, a major catalyst for examining the inclusion and recognition of gender and sexual diversity in schools stemmed from the temporary shutdown of the Toronto Pride Parade in June 2016. Having recently moved to the city of Toronto from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and after witnessing a series of questionable and problematic events brought about by , I came to Toronto during the peak of its Pride season with very diminished hopes and expectations. Having not only lost my sense of place within the dominant narrative of Pride, and increasingly unable to grasp the purpose and potential of Pride in itself, I opted out of Pride that year, and attended several queer events and gatherings unaffiliated with corporate Pride. What occurred during the Toronto Pride Parade that year, however, was nothing short of revolutionary.

As the ‘honored group’ for that year’s Pride festival, Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO), the Toronto chapter of a global movement fighting for the eradication of state-produced and systemic violence towards black cis, queer, trans, and disabled communities,17 were asked to lead the Dyke and Trans March, as well as the main Pride Parade through its scheduled route. As hundreds of thousands of energized and glistening attendees – swathed in a sea of rainbows and corporate logos – eagerly consumed and reproduced the predisposed celebratory images of Pride, BLMTO were acutely aware that, although the designated honored group, their physical presence at Pride – as a group encompassing proud black cis, queer, trans, and disabled people – did not

17 For more information and resources from BLMTO, see: https://blacklivesmatter.ca; for more information and resources from the BLM global network, see: https://blacklivesmatter.com

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easily nor enthusiastically fit under the LGBTQ umbrella18 alongside their cis white, gay, able- bodied peers.

The irony surrounding Pride Toronto’s 2016 theme, “You Can Sit With Us!”19 was also not lost on BLMTO and their supporters alike. Conversely, the growing narrative of Pride appeared less interested in elevating the varied and layered experiences and expressions of gender and sexuality within the community, and instead, appeared increasingly invested in diluting any kind of queer transformative politics that may challenge the centrality of white middle-class values, capital growth, and consumption. In the foreword of When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Angela Davis (2018) speaks to the Black Lives Matter network and movement as a “call for an inclusiveness that does not sacrifice particularity. They recognize that universal freedom is an ideal best represented not by those who are already at the pinnacle of racial, gender, and class hierarchies but rather by those whose lives are most defined by conditions of unfreedom and by ongoing struggles to extricate themselves from those conditions” (p. 9).

Thus, the theme “You Can Sit With Us” (Toronto Pride, 2016) not only presented a troubling message for those still excluded by the dominant narrative of Pride, and thus rights-based progress, but also conjured up images of space, authority, and an imagined “Us” that became impenetrable when pressed against by black cis, queer, trans, and disabled bodies.

Indeed, there are a multitude of reasons as to why BLMTO’s sit-in at Pride in 2016 was pivotal in reconsiderations of inclusion, equity, and progress, especially for those who continue to experience systemic oppression due to their intersecting identities and experiences. It was a moment that not only demanded a re-examination of the conditions that have led to Pride becoming a mainstream entry point into gender, sexuality, and inclusion, but also the conditions that have led to the continued displacement and disrecognition of racialized, trans, queer, two-

18 In speaking to corporate Pride, I intentionally use the widely used acronym ‘LGBTQ’ to indicate the continued exclusion and attempted erasure of queer Indigenous, two-spirit, non-binary, gender non-conforming, intersex, and asexual persons from corporate Pride’s popularized expression of gender and sexual diversity.

19 For more on Pride Toronto’s outlined conditions and theme for the 2016 festival, see: Pride Toronto (2016) “Parade Terms and Conditions.”

24 spirit, sex-working, immigrant, and poor members of the imagined ‘LGBTQ’ community. How were these lived experiences and expressions of gender and sexual diversity being celebrated, meaningfully included, and honored?

Thus, in June 2016, on the heels of numerous marches and protests commemorating the alarming rates of violent deaths and brutalities towards unarmed black men and black trans women at the hands of armed police (which galvanized the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2013), BLMTO’s sit-in demanded that these lives be recognized, honored, and celebrated. Not only due to the importance of the lives lost and their valuable contributions to the queer community, but due to the dire need to protect and celebrate those intersecting lives and experiences from increased rates of police violence and social, political, and economic exclusion.

In terms of what this means for education, BLMTO’s call to awaken a complacent community in the face of ongoing political, social, and economic oppression, is a call to action that desperately needs to be heeded in schools. As stressed by Rodney Diverlus (2018), co-founder of BLMTO and Lead Canadian Organizer for the Black Lives Matter Global Organization, there is much at stake when we remain uncritical and complacent towards powerful institutions that capitalize on narratives of inclusion, progress, and diversity.

For Diverlus (2018), BLMTO’s critical intervention at Pride “was a living piece of political choreography, deliberately curated to awaken a dormant community and to confront the pervasive anti-Blackness in Canadian society” (p. 63). As the final section of this study will demonstrate, school policies, practices, climate surveys, and available frameworks for measuring inclusion, student safety, and well-being are grossly missing the mark on the most vulnerable and marginalized students in school. Ultimately, BLMTO’s physical and discursive disruption of Pride communicated that our prevailing frameworks and practices of inclusion need to be fundamentally rethought.

In further exploring and contextualizing the ways in which mainstream perceptions of gender, sexuality, and inclusion come to structure and maintain a collective consciousness, institutional ethnography emphasizes how our social relations and interactions are as much societal as they are institutional. In other words, the prevailing narratives and conditions of Pride and the

25 treatment of cis black, queer, disabled, trans, two-spirit, and queer Indigenous people does not exist within a vacuum, and has immense repercussions both on societal and institutional levels.

For what is at stake are deeply entrenched inequities within our institutions and movements that equate capital growth with progress and sustainability, which also deeply inform and affect the prevailing frameworks and direction of LGBTQ+ inclusion in school. Of importance, are the ways in which prevailing narratives powerfully and effectively distort a sense of one’s place, as well as a sense of the place of others (Bourdieu, 1989), which can have devastating implications on the lives of those who are repeatedly told the do not belong within particular institutions, curricula, family structures, medical establishments and professions, affluent neighborhoods, Canada, Pride, etc.

This was clearly demonstrated during the ensuing onslaught of racist vitriol and harassment that fell upon BLMTO – which was allowed to overtly thrive leading up to the Parade, during their 30 minute sit-in (which, I would add, is a fraction of the time many Parade goers voluntarily spent in line-ups for beer gardens and music/dance venues), and still experienced in many forms today – is built upon a long history of anti-black, anti-Indigenous, transphobic, classist, and ableist sentiments from Pride as an organization, and within and outside the LGBTQ+ community as a whole. As my work is deeply invested in uncovering the ideological pathways that have led to particular understandings of gender and sexual diversity, I feel the historicity of Pride celebrations, both within and outside of schools, extremely important in contextualizing the structural and systemic factors that create and uphold oppressive and hostile conditions.

In terms of my own research and interrogation of social spaces and affect, BLMTO’s physical and discursive intervention at Pride also served as a reminder of the susceptibility of rights-based movements to be consumed by discourses and systems of power that regulate and enforce inequitable access to inclusion and full citizenship. As an echo of Pride’s political and transgressive past, which called attention to the disproportionate amounts of oppression and policing experienced by queer and trans women of color, BLMTO’s call to action was a critical and disturbing reminder of history’s tendency to repeat itself in the interest of maintaining the status quo. Pivotal to the formulation of my own research focus was reflecting on my own

26 reservations with Pride, and a recognition of the particular narratives, knowledges, and practices that reward and valorize hegemonic gender and sexuality.

As someone who specifically works with youth and their encounters and negotiations with the school system, I was struck with an intense fear that the powerful persuasion of Pride as a prominent narrative of transgressive gender and sexuality – one that is increasingly invested in homonational, capitalist, ableist, and colonial ideologies of inclusion and progress – was informing the ways in which the layered identities and lived experiences of queer, trans, and two-spirit students were being understood and expected in schools.

These fears were further realized upon reading through hundreds of responses from various members and non-members of the ‘LGBTQ’ community who decided to take to Twitter and expose their deeply divisive and reductive conceptualizations of who and what gets to be inclusive, ‘LGBTQ,’ and Canadian. As can be deducted from the Twitter users included below, who are predominantly young (of typical schooling age), white, and able-bodied, a prevailing understanding of Pride, and thus the LGBTQ community, has become synonymous with a celebration that is white , politically neutral, and whose ‘inclusivity’ complies with Canadian norms and values.

While responses similar to the ones below are in the hundreds, it is important to note the presence of responses in support of the demands as well.20 For the purposes of this reflection, however, I wanted to draw attention to the prevailing attitude and protectiveness surrounding Pride and ‘LGBTQ’ when pressed with BLMTO’s demands that pushed for a more meaningful, supportive, and intersectional approach to gender, sexuality, and inclusion:

• “Pride is about LGBT not about a specific race and their issues. It’s about the community as a whole” (Singh, 2016) • “You’re telling me that is about race? You must be out of your mind. It’s about sexuality” (Avery, 2016)

20 To view the list of BLMTO’s Demands, as well as the Twitter thread in full, see: https://twitter.com/BLM_TO/status/749754649951948800

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• “[W]here are YOUR commitments to the LGBTQ community during ?” (Borgundvaag, 2016) • “No, you sidelined another oppressed community on a day devoted to them a [sic] declared yourself more important. Gay lives matter too” (Barnes, 2016) • “[Y]ou made your movement look like a bunch of bullies who think they matter more then [sic] the , disgrace (Porky, 2016) • “You suck! BLM is a TERRORIST ORGANIZATION!” (Burtnett, 2017) • “[J]ust more domestic terrorism” (Pan, 2016) • “Pride is supposed to be about inclusion. Yet you exclude the police? What hypocrisy” (Chen, 2016) • “Not my decision to make, but how is telling gay police officers they can’t be fully involved anything but divisive and exclusionary?” (Fitz, 2016) • “[G]o to wherever you’d rather be because you’re definitely not a Canadian #disgrace” (Johnny, 2016)

As demonstrated above, part of the survival of Pride as a master narrative of LGBTQ inclusion, is that being critical of Pride is not only challenging work, but extremely dangerous due to the continued investment in discourses and practices of inclusion that work within systems of privilege and oppression, rather than effectively working against them.

In speaking to the significance of BLMTO’s interjection with Pride’s homonationalist and white supremacist disposition, (2016), one of the founders of BLMTO and a black, queer, gender non-conforming futurist and organizer, expressed how:

[BLMTO’s] action was in the tradition of resistance that is Pride. We didn’t halt progress; we made progress…We achieved a commitment to our demands despite intense push-back from a primarily gay white male community. The same community that did not want Black Lives Matter involved in Pride at all, even going so far as to create a group on Facebook called No BLM in Pride. Gender and sexual diversity, it seems, does not preclude racism or white privilege. (Now Toronto)

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As a pivotal moment that sought to reconfigure and reconceptualize the bodies and narratives that have historically occupied public space and discourse, this was not only a call to change the discourse and practices of Pride alone, but for my own research purposes, this moment brought into question the ways in which the disposition of Pride has infiltrated and taken shape in other social spheres, which can easily be translated into educational spaces as well.

What soon became apparent in further developing and articulating the purpose and rationale of my research was that the following interconnected instances, such as: the noxious responses from BLMTO in Pride; enforcing zero tolerance and SROs in schools; mandating “Appropriate Dress Codes” (TDSB, 2018); and reproducing non-intersectional climate surveys and data, demonstrates a significant lack of understanding and compassion towards queer and trans students of color, as well as queer Indigenous and two-spirit students. That said, there remains a dire need for practices and discourses that effectively decenter and deprioritize homonational and colonial frameworks of LGBTQ inclusion and acceptance, which continue to hinder the possibility for layered identities to both exist and thrive in school and society.

Having previously written on the dangers of inclusive policies and practices that operate within heteronormative and colonial perceptions of belonging,21 I was distinctly aware of the various ways that particular bodies and expressions of gender and sexual diversity were repeatedly invalidated and dismissed within educational institutions. After witnessing the deconstruction and reconceptualization of Pride’s mainstream narrative in 2016, and the mass upset created by centering and vocalizing the importance of black lives and black queer and trans desires and expressions, I realized the enormity of Pride’s impact on the community, and the insidious nature of homonationalist and white supremacist ideologies that dangerously co-opt discourses and practices of inclusion and equity.

Ultimately, reflecting upon the historicity of Pride and the regulation of inclusion that remains so central to the movement’s survival in a globalized market, BLMTO’s action was in direct conflict with a movement whose gains and visibility for some, has depended upon maintaining a

21 Stagg, J. (forthcoming). [Journal Article]. “Policy or pathologization? Questions into the rhetoric of inclusion and acceptance in schools. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies.

29 white, heteropatriarchal, colonialist order, which excludes many. Thus, the list of demands ushered forward by BLMTO were not only in the interest of building a movement that was more sustainable and inclusive for all of us, but because the conditions made possible by movements and discourses that re-centre whiteness and capitalism were increasingly making the lives of cis black, queer, trans, and disabled people of color unliveable.

As put forward by (2018), co-founder of BLMTO: “What we’ve been able to do in Black Lives Matter Toronto…the biggest victory that we’ve had is inspiring people to imagine a different world, empowering people to give themselves the permission to dream for something bigger, for something better, and to understand that they can change the conditions under which they live.”

Part of changing the conditions in which students live, both inside and outside of school, can begin from interrogating and interrupting the dangerous and hurtful ways discourses and practices of inclusion powerfully and effectively distort a sense of one’s place, as well as a sense of the place of others (Bourdieu, 1989). As previously stated, repetitive exposure to systems and structures that neither expect not affirm and empower students due to their non-normative identities or expressions can have devastating implications.

As this study puts forward, when major research efforts on school climate and culture come to the fore, and work to inform respective policies and practices to address exclusion and hostility in school, it is pivotal to ensure that the language used, and the frameworks employed, are expecting and affirming all students in schools. Especially students whose intersecting identities and lived experiences have been, and continue to be, unaccounted for in school climate surveys and student census reports.

Again, when activists, artists, educators, students, and community members push us to envision and articulate new horizons and conditions of living (Walcott, 2019), part of what this work asks of us is to question and reimagine the predominant parameters of inclusion, which make possible opportunities for change, growth, and progress. In continuing to work against discourses and practices of inclusion that are repeatedly (and thus often unnoticeably) tethered to colonialism and its modern-day iterations, we can move towards systems and spaces whose foundations are

30 not solely built upon the positioning of whiteness and heteropatriarchal binaries as fundamental to our measurements and frameworks of inclusion and belonging.

Following Ahmed’s (2006) observation that “bodies take shape through tending toward objects that are reachable, which are available within the bodily horizon” (p. 543), part of my work in future will be focusing exclusively on the spaces which are made available in schools for students to reach, take shape through, and work within or against in achieving belonging and wellness. What this current study allows me to do, by providing a strong policy analysis and environmental scan, is to create a rich foundation for which to further explore how students, in particular, queer, trans, disabled students of color, and queer Indigenous and two-spirit youth, access safety, inclusion, and well-being in school.

As the proceeding sections illustrate, the parameters of inclusion (as dictated within school policy and the practices that follow) communicate to students – in particular, queer, trans, disabled students of color, and queer Indigenous and two-spirit youth – that their intersecting, non-binary, and queer identities do not exist, do not have historical roots, and are not foundational to societal conceptions of progress, success, and belonging. That said, what is at stake for students who occupy intersecting identities and lived experiences? How are these students finding themselves in narratives of inclusion, safety, and belonging? And more broadly, how are all students coming to their identities and notions of belonging in schools? What do these identity pathways look like? How are these pathways informed and structured around heterosexist and colonial notions of belonging? Ultimately, who is benefitting from the repetition of certain directions and orientations?

In their article “All Power to All People? Black LGBTTI2QQ Activism, Remembrance, and Archiving in Toronto,” Ware (2017) interrogates the social implications of archiving as a powerful practice that both remembers and forgets collective knowledges and histories, thus sustaining certain narrative directions in both the past and present. Specifically, Ware (2017) focuses on the past and present day omissions of black LGBTTI2QQ (Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, , intersex, two-spirited, queer, and questioning) histories, spaces, and activism in Toronto, and examines the ways in which conventional archival practices produce a

31 particular sense of time and space through the preservation and circulation of select histories and lived experiences.

As a black trans artist and activist who found community outside of conventional archival spaces, Ware (2017) explains how the continued exclusion of black LGBTTI2QQ narratives and histories is not only harmful on an individual level, but has farther reaching consequences. Focusing on the broader impacts of shaping collective memory, Ware (2017) emphasizes that: “This erasure is part of a larger conceptualization of the black queer subject as a new entity, whose history is built upon an already existing white LGBTTI2QQ space and history” (p. 172).

Indeed, as demonstrated in Pride’s conflict with BLMTO, and the noxious responses that resulted, in large part, from a sustained direction upheld by a particular narrative of inclusion and belonging – how are queer, trans, and disabled youth of colour finding themselves and their lived experiences in past and present day iterations of gender and sexual diversity? What happens when queer, trans, two-spirit, and queer Indigenous youth do not have exposure to a multiplicity of histories and lived experiences in school? How can our movements and institutions do better in offering possibility models and histories that reflect, affirm, and empower black LGBTTI2QQ youth?

As Khan-Cullors (2018) reflects, as a black queer activist and artist: “I learned I didn’t matter from the very same place that lifted me up, the place I’d found my center and voice: school” (p. 26). That said, what could emerge if blackness, indigeneity, and disability were positioned and perceived as fundamental to informing queerness and queer histories? As Francis (2012) observes through their field notes as an anti-heterosexist educator in secondary schools, “practices of deconstruction might be used more effectively to further the project of thinking ethically about discourses of difference and visibility in our bodies, in history, and in pedagogy” (in FitzGerald & Rayter, 2012, p. 2). In drawing our attention towards the interplay of disability, dehumanization, dispossession, and the school-to-prison pipeline, Erevelles (2014) similarly speaks to the various ways in which social institutions and bodies are regulated in the management of belonging and non-belonging, and notes how such practices repeatedly position and perceive “black bodies and disabled bodies [as] inextricably intertwined in the punitive patrol of bodily boundaries” (p. 87).

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Thus, in an effort to locate and identify the types of schooling environments that could have positive impacts on human behaviors, as well as the kind of human behaviors that could have positive impacts on schooling environments, I feel it is beyond crucial to continually interrogate the ways in which social institutions communicate belonging and non-belonging, as well as who is expected and who is not in such spaces. In looking towards the historicity of Pride and the powerful influences mainstream Pride narratives have had on conceptualizations of gender, sexuality, and belonging, as well as BLMTO’s powerful interruption of the direction of Pride (in terms of discourse and intentionality), this section aimed to provoke a deeper examination into the present day interruptions that could enrich practices of inclusion and equity, both within and beyond schooling environments.

Additionally, the efficacy and intentionality of spaces that offer support, safety, and inclusion require ongoing critique. In deepening our understandings of such notions by questioning the intent and effects of such spaces, i.e., who is actually considered within institutional discourses and practices of support, safety, and inclusion, we can begin to critically examine the ways in which our approaches to equity, inclusion, and well-being could be expanded and improved upon. While political, economic, and social forces will continuously attempt to block the path of change and social justice, as outlined in the next section, BLMTO’s intentional and determined action within Toronto Pride powerfully demonstrated that when there is a change in direction and intentionality, something else emerges (Walcott, 2019).

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Chapter 3 The Dilemma of Queer in School and Society 3.1 Inclusion, Intent, and the Politics of Belonging

We the students need to show our government that we do not consent to this action. The impacts of these changes have been repeated by hundreds of experts: they will not keep our students, our women, our LGBTQ+ community, or our Indigenous population safe. It’s time for us all to stand up and fight for our right to education.

Which is why on September 21st 2018, students across Ontario are invited to participate in a walkout. - Ontario Walkout 2018: Student Guide

Since moving to Toronto in 2016, a lot has transpired and critically affected the social, political, and educational landscape of Ontario. The socio-political climate over the past three years in Ontario specifically, has made for a remarkable, yet extremely challenging time in the struggle for social justice and equity. Although societies, institutions, and belief systems have been deeply rooted and damaged by colonial and heteropatriarchal ideals and practices of exploitation and dispossession since time immemorial, the lives of those who live in precarious conditions due to the intersections of race, citizenship, socio-economic background, ability, gender expression and sexuality, are experiencing state-produced violence, erasure, and displacement at alarming rates.

In Ontario specifically, there has been a steadfast rise in alt-right attitudes, attacks, and volatile movements targeting all aspects of social life. While a rise in belief systems and violence rooted in the supremacy of whiteness and nationalism is alarming for a whole host of reasons, and has devastating and far-reaching implications, what is important to note for this study are the ways in which language is strategically deployed in order to both permit and punish certain practices, behaviors, expressions, beliefs, and frameworks of belonging.

In the summer of 2018, Canadian businessman and newly elected Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, and Ontario Education Minister, Lisa Thompson, released a devastating attack on the education system in Ontario. The urgent changes set to take place in schools across the province

34 included: Regressing the most recent sex-education curriculum from 2015 to the one taught in 1998, which would effectively eliminate crucial components from school curriculum, and thus from school and classroom dialogue and culture, such as: gender identities and expressions; sexual orientations; healthy relationships; various family structures; consent; safe, affirming, and positive information and practices for diverse sexualities; Indigenous languages, histories, and efforts towards decolonization and reconciliation; cyberbullying; and sexting, to name a few.

Not only are these particular attacks on education a critical reminder of the precarious places queer, questioning, trans, Indigenous, and two-spirit students often occupy in schools, but also, how such attacks on positive and affirming expressions of diversity and bodily autonomy are intimately connected to the preservation of systems that centre white, cisgendered, colonial, heteropatriarchal, and capitalist power and privilege (Benaway, 2018a).

As Ware (2017) remarks, when speaking to narrative preservation in archival practices, omissions produce a different sense of time and space, and, given the latest attempts by the Ford government in Ontario, and the Trump administration in the United States to eradicate years of progress on the inclusion of gender and sexual diversity, a sense of time and space that is deeply rooted in a “presentist agenda that selectively highlights and erases subjects, spaces, and events to expand its own power in the present into the future…” (p. 173). The notion of presentism here is significant, as it draws attention to what is at stake when we remain uncritical of current actions and attitudes that view past events and struggles for social justice from within the limited perspectives of present-day beliefs and values.

Since coming into power, for example, the Progressive Conservative Party’s calculated attacks on the Ministry of Indigenous Affairs, health care, education, support for people living with disabilities,22 and cutting all funding and legal support for new immigrants and refugees,23 truly demonstrates how certain omissions not only produce a different sense of time and space, but

22 For more on the Progressive Conservative Party’s cuts, see: https://www.ontariondp.ca/news/ford-s-first-budget- takes-children-students-social- services?fbclid=IwAR3pVl5FqMcNYTZWlrFX2cGimdKNeXhoPp3zdTpyUXoIXpT2u4PptXi-oSU

23 See Gray (2019) for more information on the specific PC cuts to funding and legal supports for new immigrants and refugees.

35 effectively work to secure it. As highlighted in the next section, language is a powerful and persuasive tool in maintaining the boundaries of subjectivity and a sense of one’s place in school and society. What has been significant to note throughout Doug Ford’s political reign has been the use of policy rhetoric to bolster a particular cultural attitude that renders notions of gender and sexual diversity and practices of inclusion as confusing, dangerous, and ultimately incompatible with the dominant systems and structures currently in place.

In writing for them magazine, Gwen Benaway (2018b), a of Anishinaabe and Métis ancestry, explains how gender and sexually diverse persons, and trans women in particular, are often included into policy rhetoric to further communicate the ‘dangers’ of being trans and gender non-conforming: “Trans children and teenagers are commonly used as a fear point for anti-trans activists as they accuse trans folks of indoctrinating younger generations into dangerous ‘gender identity ideology.’ The resolution passed by the PC Party was titled, ‘Education and Community Safety,’ implying that trans people are a threat to the safety of cisgender people and their families” (para. 4).

Thus, not only has the prevailing rhetoric of gender and sexual diversity in Ontario worked to position gender and sexual non-conformity within narratives of risk and disorientation, but the power of misinformation behind such policies works to justify the elimination of support systems tailored to those already in precarious positions, as well as the continued exclusion of particular expressions of culture, gender, sexuality, and ability to maintain white, cisgendered power and privilege.

Doug Ford’s proposed resolution on gender identity as a “Liberal ideology” just a few days before the International Transgender Day of Remembrance in 2018 (although gender identity and expression is protected grounds under Canada’s Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code24), was a glaring example of the desire and ability to dismiss and invalidate diverse expressions, practices, and belief systems that threaten to disrupt the dominance of a political platform

24 For more on Doug Ford’s proposed resolution on gender identity as a “Liberal ideology” see: https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/tory-party-motion-on-gender-identity-not-government-policy-education- minister

36 dependent upon the gender binary to secure colonial, heteropatriarchal power. As expressed by Victor Feunekes (2018), sex educator and trans advocate in , Ontario, the very fact that the humanity of gender diverse persons was debated in a public forum can have real consequences on the lives of gender diverse and non-conforming individuals: “This is going to hurt people for sure. There’s a group of people... that is essentially debating whether a whole group of people exist and they do exist…” (in Butler, 2018).

As similarly demonstrated in the U.S. through the Trump administration’s ban of trans people in the military, and the sustained attempts to undermine the basic human rights and protections of queer, trans, and gender non-conforming persons,25 the negative repercussions of rhetoric and practices that exclude and dehumanize queer and trans communities are substantial and often instantaneous. One particularly upsetting finding from Trans Lifeline, a non-profit organization and hotline that provides direct emotional and financial support for trans people in crisis,26 found that soon after the Trump administration “moved to define gender as solely male or ,” the hotline had “received four times the number of calls than normal” (Butler, 2018).

Further commenting on the detrimental impacts of Trump’s policies that ultimately define trans and gender non-conforming people out of existence, Benaway (2018a) remarks that: “It is a dangerous and cruel proposal which will ultimately end trans lives, either from violence when they are forcibly outed, or by the insurmountable barriers to healthcare, housing, and education that it will create. It will lead to the deaths of many of us, and I mourn this truth because it means that the most vulnerable trans lives will be the most impacted” (para. 1).

As previously asserted, the continued positioning of gender and sexual diversity within narratives of risk, disorientation, and pathologization serves a particular purpose. The sustained struggle for the inclusion of queerness and queer culture beyond the parameters of whiteness and heteronormativity is a continuous struggle for a reason. Whether this struggle be defined by

25 See Butler (2018) for more on the ensuing impacts of the Trump administration’s policies towards trans and gender diverse and non-conforming persons.

26 For more on Trans Lifeline, as well as their resources and work, see: https://www.translifeline.org/about

37 efforts to reclaim the language of belonging; gaining access to queer, trans, and two-spirit histories; or completely rethinking and repositioning dominant narratives of gender, sexuality, and wellness, the fight for inclusion as informed by queer culture threatens the very stability and soundness of categories that define a sense of one’s place, as well as the place of others (Bourdieu, 1989).

Thus, pushing back against the parameters of inclusion – as defined through a colonial, heteropatriarchal lens – will continually be met with resistance and the threat of erasure. What this study seeks to argue, however, is the meaningful potential of such moments of resistance, as they provide critical pathways and queer moments for which to reimagine and redefine the parameters and conditions that inform how we live and learn.

As the epigraph of this section highlights, the surge of student resistances and demonstrations has become a pivotal reminder of the significance of student voice in guiding the policies and practices that determine access to knowledge and belonging in school. As demonstrated by the student walkouts across the province of Ontario, which were led by high school student Rayne Fisher-Quann in protest of Ford’s policies on modern sex-education and Indigenous curriculum, students deserve a say in what their education includes and excludes, and will use their own voices and knowledge of their rights, identities, and bodies to fight for a socially just education system.

While this study draws attention to the productive potential of student input through several case studies, interviews, and non-traditional student surveys, this process is one attempt to further amplify the powerful voices and insights of students in schools. In future, to better understand how all students experience gender and sexual diversity and belonging in schools, I am hopeful that the anonymous student surveys, which I designed through the lens of intersectionality and psychoanalysis (in order to analyze the correlation between inclusive spaces, discourses, practices and student affect), will provide another platform for student voice to inform school policies and practices of inclusion.

What is increasingly evident from students, educators, and equity-minded members of government, is that there is a strong desire for educational institutions that do not reproduce and reify heteronormative, colonial, and capitalist systems and values. What has been made clear by

38 students walking out of their schools and collectively mobilizing the hashtag: #wethestudentsdonotconsent, is that we are living in precarious, yet robust socio-political times (Paling, 2018).

While students are increasingly critical of their education systems, and arriving en masse to protest those in power, it is crucial that such transformative potential is both supported and reflected in the ways that education moves forward. In a powerful and telling “Open Letter to Doug Ford” written by Fisher-Quann at a rally outside of Queen’s Park in July 2018, their reflection speaks to the dangers of systems that draw upon established values and belief systems, stating: “I can’t even imagine how different my life would be if all the men who harass me on the street had learned about consent earlier” (Paling, 2018).

While this study insists upon a queer lens in order to disrupt established values and belief systems, as well as better account for and affirm the intersections and depths of common conceptualizations of belonging, safety, and wellness, I argue that a queer lens in not only extremely important in accounting for and learning from queer, trans, and two-spirit experiences in school, but also, an engagement with queer orientations recognizes the ways in which the regulation of inclusion negatively impacts all students in school, by both limiting and distorting encounters with and perceptions of gender, sexuality, and belonging.

As examined by Ahmed (2006): “queer describes a sexual as well as political orientation and that to lose sight of the sexual specificity of queer would also be to overlook how compulsory shapes what coheres as given and the effects of this coherence on those who refuse to follow this line” (p. 567). What queer orientations offer then, is both the power and potential to imagine a different world and conditions for living in it.

As demonstrated by the Ford government’s failure to acknowledge that the solution to safer, positive, and more inclusive schooling lies in a radically different approach to our educational systems and structures, the diversion away from the transformational potential of queer is ever- present. As emphasized by Koschoreck and Slettery (2006): “There is always a need to address patterns of heteronormative oppression in education” (as cited in Fisher & Stockbridge, 2016, p. 47), not only due to the ever-present nature of heteronormative dominance and control, but

39 because of the dangerous narratives that heteronormativity both brings to the surface and permits when threatened.

A clear example of this can be seen in the responses from educators after the Ford government unveiled its “snitch line” for parents to anonymously report on teachers straying away from the

1998 sex-ed curriculum.27 Although teachers have always possessed the right to engage in fact- based learning, and need only utilize provincially mandated curriculums as guides for building lesson plans,28 the snitch line became the embodiment of heteronormative oppression, and exposed several underlying fears, tensions, and resistances towards the inclusion of gender and sexual diversity in schools.

As the 2015 sex-ed curriculum included information about sexual orientation, gender identity, consent, and sexting, to name a few, several fears, resistances, and protests from parents and guardians following the inclusion of gender and sexual diversity in school was quickly harnessed by the Ford government to further push towards a conservatist agenda. As the snitch line was made in the interest of intimidating teachers and bolstering more conservative parents and guardians, the line also provided a platform for harmful discourses around gender and sexual diversity as dangerous, confusing, and a burden to education.

A prime example can be seen during an interview with CBC’s Anna Maria Tremonti (2018), where she discusses the inclusion of gender and sexual diversity in schools with a Grade 7 and 8 teacher at St James Catholic School in Eganville, Ontario: “It’s very confusing, it’s confusing to adults but…[Kids] need to be aware of the terms – what they’re hearing – and have some form of knowledge about it, so that they’re not ignorant to it.” The educator continues, saying that parents will end up “shouldering the burden for topics like sexual diversity and inclusion that fall outside of the language of the 1998 program” (Crysler, Jaynes, & Tremonti, 2018).

27 See Coren (2018) for more on Doug Ford’s sex-ed snitch line.

28 See Trillium Lakelands District School Board’s (TLDSB) open letter to TLDSB staff, students, and parents for one example of the letters written in defense of teaching the 2015 curriculum in order to maintain a safe, healthy, and positive school climate and culture: https://tldsb.ca/an-open-letter-to-tldsb-staff-students-and-parents/

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Other educators expressed concern with the 1998 curriculum, and drew important attention to the fact that a curriculum from two decades ago is no longer aligned with societal progress in terms of rights and protections for gender and and expression. As put forward by a Grade 7 and 8 health educator in the Waterloo Regional School Board: “I find it interesting that the 1998 curriculum doesn’t necessarily align with our Ontario Human Rights Code and in fact that it intentionally removes issues around gender identity and expression, which are all protected grounds. And the Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides us with the right to talk about equity and inclusive issues” (Crysler, Jaynes, & Tremonti, 2018). The threat of erasure for gender and sexually diverse individuals has been a consistent through line during Ford’s political governance, and is but one example of the ways in which language plays a key role in either affirming and expecting diverse expressions and identities, or dehumanizing and ultimately excluding such expressions.

Recently, during question period on the Day of Pink (a day for drawing awareness to homophobic and transphobic bullying) Ontario Education Minister, Lisa Thompson, refused to say the words ‘homophobia’ and ‘transphobia’ stating that: “Those words don’t exist in my vocabulary” (Kernaghan, 2019). What is perplexing about such a statement from the Education Minister, is the way in which the limitations of language forecloses any possibility of acknowledging and confronting homophobic and transphobic harassment and exclusion.

Further commenting on the Minister’s refusal, Terence Kernaghan, Ontario NDP Critic for LGBTQ Issues, expressed: “This minister has delayed teaching gender expression until grade 8, when we know LGBTQ+ students need support much earlier than this. Why is this minister taking support away from LGBTQ+ students? And can the minister say the words transphobia & homophobia?” (Kernaghan, 2019). In other words, how can we address these issues when they are erased from dominant discourse?

Given a similar suggestion from Susan Zuidema, a former elementary school teacher and current Education Consultant in Ontario, it is clear that those occupying positions of power within education will not always have the best interest of all students in mind. During the same interview with Tremonti (2018), the current Education Consultant communicated the following

41 statement, which can also be read as a warning to those seeking or occupying diverse identity expressions:

…in terms of the suggestion that there are these other opportunities where you could express or identify in a way, another way students who otherwise might be cisgendered, meaning identifying with their biological sex and gender… those being in alignment. If they start to question those things, what’s the outcome going to be? Are they going to fall into the same risk categories that students that have a natural gender dysphoria fall into in terms of suicide ideation and depression and anxiety and drug use? That’s my concern, what’s the outcome going to be for those kids? (Zuidema, 2018, in Crysler, Jaynes, & Tremonti, 2018)

What is particularly revealing about this statement, is the positioning of gender and sexual diversity as unaligned, unnatural, and pathological when juxtaposed with cisgendered experiences. Moreover, the insinuation that offering more opportunities for identity expression will automatically lead to other “risk categories” highlights how queer and trans experiences are continually placed at-risk; as risk to themselves, towards cisgendered students, and “students that have a natural gender dysphoria” (Zuidema, 2018, in Crysler, Jaynes, & Tremonti, 2018). Also, as the above statement is coming from a current Education Consultant, it serves as a critical reminder of the need to constantly interrogate and unpack the damaging potential of language, on both the individual and institutional levels.

While the next section will further examine the ways in which gender and sexually diverse students are kept within conceptual frameworks of risk, doubt, and pathology, it is important to consider Walcott’s (2003) assertion that: “...nations are not only made different through a politics of recognition, but that they are made different by the various ways in which the multiple ethico- political conditions of belonging are given room for expression” (p. 20). What is evident in the Progressive Conservative Party’s rhetoric surrounding gender identity and expression is a concerted effort to tell a particular and purposeful story regarding gender and sexual expression in school and society.

As Fisher and Stockbridge (2016) assert: “Stories serve a number of purposes involving understanding our present and past while imagining our future” (p. 47). Thus, while the

42 governing party of Ontario declares gender identity a “Liberal ideology” and puts forward resolutions that seek to remove any references of gender identity and expression from Ontario’s sex-education curriculum, there is a strategic effort in creating confusion and complications surrounding gender and sexual diversity and its ‘dangerous’ implications on the stability and coherence of a sound society.

In leading the general public to believe a certain perception of respectability and of sound subjectivity – one that is firmly rooted in traditional expressions and expectations of masculinity and femininity – the ensuing influences on school policy, practice, and school culture are thus informed by a “‘societal sense of permission to marginalize, abuse, or assault gay men, , bisexuals, and transgendered individuals – or the children of LGBTIQ parents’” (Fisher & Stockbridge, 2016, p. 47). To reiterate, heteronormative oppression and the pathologization and suppression of gender and sexual expression is harmful to all students in school.

As Benaway (2018b) puts forward: “By holding up trans people and our lives as an example of identity politics gone rogue, alt-right political parties use the menacing spectre and threat of trans existence to dismantle human rights protections, justify misogyny and racism, and solidify their populist control over the most vulnerable parts of society” (them). Thus, the fight to preserve a more affirming, inclusive, and relevant Health and Physical Education Curriculum is also about fighting for a form of inclusion that does not reify inadequate and oppressive standards of acceptance and belonging, for all students. In getting to the root of the unconscious fears and anxieties that shape our institutions and frameworks of inclusion, we can allow for a broader consideration of belonging, both within and outside of schools.

As asserted above, homophobic and transphobic bullying persists when given permission and a platform. However, as noted by Fisher and Stockbridge (2016): “[The] condemnation of gay students in schools is pervasive and damaging,” and manifests the hostile conditions and “possible flourishing of oppression and bullying” that many of us are working tirelessly to eliminate (p. 47). As some students continue to be awarded for certain identity expressions and behaviors, and thus become complacent towards heteronormative policies and practices that directly impact others (Dryden, 2019), such as the reinforcement of gender-binary bathrooms;

43 zero-tolerance; SROs in school; and ‘appropriate’ dress-code policies, this complacency fosters a permissible hostility towards those outside hegemonic gender and sexual norms.

As highlighted by Leck (2000), gender and sexual hostility often becomes entrenched and normalized within the culture of the school as teachers and administrators also locate success and power through heteronormative oppression: “Some school districts and some school personnel appear to be preoccupied with control and power issues that entrap them in entrenched, monocultural, and binary frames of reference. Students and parents who struggle with issues of identity and sexual/cultural diversity do not usually find a harbor with those types of schools and educators” (p. 330).

Indeed, as revealed in my review of inclusive policies and practices in school, when students are continually exposed to inadequate information and impressions of gender and sexual diversity, such negative positionings directly benefit the dominance of heteronormativity, and thus the reification of oppressive systems dependant on binary truths (Benaway, 2018a). In moving forward, educators need to embrace a queer pedagogy so as to question persistent gaps and better support diverse learners and teachers. Hernandez’s (2017) assertion that we need to be: “Teaching people to keep on questioning and to reclaim the question” (in Goldstein, 2017) resonates deeply with my own research and practices.

Reclaiming the transformative power of the question is a crucial step in resisting complacency in schools, and moving towards a more equitable and inclusive pedagogy. As inclusive policies and practices attempt to make sense of and effectively address data surrounding school climate and culture, a reconsideration of what we are asking and how we are framing our questions could ultimately lead to different responses. Such responses, I have argued, that would be instrumental in allowing for multiple truths, expressions, and frameworks of belonging to emerge.

When reflecting upon student accounts of gender and sexual diversity and belonging in schools, a persistent theme that arose in my research was the violence (both attitudinal and structural) and hostility experienced from educational systems that communicate belonging through predisposed colonial and heteropatriarchal frameworks. Thus, what remains fundamental to our subject- formations and how we define and understand the process of becoming and belonging needs to be rethought. To echo Patterson (2018): “[t]he most important thing is getting the system

44 right…I think you can develop models and approaches till the cows come home…and that’s all very valuable, but what really interests me much more is the system. How do things actually fit together? How do you match unique needs to services? What are the strategies, economic and social, that empower [people] to actually get what they need, as opposed to what they might be offered?” (p. 38).

As previously asserted, one of the ways in which to positively influence the mobilization of knowledge surrounding gender and sexual diversity, is to continually challenge dominant perceptions and practices of inclusion, which can begin by addressing the limitations within current research methodologies and findings. Since study findings from the TDSB and the Ministry of Education powerfully informs the direction of inclusive policy and practice in school, it is critical to challenge prominent measures and discourses of inclusion at both the institutional and individual levels.

Thus, in adopting an intersectional and multi-dimensional approach to data collection and analysis, educational change can come about by telling different stories, and “reading them alongside more mainstream narratives, [to] inform trans theory, guide future activism, and set the stage for new ways of working for change (Ware, 2017, p. 173).

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3.2 School Policy and the Limits of Queer in the National Imaginary

The critical pedagogue always seeks just and fair ways to alter a system which, by and large, and despite seemingly good intentions, has effectively oppressed many of its members. - Elizabeth J. Meyer, ‘But I’m not gay’: What straight teachers need to know about

As a queer researcher, writer, and activist, who remains critical and concerned about the direction of queer, two-spirit, and trans inclusion in schools (especially queer and/or trans disabled, racialized, and/or low-income students), my focus on the relationship between policies put forth by the TDSB and the Ministry of Education, and the politics and parameters of LGBTQ+ inclusion in Pride, is to illuminate the various ways that normative narratives of liberalism, progress, and inclusion gain traction and legitimacy in the public sphere, and thus influence and potentially obscure 2SLGBTQIA+ inclusion in schools.

As seen in the disparities between TDSB policies that advocate for equity, safety, and belonging, such as: Caring and Safe Schools (2013), the Guidelines for the Accommodation of Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Students and Staff (2013), and the Equity Policy (2018), and TDSB practices that further marginalize and exclude, such as: School Resource Officers (SROs), binary bathrooms, the Appropriate Dress Policy (2018), and the PC government’s reversal of inclusive and affirming curriculum, such contrasting conceptualizations of safety and belonging are concerning for students who occupy intersecting identities and experiences.

Since June 2018, there have been several significant shifts felt across the sociopolitical/educational landscape of Ontario. Most notably, were the Premier’s and the Minister of Education’s attacks upon 2SLGBTQIA+ students in Ontario schools through the hasty eradication of the 2015 health and physical education curriculum, which placed 2SLGBTQIA+ students at even greater risk in schools. This moment, among others, was a devastating testament to how quickly policies and practices can be implemented to delegitimize,

46 dehumanize, and ultimately work to eradicate knowledges and experiences pertaining to: gender and sexual diversity; consent; Indigenous teachings; decolonization; anti-racism; gender-based violence; cyberbullying; and sexting, among others. That said, how can schools actively resist oppressive practices of inclusion to ensure that 2SLGBTQIA+ students, and those who live intersecting lives (i.e., are racialized and disabled and queer and/or trans) feel safe, cared for, and affirmed while at school?

As this section will argue, critiquing the prevailing narratives of LGBTQ+ inclusion in Pride is not only crucial in resisting an entire movement’s absorption into assimilationist, capitalist, and colonialist ideologies and practices, but for those invested in the positive health, development, and leadership of disabled/abled queer and trans youth of color, two-spirit, and queer Indigenous youth, it is imperative to interrogate and interrupt the various ways in which mainstream narratives of ‘LGBTQ+ inclusion’ affect what it means to be racialized and disabled and queer and/or trans in school. Specifically, how mainstream narratives of ‘LGBTQ+’ impact school policies and practices that determine socially appropriate encounters with, and expressions of, gender and sexual diversity.

Notably, the current frameworks of inclusion, as put forward by the TDSB and the Ministry of Education, present a persistent framing of gender and sexual diversity within narratives of harassment, risk, inappropriate behavior and dress, and exclusion. Not only do such negative and ostracizing frameworks hinder the positive development and well-being of queer, trans, and two- spirit students, but also limit our understanding of risk and harassment as solely existing on the individual (i.e., student or staff) level.

As Eve Tuck (2009), Unangax writer, researcher, and educator, urged over a decade ago, researchers, scholars, policy-makers, and the like, need to re-evaluate the ways in which over- researched (yet underrepresented, undervalued, and underresourced) communities are consistently positioned within “damage-centered research,” which can only ever yield “damage- centered narratives” (p. 409). Such narratives are thus unable to exceed historical and contemporary understandings of dispossessed and disenfranchised individuals as anything more than damaged and broken, and “entire communities as depleted” (p. 409). Such narratives, Tuck (2009) warns, carry long-term repercussions for individuals and communities, and thus a careful

47 reconsideration and reframing of research, and the portrayal of those historically and currently relegated to the margins, needs to inform future research, policy, and practice.

In looking towards such critical insights, which are as urgently needed now as they were then, it is my hope that the following section illuminates the ways in which the prevailing framework of inclusive education has been dominated by reductionist discourses of inclusion (Liasidou, 2012), which strive to accommodate difference, while perpetuating damage-centered narratives (Tuck, 2009) that both limit and hinder the broader ways in which queer, trans, and two-spirit students could access belonging, affirmation, and acceptance in schools.

In an attempt to better rectify exclusion and discrimination in school policy and practice, I will employ an intersectional lens to generate a critical entry point into reconsiderations of bullying and exclusion as beyond singular and isolated moments, but rather, intrinsically linked to “relationship[s] between people and history, people in communities, people in institutions…[and] the histories that have brought us to [these] particular moment[s]” (Crenshaw, 2018). As such, an intersectional (as well as interdisciplinary) approach to school policies and practices can deepen conventional understandings of the various ways in which non-normative and/or non-conforming students are impacted by heterosexist, ableist, and colonial standards of acceptance and belonging.

That said, this section will emphasize the importance of moving away from discourses that conceptualize non-normality as “risk” and anomaly, and instead, move towards policies and practices that locate and identify discrimination and exclusion as both systemic and structural problems. In doing so, school administrators, staff, policy-makers, and students, can look towards narratives that illuminate an array of lived experiences and expressions that exceed notions of risk, isolation, and ambiguity.

As an entry point into this discussion, I will focus on the following questions: How are inclusive policies and practices conceptualizing safety and belonging in school? Who is named and positioned as “at-risk” in inclusive discourse and practice? How do at-risk and damage-centered narratives reflect the normative ideals underpinning contemporary schooling, and moreover, the limitations surrounding conceptions of diversity and difference? How is social distance maintained across gender and sexual boundaries? How is this distance accentuated along the

48 lines of race, class, and ability? And who continues to benefit from this process? Lastly, what policies and practices are in place that allow school systems to overlook and thus ignore the diverse needs of students?

In response to the TDSB’s Equity Foundation Statement enacted during the 2000-2001 school year, critical pedagogue and ethnographic playwright, Goldstein (2004), embarked on a research project to explore how institutional policies on anti-homophobia are implemented and experienced in Ontario public schools, specifically “one TDSB elementary school, one alternative middle school and two secondary schools” (p. 4). The purpose of this study was to observe how anti-homophobia policies and initiatives were performed and practiced in schools, and to interview and “investigate how new teachers working in TDSB schools felt about implementing TDSB’s anti-homophobia equity policy” (Goldstein, 2004, p. 4). What emerged out of this study was a uniquely queer approach to school policy and affect in schools.

Although the Equity Foundation Statement (2000) stressed that the TDSB was “committed to ensuring that fairness, equity, and inclusion are essential principles of our school system and are integrated into all our policies, programs, operations, and practices” (p. 1), a critical focus on the implementation of anti-homophobia education across “almost 600 public elementary and secondary schools” (Goldstein, 2004, p. 5) operating under the TDSB continued to evade school discourse. As emphasized by Goldstein (2004): “My experiments with ethnographic playwriting and performed ethnography endeavor to represent the research subjects in a way that not only facilitates their truths but also matters to people who were going to be asked to listen to and act upon, these truths” (p. 3).

Thus, the need to make visible what is often made invisible through discourse and repetitive practices in schools (which often become normalized and unquestioned), remains urgent for all those invested in the actualization of inclusive education. Moreover, shedding light on invisibilized language systems and affect further helps us interrogate “an institutional discourse within which teachers and students who teach and learn at the TDSB are expected to position themselves” (Goldstein, 2004, p. 19).

As Leck (2000) puts forward: “Each school system also projects a set of institutionalized expectations about appropriate student development and public behaviour” (p. 334), which only

49 intensifies the exclusion of students whose gender and sexual expression intersects with race, class, and ability. Likewise, Meyer (2007) examines how the “systematic inclusion” (p. 22) of marginalized groups in schools (through isolated support groups, Pride days, and Anti-Racism Week, for example) further supports how our education systems maintain a normalized, heteronormative order by continuing to segregate and often pathologize anything that deviates from the norm.

Further, Meyer (2007) claims that the systematic inclusion of marginalized students acts as a form of control and resistance, stating that “while marginalized groups employ new strategies to challenge dominant ideologies, these entrenched discourses push back” (p. 26). This push-back in schools is pervasive and often remains unchallenged, thus continuing to foreclose the possibility of queering school policies and the ways in which policy rhetoric “contribute[s] to homophobic attitudes and to reinforcing the heterosexual norm” (Meyer, 2007, p. 20).

In respect to the advancements of inclusive education brought forward by the TDSB, it remains evident that students and staff lack access to discourses and practices required to shift pre- established notions of social power and prestige. As findings from GLSEN’s (2018) most recent National School Climate Survey demonstrate, the overall percentage of LGBTQ students reporting access to supportive resources and comprehensive anti-bullying policies has not surpassed 15% since 2005. Findings further indicate that the availability of LGBTQ-related school practices, such as the positive inclusion of LGBTQ issues in classroom curriculum, has stayed around 20% since 2001.29 Not only do such stark findings indicate the intensive work needed to be done around LGBTQ inclusion in school, they also highlight the inequitable distribution of power and positive representation between LGBTQ and heterosexual students.

As I have put forward, the various inclusive policies and practices made available by the TDSB and the Ministry of Education merely advocate for the inclusion of marginalized students, while continuing to cite heteronormative identities and experiences as the dominant measure of

29 To view GLSEN’s (2018) infographic showcasing these findings, see: https://www.glsen.org/sites/default/files/Availability-of-LGBTQ-inclusive-school-resources-GLSEN-NSCS- 2017.png

50 acceptance, and thus, inclusion and belonging. Therefore, current discourses on inclusion, bullying, and acceptance remain limited in their ability to cultivate positive and affirming spaces for a diverse array of students.

In order to foster environments that help, rather than hinder the well-being of queer, trans, and two-spirit students, educational discourses need to move beyond individualized and isolated perceptions of bullying and harassment, and instead, move towards an acknowledgement of the broader social purposes of bullying and exclusion in schools. Such a rhetorical shift would provide a critical entry point into the normative standards that determine and define how ‘at-risk’ students are perceived and positioned in schools.

By re-examining the effects of predisposed subject positions, such as ‘at-risk,’ for example, school policy-makers, students, and administrators can begin to question: How is acceptance, belonging, inclusion, and safety, being perceived in policy and practice? Who is benefiting from these perceptions? What are the contributing factors that remain absent from discourses surrounding exclusion and harassment? What cultural shifts could occur if school policy and practice were to critically engage with the social purposes of bullying and exclusion?

When examining the following policies and initiatives put forth by the TDSB, such as: the Equity Foundation Statement (2000); Student Dress Code (2012), Caring and Safe Schools (2013); Guidelines for the Accommodation of Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Students and Staff (2013); Accessibility Policy (2018); Equity Policy (2018); and the Toronto District School Board Appropriate Dress Policy (2018); as well as policies from the Ministry of Education, such as: the Accepting Schools Act (2012); and the Ontario Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy (2016), a common through line is a rhetoric that strongly advocates for the inclusion of historically marginalized students and staff, while continuing to position non-white, disabled, and/or queer students within narratives of marginalization, risk, and exclusion.

As this section argues for a shift in policy rhetoric concerning the inclusion of gender and sexual diversity in schools, I have found Goldstein’s (2004) study into anti-homophobia policy implementation a critical and insightful approach for which to consider the impacts of policy rhetoric on students and staff. More specifically, Goldstein’s (2004) re-envisioning of teacher

51 interviews through performed ethnography locates the tensions and misconceptions that remain when inclusive policies are not challenging preestablished norms and perceptions.

As demonstrated by the recent feedback the TDSB received after requesting community consultations in revising its Student Dress Code (2012), one of the core issues the consultations brought forward was that the draft policy remained entrenched in oppressive language systems (through biased stereotyping practices) and left unchallenged inequitable, predisposed subject positions. In doing so, the TDSB’s draft revision, the Appropriate Dress Policy (2018), disproportionately targeted queer, trans, two-spirit, gender non-conforming, racialized, and feminine presenting students.

Again, as illustrated in Goldstein’s (2004) study of the challenges in ensuring equitable and consistent use of anti-oppressive policy, the Appropriate Dress Policy (2018) left unclear how staff and student interpretations and implementations of the policy would remain consistent, unbiased, and equitably applied in schools. Likewise, as advocated by Goldstein (2004), the End Dress Codes collective (2018) proposed the need for staff and students to receive appropriate information and training for implementing an anti-oppressive dress policy.30

Leck’s (2000) assertion that: “Educators’ language needs to be carefully thought through and constantly situated appropriately within contexts of shared meaning that open rather than close or make invisible possibilities for understanding” (p. 335) resonates deeply with both Goldstein’s (2004) and the End Dress Codes’ proposal. The positive outcomes that the End Dress Codes collective and Goldstein (2004) have gained through community input and collaborations with students, parents and guardians, teachers, administrators, and Boards, illustrates the power behind questioning and thus revealing how we locate ourselves within situated meanings, as through “spoken language, but also of written, body, visual, and other sensory languages” (Leck, 2000, p. 336). By creating communication through dialogue (Goldstein, 2004), this level of community engagement and input demonstrates the various ways in which students and teachers

30 For more on the End Dress Codes collective, as well as the ongoing campaign and community/school board consultations, see: https://enddresscodes.com/

52 communicate across identity differences and similarities, and allows for policies to emerge that unambiguously promote equity and inclusion (End Dress Codes, 2018).

While inclusive rhetoric has garnered a celebrated, as well as contentious, recognition over the past decade, specifically in Ontario, “inclusion” as a term or catch-phrase (Portelli et al., 2007) remains at the forefront of educational efforts advocating for positive change. That said, Parekh et al. (2016) similarly remain critical of how action transpires behind ambiguous discourses of inclusion and equity, stating that, while “inclusion initiatives [are] being driven by hopes of improving the educational outcomes for students being moved to inclusive settings, and also the goal of bringing about greater equity and reducing the historical and current stratification of student opportunity along the lines of race, language, class, gender, and immigration status…” (p. 76), all those involved in this process should be aware of how support systems further classify and pathologize “all those students whom schools have historically not served well” (Portelli et al., 2007, p. 2).

Thus, what continues to evade inclusive rhetoric are the ways in which students experience physical, emotional, and spiritual distress from perfunctory policies that reassert heteronormative, ableist, and colonial frameworks of belonging.

As argued above, rather than repeatedly situating gender and sexually diverse students “in reference to something students deem abnormal or unpleasant [which] implicitly cites heteronormative discourse – [and] defines heterosexuality and stereotypical gender roles as normal” (Smith & Payne, 2016, p. 74), school policy-makers, Boards, and administrators can look to various communities in order to cultivate alternative language systems that circulate within the schooling environment (Smith & Payne, 2016). One of the many excellent resources available and accessible for educators and students is the web-booklet, Safe and Caring Schools for Two Spirit Youth: A Guide for Teachers and Students (2011). The following booklet is but one example of the various ways schools can begin to recognize and respectfully address the intersecting challenges that many two-spirit students face in school.

As outlined in the booklet: “the impact of colonization has been long lasting; suppressing Two Spirit traditions and roles and leaving generations of Two Spirit people suffering from multiple layers of discrimination and stigma. Two Spirit youth are particularly at risk” (Safe and Caring

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Schools for Two Spirit Youth, 2011, p. 2). As such, the informative booklet provides alternative approaches to implementing policies and practices that speak to the specific experiences of queer Indigenous and two-spirit youth in schools. Moreover, the booklet provides culturally specific understandings of gender, sexuality, safety, risk, and acceptance based on Indigenous and two- spirit worldviews, traditional languages and teachings.

Thus, school policies effectively do the work of inclusion and equity by addressing gaps in support, well-being, and achievement through student and community input. There are many accessible and informative community resources that aim to help schools and educators achieve equitable and affirming environments through the insights of students’ respective communities and lived experiences. Community organizations are often at the forefront of much of the crucial work happening to ensure that respectable, responsive, affirming, and equitable services and education is being made available to queer, trans, queer Indigenous, and two-spirit youth.

Further, community spaces for youth, which are led by and for youth, can provide essential spaces for dialogue, connection, and support in resisting the internalization of social stigma. As stated in Safe and Caring Schools for Two Spirit Youth (2011): “…colonial contact brought with it homophobic beliefs that quickly threatened and suppressed Two Spirit roles and teachings” (p. 9). Thus, resources and teachings pertaining to healthy sexuality and gender diversity need to educate and support students in a manner that is respectful to their ways of life (Healing Our Nations, 2019).

In order to respectfully and adequately address oppression and exclusion in schools, resources such as the Safe and Caring Schools for Two Spirit Youth (2011) provide an essential framework for which to locate, decolonize and “de-territorialize” (Fisher & Stockbridge, 2016, p. 42) pre- established conceptions of gender, sexuality, risk, safety, and acceptance in schools. As Wilson (2008) explains, from her perspective as a two-spirt woman from the Opaskwayak Cree Nation: “The Swampy Cree dialect of our community has no word for homosexual and no gender specific pronouns” (p. 193).

Further, while policy narratives on and bullying often centre the process of “coming out” as the apex of the LGBTQ experience, Wilson (2011) identifies more with the culturally specific process of “coming in” as two-spirit people: “as Native people who are not

54 straight, we had become comfortable with who we are not because we had “come out” (a process that seems like a prerequisite for happiness in modern books and movies about gay or lesbian people). We became comfortable with ourselves and empowered when we came into our identities as Two Spirit people” (as cited in Safe and Caring Schools for Two Spirit Youth, 2011, p. 11). Therefore, in order to effectively reach two-spirit students, the entire narrative of modern gender and sexual identity needs to exceed the traditional binary, and create space for other truths and expressions to thrive in schools.

Smith & Payne (2016) similarly examine the ways in which “dominant discourses of bullying, school climate, and LGBTQ students’ victimization shape how educators understand negative school climates for LGBTQ youth and envision possibilities for change” (p. 74). Of importance, is the argument that “school climate and bullying discourses reproduce an oversimplified narrative of how LGBTQ students are stigmatized and marginalized in the day-to-day operations of schools” (Smith & Payne, 2016, p. 74).

For the purposes of this study, Smith & Payne (2016) provide a critical foundation for which to further question how inclusion is actually happening for queer, trans, and two-spirit students through inclusive policy, and based on whose standards and perceptions of belonging? In other words, how are inclusive policies conceptualizing and measuring inclusion and belonging? Are prevalent discourses of inclusion and bullying based on changing or maintaining the dominant culture of the school?

As noted by Short (2008), the violence that students often remarked upon was due to a “certain prestige within the school” that some students felt they held over others, which remained unchallenged and thus normalized (p. 42). Students that reflected dominant expressions of masculinity or femininity, through “normative gender and sexual presentation,” experienced tangible superiority, which was permitted through school policies and practices that both valued and encouraged social norms (Short, 2008, p. 42). Subsequently, in addressing the reproduction of social norms within educational spaces, school policies and practices play a crucial role in fostering safe and affirming schools. As demonstrated by the TDSB’s Guidelines for the Accommodation of Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Students and Staff (2013), referred to as the Guidelines from herein, students and staff are encouraged to be mindful of

55 gendered language, binary activities, stereotypes, and biases that could be harmful and isolating towards those who identify as transgender or gender non-conforming (p. 20).

However, in the section focusing on “Job-Related Planning for a Gender Transition” (p. 18), a disproportionate amount of emotional work and responsibility is placed on the individual transitioning. Not only does this place the staff member or student transitioning at potential risk, but such approaches characterize diverse expressions of gender as isolated incidences or educational issues. This is further demonstrated in the section focusing on planning and communicating one’s transition. In the Guidelines (2013), it is suggested that the manager of the educational workplace should: “Make it clear that the transition is ‘no big deal’ and that work will continue as before” and “Announce the timing of a mandatory ‘Transgender 101’ [workshop] to take place before the transition” (p. 19).

However, as previously asserted, what remains problematic about this approach is the reactive nature of the inclusive practice. Meaning, it is extremely difficult to express and ensure that this process will be “no big deal” in an environment that has yet to encounter diverse expressions of gender and sexuality. Due to the absence of gender and sexual diversity in the culture of the institution, one’s transition will be a big deal for most. Thus, when institutional spaces are not proactively considering and expecting a diverse array of experiences and identity expressions, levels of risk and hostility are heightened, and exclusion easily becomes normalized.

While the actions of students and staff are imperative in fostering inclusive and equitable schools, the ways in which students experience and internalize physical, emotional, and attitudinal violence from normative discourses and practices remains unacknowledged, and consequently, “LGBTQ and gender non-conforming students’ positions in social hierarchies remain largely unchanged, and systems of power that put them there remain intact” (Smith & Payne, 2016, p. 74). In an effort to better recognize and disrupt normalizing discourses in schools – a practice that could be liberating for all students – inclusive and anti-bullying discourses need to discard traditional narratives that perceive students and staff as inherently at-risk and marginal due to their gender expression, sexuality, race, and/or ability.

Instead, drawing upon narratives that affirm and anticipate gender and sexual diversity in schools could bring about new discourses and directions for which to envision cultural change. As

56 further emphasized by Wilson (2011): “Learning about and talking to our youth and other community members about Two Spirit identity could help them move along their own healing paths” (as cited in Safe and Caring Schools for Two Spirit Youth, p. 11).

In Short’s (2008) research study, he was able to speak with a school teacher who had been engaged in equity focused work in schools for over two decades. During the interview, Short (2008) asked the teacher what she would like to see coming out of school policy and practice. In her response, she expressed that: “The educational response has to be there, as well, to combat all the other voices and influences telling the students how to be normal” (p. 44). This teacher’s reflection is crucial, as it reasserts the need for a systemic and structural response to the normative influences that hinder the well-being and sense of belonging of students. As Short (2008) further examines:

Formal law, policies, and codes of behavior are a necessary first step. Nonetheless, what schools must do to ensure the safety of queer students is to educate and to re-educate the actors in the setting. The curriculum must include courses that study gender and sexuality in order to implicate the heterosexual students. Otherwise, heterosexual students (and teachers) receive information about queer students and react to the response of the law to the harassment of queer students from their distanced, normative positions. (p. 45)

This normative positioning, which also evokes social distance, is best demonstrated in Ontario’s Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy, which was last modified in 2016. In the section focusing on why Ontario needs such a strategy, the Ministry states:

Ontarians share a belief in the need to help students learn and to prepare them for their role in society as engaged, productive and responsible citizens. Yet, some groups of students, including recent immigrants, children from low-income families, Aboriginal students, boys and students with special education needs, among others, may be at risk of lower achievement. (2016, para. 3)

Given this explanation, it remains unclear as to why some students face challenges in Ontario schools over others. What can be deducted from this statement, however, is a rhetorical separation between Ontarians, or “the standard against which risk is measured” (Portelli et al.,

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2007, p. 9) and Others, i.e., those who are low-income, have special education needs, or simply exist “among others.”

An unspoken, normative positioning is further demonstrated in the Ministry’s response to the particular timing of the strategy, stating that:

Canadians embrace multiculturalism, human rights and diversity as fundamental values. However, there are ongoing incidents of discrimination in our society that require our continuing attention… Racism, religious intolerance, homophobia and gender-based violence are still evident in our communities and, unfortunately, in our schools. This can lead to students feeling rejected, excluded and isolated at school, which may result in behaviour problems in the classroom, decreased interest in school, lower levels of achievement and higher dropout rates. (2016, para. 6)

In addressing “ongoing incidents of discrimination,” which could lead to a “decreased interest in school” the strategy is able to create distance between acts of discrimination, and the unspoken, as well as spoken, ways in which schools are organized around oppressive norms and ideologies. By continuing to frame discriminatory behaviors and beliefs as individually produced and experienced, equitable and inclusive frameworks dangerously obscure the systemic reproduction and reification of social hierarchies in school, which inevitably lead to schooling environments that feel unsafe and inaccessible to many students.

As asserted above, the educational response has to be there. For students who experience systemic discrimination and exclusion on a daily basis, educational policies on equity and anti- discrimination are a crucial start, but the consistent practice and implementation of such policies is essential in fostering environments where historically underserved and mistreated students feel they can access safety, inclusion, and acceptance on their own terms. As the booklet on Safe and Caring Schools for Two Spirit Youth (2011) puts forward:

It is not easy to ask for help… • Two Spirit students do not feel safe to approach school staff for assistance. • Less than 50% of Two Spirit students know if their school has a policy for reporting homophobic incidents.

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• Two Spirit students feel that school staff are unlikely to intervene or say anything to address the situation. (p. 19)

As stressed by Smith & Payne (2016), inclusive and anti-bullying policies and practices often fail to identify the social purposes of homophobic and transphobic language, for example: “why students use this language to target one another or express general displeasure, how this language cites gender stereotypes and heteronormative discourse, and how it reinforces social stigma around LGBTQ identities and gender transgressions” (p. 80). Therefore, when inclusive and anti- oppression policies are not actively shifting the collective habitus (Bourdieu, 1989) of the schooling environment, i.e., the ways in which students perceive the social culture of the school and their place within in it, such policies often reify the terms of viable and nonviable bodies and identity expressions.

Titchkosky (2008) further examines “the interrelation of bodies, [their] environment, and knowledge” (p. 40) to problematize how structures reproduce the status quo through the narration of “nonviable” bodies as justifiably excludable; given historical, normative conceptions of difference, access, and belonging. In particular, how historically inaccessible institutions, to varying degrees, continue to gesture towards a “caring inclusion” by invoking both a sense of access by “placing an icon of access on a door, poster, or pamphlet…” while sustaining an environment complicit in “the work of dis-attending to disability” (p. 54), which consequently, maintains the status quo. In dis-attending to disability, a caring inclusion thus attends to the work of normalcy and maintaining “some sort of boundary at the edges of which resides the possibility of defining and shoring up belonging and not belonging, relevancy and irrelevancy, personhood and its Other” (Titchkosky, 2008, p. 55).

Further, Wolowic et. al (2017) highlight the dangers of assuming that inclusive signs alone help and support 2SLGBTQIA+ students, stating that: “Policy makers hope the visibility of the symbol can help, but researchers caution that the mere display of such rainbows or ‘safe space’ stickers as part of many of the initiatives seldom requires training that aids teachers in their practical support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth…” (p. 558). Thus, when displays and discourses of inclusion are not acting inclusively by shifting the culture of the school – through appropriate teacher training, inclusive curriculum, and spaces, for example –

59 the overall presentation of inclusion fails to disrupt the status quo, and thus maintains a culture of oppression and hostility towards 2SLGBTQIA+ students and staff.

Of particular interest to this claim is the concept of “enfleshment,” which Erevelles (2000) describes as the process where “bodies are inscribed by the dominant cultural practices of schools [and are] marked by discourses that not only sit on the surface of the flesh but are, on the other hand, embedded in the flesh such that we learn ‘a way of being in our bodies…that is we are taught to think about our bodies and how to experience our bodies’” (p. 33). The process of enfleshment, by which the body comes into being via the social determinants made available by the surrounding environment, is most poignant when bodies exist outside of a dominating norm.

When reflecting on the education system, there is a particular desire to name and organize bodies based on colonial, ableist, and heterocentric norms, which consequently, constitute non-white, disabled, and queer students as at-risk or antithetical towards the dominant framework of education. Thus, while there are continuous attempts to foster safe and accepting schools through inclusive policies and practices, the discourses made available for which to envision change remain within conceptions of queerness and disability as educational problems.

As students orient themselves around a normative social order within their schools, they may be unaware of how discourses of marginalization, risk, and exclusion affect their social positioning, and “may come to understand various forms of power or domination over them as ‘natural,’ or at least unchangeable, and therefore unquestioned” (Gaventa, Pettit, & Cornish, 2011, p. 13). Students and teachers may also internalize dominant narratives of marginalization and risk in ways that rationalize inequity and exclusion, rather than acknowledging oppression as systemic and structural. Consequently, as long as inclusive practices continue to draw upon narratives that reify damaging social norms and hierarchies, students will continue to be positioned within discriminatory and inequitable spaces.

By critically and carefully examining the effects of predisposed subject positions – such as ‘marginal’ and ‘at-risk’ – policy-makers, students, staff, and administrators can begin to question: How is acceptance, belonging, inclusion, and safety being conceptualized in policy and practice? Who is benefiting from these perceptions? What consultations, if any, are being held at the student, staff, and community levels? What communities are being considered in this

60 process? Is this process an open and accessible opportunity for students, staff, and communities to build long-term and sustainable relationships of understanding, consent, and respect?

In response to the community consultations put forward by the TDSB concerning a revised version of its Student Dress Code Policy (2012), The End Dress Codes Collective (2018) highlighted the need to ensure that – while community engagement is essential in policy development and implementation – policy rhetoric needs to remain unambiguous and accessible in order to fully achieve equity and inclusivity in schools, stating that:

• It’s awesome that the Board is doing this work. • It’s awesome that gang attire is no longer mentioned – that’s one less excuse to racially profile. • It’s awful that students are expected to cover their “chests” with opaque fabric – dress coding re: cleavage will continue apace. • It’s a shame that the draft remains difficult to read. (End Dress Codes, 2018)

In the section “What schools can do,” the Safe and Caring Schools for Two Spirit Youth (2011) booklet offers several useful strategies that can help teachers advocate for students, in particular two-spirit students, in order to foster safe, caring, and equitable schools. Of relevance to school policy, I wanted to highlight a few of their suggestions:

• Advocate an inclusive, respectful anti-homophobia policy in your school district and your school. Make this policy well known to students, parents, administrators and all staff as a positive part of their commitment to making their schools safe. • Ensure that staff receive educational seminars and workshops on Two Spirit issues to increase awareness, improve rates of intervention and increase the number of supportive staff available to students. • Include Two Spirit youth, Elders and community members in program development and evaluation. (p. 21-22)

In speaking to the importance of ensuring narratives of diverse expressions and identities are made accessible, equitable, affirming, complex, and beautiful, Dominique Jackson (Tobagonian-

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American trans actress, author, and model) asserts that: “I don’t look for acceptance in 2019 – I look for respect” (CBC, 2019).

Indeed, as I continually look towards various communities to inform my own knowledge, research, and activism, so too should policy-makers, school staff, and administrators when navigating and incorporating 2SLGBTQIA+ students into discourse and practice. It is my unwavering belief that queer, trans, two-spirt, disabled, and racialized youth and their surrounding community members hold powerful and integral knowledge regarding their own lived experiences, and the various arms of oppression that continually seek to undermine and disregard such ways of knowing and being in the world.

Ultimately, as long as our education systems continue to teach and learn within inclusive frameworks that reify heteronormative, ableist, and colonial standards of belonging, students who identify as queer, trans, two-spirit, or questioning will continue to be immersed in hostile school cultures. Providing access to discourses and practices that both anticipate and affirm students who exist outside dominant social norms would not only benefit the development of all students in school, but would create the cultural shift needed in order to “re-make that which has conditioned consciousness, by telling a new story about who we are” (Titchkosky, 2008, p. 56).

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Chapter 4 Student and School Accounts of Gender and Sexual Diversity 4.1 Narrative Preservation in School Climate Surveys: Examining Institutional Accounts of Belonging

Identity isn’t simply a self-contained unit. It is a relationship between people and history, people in communities, people in institutions. So schools do a good job when they understand that, and when they commit themselves to curricular development, to opportunities in the school for all students to understand the histories that have brought us to this particular moment. You can’t change outcomes without understanding how they’ve come about. - Kimberlé Crenshaw, “What is intersectionality?”

Given the limited parameters of a Master’s thesis, an extensive analysis of school climate surveys is beyond the scope of this study. I am, however, interested in examining what I perceive as a methodological through line apparent in various school climate surveys. Namely, that a large portion of school climate and student well-being surveys operate along a “single-axis framework” (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 139), which primarily considers single identity categories when approaching questions related to student behavior, health, inclusion, and well-being in school.

Thus, in considering correlations between school culture, climate, and a particular emphasis on intersecting identities and lived experiences, my anonymous student survey (Appendix A) attempted to go beyond the prevailing single-axis framework of school climate surveys, and instead, adopt what Fisher and Stockbridge (2016) refer to as a “prismatic inquiry methodology” (p. 53), which “utilizes the convergence, divergence and juxtaposition of data in the exploration of hidden or unexpected relationships, opening the paths to other ways of knowing while maintaining a criterion of quality and definitions of success” (p. 54).

While a multitude of school climate and student well-being surveys exist at the local, national, and international levels, I wanted to draw attention to several key studies at the local and national, i.e., Ontario and Canadian levels. In doing so, I recognize that future research should

63 consider an international scope to further examine the correlations across differing demographics and other intersecting factors that contribute to student well-being and perceptions of school climate and belonging. In an effort to ensure diverse perspectives and social positions are considered in my analysis, the surveys outlined in this section offer differing points of departure (i.e., institutional, professional, student, and non-profit) in light of certain power dynamics and conceptualizations of climate, behavior, health, inclusion, and well-being in school.

As previously stated, the climate surveys included in this study provide a snapshot of the important work that is being done by individuals, community organizations, institutions, boards and Ministries to ensure students are immersed in safe, caring, and accepting schools (with particular reference to gender and sexual minorities). That said, the particular surveys I draw upon have had formative impacts on narratives surrounding equity, inclusion, and student well- being. Consequently, although these studies provide an expansive portrait of school climate, and factors contributing to the health and well-being of students (for example: feelings of safety, inclusion, and access to resources and other supports within and outside school premises), such studies employ limited parameters for which to understand and complicate how students arrive at particular narratives of gender, sexuality, and inclusion as it relates to their sense of self, and the selves of others.

As demonstrated in the final report conducted by EGALE Canada Human Rights Trust, “Every Class in Every School: The First National Climate Survey on Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia in Canadian Schools” (2011); the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network’s (GLSEN’s) “National School Climate Survey: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth in our Nation’s Schools” (2014); Peter, Taylor, and Chamberland’s (2015) “A Queer Day in Canada: Examining Canadian High School Students’ Experiences with School- based Homophobia in Two Large-scale Studies”; Gahagan’s (2016) noteworthy study, “Exploring the School Climate for Gender and Sexuality Minority Students and Staff in Nova Scotia: A Survey of NSTU Teachers”; the TDSB’s “Caring and Safe Schools Report” (2017); and lastly, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s (CAMH’s) report on “The Mental Health and Well-Being of Ontario Students 1991-2017” (2017), the following surveys – although significant and extensive in offering an assemblage of data regarding perceptions of school climate for at-risk youth and staff in Canadian schools – such approaches to data collection and

64 analysis remain grounded in singular or binary frameworks, which consequently, fail to address the correlation between intersecting identity markers, and the heightened risks of oppression and marginalization for those students in school.

More specifically, in Gahagan’s (2016) “Exploring the School Climate for Gender and Sexuality Minority Students and Staff in Nova Scotia” as well as CAMH’s report on “The Mental Health and Well-Being of Ontario Students” (2017), a common (and significant) issue that arises is a general disregard for intersectionality, and thus, a dismissal of the ways in which perceptions of school climate and well-being – in relation to sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression – differs when considering other identity markers such as race, disability, class, citizenship, nationality, creed, etc.

Subsequently, the proliferation of a single-axis framework, and the narratives that stem from data analyses, fail to fully explain “how what appears to be a neutral system [such as the school] can produce different outcomes for people based on the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, age, citizenship status and other aspects of social identities” (Durfee, 2018), which, upon further reflection of the aforementioned surveys, is both a persistent and problematic theme.

Consider, for example, that the summarized report on “The Mental Health and Well-Being of Ontario Students” (2017) puts forward a significant claim that the mental health and well-being of students from grades 7-12 has increased considerably over the past decade, based on select indicators across their total sample of students (CAMH, p. xii). While such findings highlight sizable decreases in the areas of antisocial behavior; physical fighting at school; being bullied at school; and medical use of prescription drugs over the past year, as well as work to be done in areas that saw an increase in fair or poor self-rated mental health; moderate-to-serious psychological distress; serious psychological distress, and a concerning stability in the areas of suicidal ideations and suicide attempts over the past year,31 there remains no reference to how such indicators of health and well-being intersect with a student’s race, class, gender, sexuality, and/or disability. As such, ensuing public discourse and policy becomes largely informed by

31 Findings taken from the “Overview of Trends for Selected Mental Health and Well-Being Indicators Among the Total Sample of Students, OSDUHS [Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey]” (CAMH, 2017, p. xii).

65 experiences and perceptions of student health and well-being based upon gendered, regional, and grade differences alone (CAMH, 2017).

Likewise, as observed in other student and school climate surveys,32 not only does a limited and aggregate approach to data collection and analysis fail to consider the intersections of social identities that influence experiences of mental health and well-being in schools, such prominent methodologies also reproduce narratives that provide partial and incomplete understandings of identity and interlocking forms of oppression, which subsequently, perpetuates distorted understandings of student realities and experiences.

In a study aimed at complexifying the notion stigma among adolescents, for example, Saewyc et. al (2013) developed a general stigmatization measure in order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of stigmatization and its effects. In doing so, Saewyc et. al (2013) provided a much needed approach towards thinking about stigma and oppression from multiple vantage points, such as personal, institutional, and structural, and the differing impacts this may have on students in school. What Saewyc et. al (2013) perceive as the “three dimensions of stigma: enacted stigma (rejecting hostile behaviours targeted toward stigmatized people), perceived stigma (awareness you possess a stigmatized characteristic and others reject you), and internalized stigma (acceptance of the dominant groups’ negative judgments about you),” provides a holistic and complex understanding of the various practices and behaviours that produce stigmatizing affects.

The notion of “layered stigma” or, the compound effects of stigma from multiple stigmatized characteristics (Saewyc et. al, 2013), offers a more nuances conceptual framework for which to recognize the layered impacts of oppression on 2SLGBTQ+ students in school, and address the underlying narrative structures that maintain hostile and unwelcoming spaces for diverse student bodies. As stressed by Khan-Cullors (2018), the interspersed, yet all-too-common experiences of harassment and social exclusion based on racial bias and profiling in schools often escape major

32 CAMH (2017); EGALE (2011); Gahagan (2016); GLSEN (2014); Peter, Taylor, & Chamberland (2015); and the TDSB’s Caring and Safe Schools Report 2016-2017 (2017).

66 studies and school data collection processes, which is largely due to the normalization of school cultures that reify colonial, heteronormative, and Eurocentric standards of inclusion and belonging. In addition to a systemically oppressive school culture, is a climate of fear that stems from the daily marginalization experienced by racialized students in school.

As further asserted by Crenshaw (1989), the perpetuation of a single-axis framework, which leaves interlocking forms of oppression unaddressed, also “sets forth a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis” (p. 139), thus missing a pivotal opportunity to examine how experiences of gender and sexual diversity, for example, differ depending upon one’s race, class, ability, citizenship, etc. Indeed, while a large amount of student data is predominantly aggregated across gendered, racial, socioeconomic, and grade differences – and when considered, disability – each are examined as isolated categories, as if to say that varying identity markers have little to no relationship with each other.

That said, the anonymous student survey included in this particular study incorporates questions that intentionally address the intersecting influences of identity, culture, and climate as one attempt to better understand (and potentially redefine) conceptions of student behavior, health, belonging, and well-being in school. Moreover, in consideration of gender and sexual minorities in school, I also wanted to ensure that heterosexual orientations were brought to the fore as well. So often, normative practices, desires, and identity categories are afforded the option of remaining in the background, and thus beyond reproach when considering the ways in which particular bodies, behaviors, and expressions of identity are organized around societal norms of gender and sexuality.

As put forth by Ahmed (2006), when we redirect our critical gaze towards conceptions and performances of heterosexuality, and place such activities under similar scrutiny as homosexuality and queerness, heterosexuality becomes more than “simply an orientation toward others, it is also something that we are oriented around, even if it disappears from view” (p. 560). That said, there is a distinct difference between disappearing from view due to the normalization of your lived experience, and disappearing from view due to normalizing forces that seek to displace and undermine certain identity expressions and lived experiences.

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Arlo Kempf’s (2018) report on “The Challenges of Measuring Well-Being in Schools” further considers the challenges, limitations, and possibilities surrounding current measurements and standards of student well-being in Ontario schools, and thus presents a powerful argument for what is at stake when policy discourse and current climate surveys are complicit in the systemic misrecognition and erasure of non-normative students and staff. Kempf (2018) puts forward that, “[w]ithin education specifically, the Ontario Ministry of Education has placed wellbeing at the centre of its vision for the future of Ontario’s public education systems” (p. 3). However, as my research study explores, there remains a detrimental dissonance between the notion of health and well-being as “multifaceted in the educational context” and that which is “consistently linked by policymakers with questions of academic achievement” (Kempf, 2018, p. 1).

Further, what is becoming increasingly apparent, is the notion that “what students should know is inextricably linked to how students should know, as well as to how students should be; namely, resilient, creative, inquisitive, and interpersonally proficient” (Kempf, 2018, p. 3). In measuring student health and well-being, however, this raises several concerns, specifically when considering the ways in which diverse student populations are recognized and accounted for within regimented and standardized conceptions of health and wellness.

As emphasized in response to a recent study focusing on the SRO program and its impacts on school culture and climate, which was spearheaded by the Toronto Police Services Board and conducted by researchers at Ryerson University, TDSB executive superintendent on engagement and well-being reflected that: “…reviews like Ryerson’s miss the mark… universities may crunch numbers and find that the majority of students react positively to the SRO, like in a recent Carleton University review of Peel Regional Police’s program. But what about the students who don’t?” (Rattan, 2017).

The concerns expressed by Rattan (2017) highlight the dangers of collecting and mobilizing knowledge that fails to fully explain “how what appears to be a neutral system [such as the school] can produce different outcomes for people based on the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, age, citizenship status and other aspects of social identities” (Durfee, 2018). Which is why this study argues for the greater incorporation of intersectional accounts from students, staff, and families to address institutional measures that dangerously obscure the hostile realities

68 minoritized youth face in school, due to an overwhelming focus on the majority of student responses as the overall experience of inclusion, safety, and well-being in school.

Thus, in order to ensure that future school climate surveys, policies, and practices do not “miss the mark” (Rattan, 2017) on minority voices and their unmet needs in school, the following study argues for an intersectional and comparative approach to meaningfully explore the relationship between institutional reports of student inclusion and well-being (as measured and defined through school climate data) and the prevailing perceptions of gender and sexual diversity (as illustrated in school policy rhetoric, inclusive practices, and mainstream Pride narratives). In exploring the commonalities and contradictions that emerge from institutional and personal accounts of 2SLGBTQ+ inclusion and well-being, an intersectional and comparative approach allows us to move beyond binary, heteronormative, and colonial frameworks when measuring and operationalizing inclusion and wellness in school.

As emphasized by Hernandez (2017): “kids will show you what they feel when they think they can” (LGBTQ Families Speak Out). Therefore, it remains the responsibility of those in power to be aware of how the insistence of heteronormative and colonial frameworks and standards of belonging may emotionally, mentally, and spiritually impact gender and sexual minorities in school. As Leck (2000) further argues: “Those confusions are clearly destructive for those individuals who are caught up in the politicization, the oversimplification, and the embedded misunderstandings about adolescent sexualities” (p. 332). Consequently, recurrent efforts to understand and address both positive and negative school climates and cultures are thus falling short in terms of what is being measured, how measurements are taking shape, and when schools are achieving positive climates for all students and staff.

While Kempf (2018) is similarly critical of the ways in which current measurements of student well-being are increasingly linked to school and student achievement, such criticisms not only draw attention to the problematic associations apparent in approaches to student health, but also demonstrate what is at stake when dominant discourses of student wellness fail to consider the broader systemic and interlocking factors that determine and define how certain students experience and access health and well-being in schools. Following the assertion that: “Until we begin understanding more about causality, we will not understand the true structures underlying

69 what we study” (Kempf, 2018, p. 10), we cannot fully understand and address school cultures – and the climates they create – until there is a broader recognition and shift of power within the administrative and organizational levels.

Given the recent disturbing cases of assault and sexual assault at St. Michael’s College School – the private, all-boys Roman Catholic day school in Toronto, Ontario – concerns surrounding school culture and reform are becoming more and more prevalent in mainstream discourse. Reflecting on Kempf’s (2018) assertion that “within a public accountability discourse…that which works best may not be easily measurable and may never be politically attractive. Rather, better measures may be far wider, messier, and complicated than anything proposed to date” (p. 11), j skelton (educational consultant in the TDSB) similarly suggests that changes in school cultures are often signaled by more complicated and challenging responses and outcomes. In an interview with CBC’s Matt Galloway (2018), j skelton and a behavioral psychologist spoke to the recent incidences at St. Michael’s and how to address and change a deep-seated culture of bullying and intimidation at St. Michael’s specifically, and schools in general within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).

As an educational consultant working with schools and students in the TDSB, j skelton reflects in their interview with Galloway (2018) that:

One of the things that we often see in working with schools is, when they begin to change and when students start to feel safer, they often see an increase in students reporting incidences. It’s not that the incidences are increasing, but that students feel that they can come, and receive support, and be taken care of, and be protected. I think that one of the first signs that change is happening is often that increase in reporting. (skelton, in Galloway, 2018)

In other words, it is not necessarily the case that acts of violence and assault are becoming more frequent in schools (although that often becomes the rhetoric), but rather, the systemic and socialized behaviors of violence – made permissible by a toxic, dominating and permissible culture – are becoming more visible and publicly called to account. Subsequently, when we begin to see a change in public discourse, we also begin to see a change in perspectives,

70 visibilities, and ultimately a change in systemic patterns of violence and oppression. As further observed by skelton:

…when you are in a structure with very rigid lines of power and privilege, it’s difficult to report up into that structure. It’s difficult to say, ‘somebody higher in the system has harmed me,’ and that ‘I need protection.’ It looks like weakness, it is often discredited. We do not make it easy for people to report. And so when you’ve got a culture that perpetuates silence, and protects those at the top, we see these kinds of patterns. (Galloway, 2018)

Therefore, as is the intention of this study, a large part of disrupting patterns of silence, violence, and inequity in schools is making visible that which has historically been made invisible through patriarchal, colonial, and hetero/homonormative discourses and practices that protect and maintain the status quo.

Presently, as well as historically, with increased visibility of marginalized voices and lived experiences comes an increased presence of platforms and ideologies that seek to further dehumanize and undermine those fighting for basic human rights and equitable access to public services and spaces. As skelton puts forward, “[s]chool cultures are like our broader culture[s]. When we allow power and privilege to concentrate, we often see power and privilege protecting themselves” (Galloway, 2018).

That said, when attempting to address a long-standing, prestigious institution like St. Michael’s, whose core foundation is built upon the reinforcement of colonial, patriarchal power and privilege, the “culture of bullying” which is largely critiqued as the source of violence and oppression (Galloway, 2018) needs to be fundamentally re-examined. In order to address the systematic ways in which power, privilege, and social inequities operate and thrive within schools, bullying needs to be considered as less of an autonomous practice apparent in any school, but instead, considered a symptom of the various ways in which schooling environments replicate and permit dangerous dynamics of power and prestige (Smith & Payne, 2016).

A recent study by GLSEN (2014), alongside Bidell’s (2016) in-depth analysis of said study, further examined the ways in which school staff, teachers, and students are “direct or passive

71 contributors to engendering or maintaining a hostile environment for LGBTQ students” (Bidell, p. 109), and found that over 57% of students do not report harassment in schools due to “doubts that staff would effectively address the situation and fears that reporting would make the situation worse” (GLSEN, 2014, p. 27). Such a distressing reality for students is concerning, and further highlights a critical correlation between student response, and the overall environment that makes the act of responding (im)possible. When schooling environments are upheld by discourses and practices that instill fear, silence, and doubts in particular students, the possibilities for understanding and responding to the needs of these students becomes unreachable.

For instance, in focusing on the experiences of homeless youth in schools, results from the GLSEN (2014) study found that: “80.9% reported they never talked to a teacher, 70.8% never talked to a school/mental health counselor, and 86.5% never talked to a school administrator about issues related to their sexual orientation or gender identity” (Bidell, 2016, p. 110). Aside from being alarming, these findings also demonstrate that school policies and practices that measure student belonging alongside climate data that assumes all students disclose will be unable to address the diverse needs and experiences of students most marginalized in schools. A more recent study by GLSEN (2016), focusing on the impacts of educational exclusion among LGBTQ youth, revealed that:

When LGBTQ students feel less safe, less comfortable, and less welcome in schools, they are less likely to attend and more likely to drop out. School policies that disproportionately affect LGBTQ students, such as gendered dress codes and rules about public displays of affection, also expose LGBTQ youth to greater rates of school discipline and sometimes, as a result, involvement in the justice system. (p. 33)

Given the local context of Ontario, and specifically within the TDSB, it is critical to examine and expose the impacts of such practices such as: the use of zero-tolerance and School Resource Officers (SROs), which disproportionately target black, Indigenous, and racialized students; the use of gendered bathrooms, which contribute to hostile and inaccessible school climates and cultures for trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming students; the daily experiences of being misgendered; learning from non-inclusive curriculum; ‘appropriate’ dress policies, which

72 again, disproportionately target queer, trans, black, two-spirit, and female identifying/presenting students.

In assessing the various factors that contribute to student harassment and exclusion in schools, school climate surveys need to focus more on the ways in which policies and practices communicate belonging to students, and how such discourses impact student experiences and their differing levels of risk while at school.

An encouraging example of climate surveys that effectively address the overall schooling environment and its impacts on students based on their differing positionalities is highlighted in the latest National School Climate Survey by GLSEN (2018). Through a consideration of the experiences of LGBTQ students with disabilities, LGBTQ immigrant students, and the impacts policies, curriculum, and educators have upon the schooling environment, GLSEN (2018), for the first time, was able to identify staggering statistics regarding the experiences of gender and sexual minorities in school.

By critically measuring school climate as a multi-dimensional system that continues to uphold hostile and unwelcoming biases and spaces for students who occupy intersecting identities, GLSEN (2018) found that the “vast majority of LGBTQ students (87.3%) experienced harassment or assault based on personal characteristics, including sexual orientation, gender expression, gender, religion, race and ethnicity, and disability” (p. 5). Within GLSEN’s (2018) entire report, this finding (87.3%), was one of the highest and most concerning statistic, and further emphasized the value in considering the combination of discrimination, exclusion, and institutional bias in order to adequately address the roots of hostility and social inequity in school.

As Genovese, Rousell, & The Two Spirit Circle of Edmonton Society outline in their report focusing on Safe and Caring Schools for Two Spirit Youth (2011):

When thinking about why these differences exist, most researchers agree that it is not because Two Spirit youth are more likely to have a mental illness per se. Rather, it follows from the stress of such things as racism, negotiating coming out, fear of, or actual

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familial disapproval and rejection, victimization by peers and the chronic stress associated with having a dually stigmatized identity. (p. 20)

Therefore, when perceptions of risk exceed the individual level (i.e., queer, trans, and two-spirit students being perceived as inherently at-risk due to their intersecting, ‘non-normative’ identities) school climate surveys can more appropriately and thus effectively respond to student safety and belonging in school. In doing so, we can begin to identify risk factors based on the correlations between student identity, expression, and the dominating school culture to better address and respond to student exclusion and harassment. As identified in Safe and Caring Schools for Two Spirit Youth (2011): “The lack of understanding surrounding Two Spirit culture has been a major obstacle to responding adequately to address these challenges in schools” (p. 21).

This sentiment is further echoed in the first and largest international study on homophobia in sport, entitled Out on the Fields (2015), which examines the discriminatory behaviors and attitudes common in sport cultures. Through interviews with nearly 9500 participants between the ages of 18 and 25 and from various backgrounds,33 lead author Erik Denison (2015) observed a fascinating dissonance between institutional and attitudinal cultures of acceptance and inclusion. When interviewing people about the culture they experienced while in sport settings, Denison (2015) found that while 80% of these players “admitted to either using or hearing homophobic language within the last two weeks,” the same respondents also indicated that their “locker room and supporters would be accepting to a player who would come out…” (CBC Radio, 2019c).

Reflecting on this study, Andrea Barone who is a gay hockey referee, expressed that: “…there is a disconnect there… They’re using [oppressive] language, yet they’re saying that the environment is accepting, so they don’t realize that the language is actually damaging…And that’s the biggest hurdle, to educate them that that language actually is extremely damaging” (CBC Radio, 2019c). In my search for climate surveys that examined hostility and discrimination

33 For more about the study’s data, methodology, and other tools and resources: http://www.outonthefields.com/

74 as systematically and individually produced, Denison’s (2015) findings clearly communicated the prevailing dissonance between institutional and student accounts of positive and inclusive school cultures.

Through the interrogation of discriminatory cultures on both the attitudinal and institutional levels, Denison (2015) further affirmed my concerns that although anti-2SLGBTQ+ cultures are reproduced through individual attitudes and behaviors, school climate surveys and other large- scale studies need to acknowledge the impacts of institutionally produced cultures of hostility and exclusion through the reproduction of discriminatory policies and practices. As emphasized by Barone in response to Denison’s (2015) study: “one of the biggest cultural hurdles is educating the hockey community about the damaging effects of words… Why is there such a disconnect? Why are people okay if you come out but then if they don’t come out or they don’t know someone who’s gay, that language is still prevalent?” (CBC Radio, 2019c).

Indeed, what is needed are school climate surveys that critically interrogate the correlations between schooling environments (both cultural and structural), student perceptions of belonging, and the conditions made possible for which to access belonging and wellness in school. To echo Kempf (2018): “We are nowhere close to individual measures, but we may be able to look for trends in wellness across and within populations, as well as track system-wide and school indicators, conditions, and approaches that correlate with increases in wellness within these populations” (p. 20). Which is one of many reasons as to why the school is such an important site for the interrogation of the various ways in which individuals are set-up to battle for their worth and value in society, and why I chose to explore what narratives and experiences populate articulations of school belonging and inclusion.

Consequently, the dominant narratives focusing on inclusion in school often hinders the positive development of queer, trans, two-spirit, racialized, and disabled youth by continually (re)producing a division between students that are normal, appropriate, and safe, and students who are contained in narratives of marginalization, risk, and uncertainty. Through the continued reproduction of discourses that isolate and ultimately hinder the positive development of queer, trans, two-spirit, racialized, and disabled students, the public education system is able to simultaneously advocate for equity and inclusion, while maintaining a normative culture that

75 oppresses and excludes a large portion of students based on gender identity and expression, sexuality, and the intersections of race, citizenship, disability, and class.

Thus, in order to fully acknowledge and effectively respond to the various ways that colonial and heteronormative standards of belonging manifest in inclusive discourse and practice, it is crucial that schools, policy-makers, and students have access to discourses that expect and affirm the positive development of queer, two-spirit, trans, and questioning students. In an effort to cultivate educational environments that are affirming and accepting of diverse student populations, anti-bullying and inclusive discourses need to be able to confront the insidious and powerful influence of the “normative student for whom public schools are designed – the mythical normal child” (Baglieri et al., 2011, p. 2129).

Moreover, when assessing the ‘positive’ nature of school climates and cultures, it is also crucial to situate such assessments within critical considerations of how the current political and cultural climate in which schools are situated is impacting schooling environments. In other words, how are current cultural and sociopolitical climates influencing both the elevation and justification of the “mythical normal child” as well as the suppression of others in education?

As argued in this section, school climate narratives tell a particular story regarding inclusion, belonging, and wellness, and in doing so, establish the parameters for which students are able to access and understand their sense of place within the schooling environment, as well as the place of others (Bourdieu, 1989). To echo Fisher & Stockbridge (2016): “Stories serve a number of purposes involving understanding our present and past while imagining our future” (p. 47). Thus, what critical school climate work offers, is the opportunity to change the story, which I believe provides a critical entry point into increasing equity and social justice in schools. Ultimately, what all students need are “narratives of hope, stories of possibility, and media examples of new outcomes which can be seen as working to establish more equitable classrooms and communities” (Heffernan & Gutierez-Schmich, 2016, p. 151).

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4.2 First-hand Accounts of School Climate and the 2SLGBTQ+ Experience

We call ourselves Two Spirit as a way to take control of our identities and experiences. We are Native American people who are LGBT and our stories about how we grew into our identities are typically very different from conventional coming out stories. Rather than trying to fit ourselves into the established mainstream identities for LGBT people, we are developing identities that fit who we are. - Dr. Alexandria Wilson, Coming In: Native American Two Spirit People

Trust me, I’m telling you stories… I can change the story. I am the story. - Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

One of the greatest moments that Hernandez (2017) – writer, activist, queer woman of color, and mother – could have given readers of Scarborough was the opportunity to fundamentally reconsider how particular individuals and communities are positioned within narratives of worth, belonging, and risk within their schooling systems as well as society. Set in a low-income, inner- city neighborhood in the East end of Toronto, Scarborough not only focuses on specific relationships, families, and individuals who are often relegated to the margins, but also provides a crucial space for readers to question and critically think about how and why particular discourses and institutions continue to devalue, ignore, and silence those most marginalized in society.

The fictional, yet deeply truthful characters and lived experiences in Scarborough provide meaningful accounts of how marginalized and queer families navigate, internalize, and reclaim their narratives; both on their own, and more importantly, when juxtaposed with other families and their encounters with social institutions. Through a critical examination of queer encounters with schools and the varying experiences of queer families within the education system, the following section will draw upon several narratives in Hernandez’s (2017) Scarborough; select participant interviews from the “LGBTQ Families Speak Out About School” project (Goldstein

77 et al., 2014-2020); as well as various first-hand accounts of gender and sexual diversity in schools through student interviews and anonymous surveys.

For the purposes of this study, highlighting various accounts of school culture and the ways in which students, staff, and families encounter and navigate the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, disability, class, and schooling, reveals the mainstreaming effects of the ‘LGBTQ’ discourse and the need to further examine correlations between student belonging and the dominating perceptions of gender and sexual diversity that permeate schooling environments. As Leck (2000) asserts: “Knowing the extent to which a young person reflects, integrates, sorts, or repels peer pressure, adult prescriptions, and popular culture influences can also be important for our understanding of that individual’s educational needs” (p. 334).

What becomes clear throughout the following accounts of belonging, both within and outside of schooling environments, is a sustained divide between queer and trans students, staff, and families who have been welcomed into the mainstream LGBTQ equality narrative, and those who continue to fight for inclusion, equity, and belonging in a way that exceeds the white, homonormative framework that largely supports the LGBTQ equality movement. Moreover, what this divide illuminates are the varying ways in which school practices and cultures are influenced by mainstream discourses of equality and homonormative acceptance, and are thus complicit in the reproduction of inequitable experiences of acceptance and belonging in schools.

Following this sentiment, the “LGBTQ Families Speak Out About School” (Goldstein et al., 2014-2020) project provides a critical and revealing examination into the varying experiences queer families encounter while navigating the heteronormative landscape of schools. The stated goal of the project, which is ongoing, is to: “video interview LGBTQ families across Ontario about their children’s experiences in school and share our findings from these interviews with teachers, community educators, and other LGBTQ families” (Goldstein et al., 2014-2020). To date, Principal Investigator, Goldstein (2014-2020), and her research team (Baer, Ga’al, hicks, Koecher, Owis, Reid, Salisbury, & Walkland) have collected 37 interviews from parents and families across Ontario.

Each interview offers a rich, insightful, and sometimes challenging account of the ways in which being queer families (i.e., existing outside of the expected nuclear hetero-norm) influences

78 perceptions of safety, inclusion, and belonging for the parent(s)/guardian(s) as well as their children while at school. For the purposes of this study, however, I wanted to focus specifically on the interviews with Catherine and Nazbah, Michael and Ernst, and Victoria Mason to compare and contrast several moments that were surprising, emotional, revealing, and informative for future school practice.

Beginning with Catherine and Nazbah (Goldstein, 2017), a particularly significant moment during their interview was the immediate recognition of their various identities and social positionings as a queer family in relation to the heteronormative culture of schools. Their interview in particular brought to the forefront complex notions of recognition, visibility, and embodiment. All of which were common themes running throughout the other participant accounts. Catherine, a queer woman of colour, mother, artist, and author; and Nazbah, a self- identified queer, lower middle class, Urban Native, and poet, continually situated their queerness within and against discourses of power, privilege, and equality, which further contextualized how and why their family has a more complicated relationship with schooling environments. The openness and self-awareness demonstrated by Catherine and Nazbah allowed for a deeper understanding of the systemic, ideological, and structural barriers that inform how diverse families navigate the pervasive heteronormativity and coloniality embedded in schools.

Catherine and Nazbah’s complicated and nuanced accounts of navigating the public education system led to several significant reflections, all of which deeply questioned: What does it mean to be recognized in school and society? Who has access to visibility? Who has choice regarding how they are seen and positioned in society? And further, how do certain individuals and families embody queerness differently than others? These questions were also surprising in that they signaled a glaring absence in the interviews with Michael and Ernst (a white, cisgendered male, middle income, gay couple).

For Catherine and Nazbah, an awareness of the self and social hierarchies was a prerequisite in critically thinking through their experiences with schools as a “blended queer family” (Goldstein, 2017). I found the absence of this critical awareness a surprising lack in the other videos, and would be interested in how the interviews with Michael and Ernst might differ if they were also

79 given the opportunity to examine their queerness in relation to the heteronormative culture of schooling and society.

There is a particular moment in Scarborough (2017) that highlights the importance of queering the why and how questions surrounding identity and how individuals and families are regarded and positioned in institutions and society. In the novel, a prominent character named Sylvie, a young Indigenous girl living in a low-income area, remarks how: “These wrong things happen often, which is why I was familiar with the feeling. These wrong things explain the Why Here and the Why Now. But they never explain the Where To or the How Will We” (p. 26). Drawing attention to the “Why Here and the Why Now” questions is a crucial step in revealing the barriers and forces that continue to oppress certain individuals and families in school.

As Catherine further asserts in the “LGBTQ Families” project: “Educators have to be more queer – not in terms of sexuality, but in terms of a constant questioning of why we do this, why does this continue to happen, and why are these policies and protocols in place?” (Goldstein, 2017). Thus, a queer approach to analyzing the effectiveness of school policies and practices provides a critical opportunity to reflect upon and reconsider the how and why of student, staff, and family experiences with school.

Listening to the interviews with Michael and Ernst (Goldstein, 2017), for example, there were several moments where a queer approach would have benefitted their perspectives in regards to recognition, visibility, and embodiment. One moment in particular focused on growing up in Catholic Schools and navigating that space as gay men. Although both Michael and Ernst chose not to reveal their sexuality in school for various reasons, there existed for them an element of choice concerning recognition and visibility that is often not afforded to other gender and sexually diverse folks. In speaking to their specific experience, Ernst notes how:

…there was always that energy of the good that has always led the way, and there was never any fear at all ever, of where we lived, where, you know where the kids went to school and because it always felt so great and so real and so meant to be. That, I think is what has directed the things in our life, and hopefully in our children’s lives. (Goldstein, 2017)

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Again, as a white, cisgendered, middle income, gay couple, this reflection would have been a prime moment to question why or how “that energy of the good” had such a strong presence in their lives. And further, why there was never any fear accompanying their home life, neighborhood, or where their children went to school.

Michael’s response was also surprising. Rather than reflecting on who passes safely in schools and society at large, as well as the values and expectations underpinning notions of safety and belonging, Michael instead, wonders: “…what our experience would have been like had our kids gone to a Catholic school…” (Goldstein, 2017). Although this is an important question concerning how gay men navigate Catholic institutions, the social and educational upbringings that Michael and Ernst had experienced – and continue to experience and pass on to their children – raises a lot of questions that are central to understanding the experiences of gender and sexual diversity in schools.

As asserted by Victoria Mason, a lesbian woman of colour and mother, there is often a dissonance between the home and schooling environments (Goldstein, 2016). That said, Victoria Mason’s personal encounters with her daughter’s school, which have mostly been lacking in understanding and support, emphasize the importance of continually teaching and learning about the varied and complex expressions of gender and sexual diversity both within and outside of schooling environments.

This is especially important when considering students whose gender and sexual difference from the dominant norm intersects with their race and class. For Victoria, as a lesbian woman of colour and mother, reflecting on her daughter’s experiences with homophobia in school highlighted the ways in which her daughter’s navigation of homophobia also had to consider the challenges of being the only student of colour in her classroom:

I think another piece is the fact that also…that she is the only student of colour in her class. And so, I think that creates, you know if you want to talk about sort of the intersectionality. So for her, how many ways, you know, maybe there’s some of “how many ways do I not have to stand out here right now, when I am just trying to go to school and not have to deal with any of these other things?” And I know there’s a subtext around, so when I had gone to school about the racial incident, you know, she obviously

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knows that she’s a racialized body…She feels very good about that. But here she is in this place where the female racialized body was actually you know, I think violently exposed in terms of experience in the school. And so, here she is, the only person in that space that is identifying in that way, and you know, how difficult is that, right? For her when other kids are laughing. (Goldstein, 2016)

For Michael and Ernst, although their experiences with schools have been generally positive, which is wonderful, their seemingly easy alignment with school values and their ability to participate in school practice yields powerful insights into what LGBTQ acceptance and belonging often looks like. Following this sentiment, Ernst explains how they prepared for their life as gay parents and demonstrates an awareness of certain protocols before entering the school system:

I think we were very mindful when we decided to have a family and that we have children, to be with the children and to do things for the children. So I don’t think what Michael and I are doing is any more than what was always done, but we do those things. We don’t just say we are not going to do that… we take them on because we want to do them. And the kids are…so the school system has always supported everything we’ve done and we’ve supported everything they’ve done and we’ve never at least to my knowledge never had anyone really make us or our children feel odd. (Goldstein, 2017)

This excerpt illustrates the powerful influence of parental involvement in determining how the school system recognizes and supports LGBTQ families. Moreover, it allows us to question whose involvement in schools is encouraged and supported, and how this reproduces pervasive standards of belonging based on hetero/homonormative and colonial frameworks.

Donn Short (2008) similarly observes pervasive forms of violence in schools, and through interviews with students and teachers from various high schools in the GTA, draws our attention to what he defines as “attitudinal violence,” which would include “dirty looks, refusing to acknowledge others, stares” (p. 42). In speaking to one student in particular about attitudinal violence, the student reflects upon this form of oppression as a by-product of unaddressed social power in the school:

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I think it was more of a situation in which they had social power. They had a certain prestige within the school and that comes about through, among other things, normative gender and sexual presentation. They exuded their sexuality. It was a very dominant kind of sexuality. I think being homophobic and sexist was part and parcel of it. And it goes on without most of them consciously thinking about it. (Short, 2008, p. 42)

Given this student’s experience of a pervasive and hostile culture in the school – which they perceive as an unaddressed, and thus unchallenged prestige and power held by those who exhibit heteronormative behaviors – the limitations of contemporary discourses and practices of inclusion are quite telling.

The above reflection is a powerful demonstration of the consequences of policies and practices that continue to cite hetero/homonormative behaviors and expressions as the dominant standard of inclusion and belonging. Further, when attempts are made within schools to advocate for greater equity and inclusion, without also addressing what Smith and Payne (2016) refer to as “the social purposes of bullying” (p. 75), i.e., the battles for social power that contribute to hostile school cultures, the policies and practices that follow remain unable to create the attitudinal shifts necessary for which to envision change.

Following this sentiment, Short’s (2008) research study “Queers, Bullying, and Schools: Am I Safe Here?” complicates the ways in which formal law or state law – which he defines as societal laws, school policies and regulations – interact with other competing normative orders that dominate schooling environments. What is critical about Short’s (2008) study is the observed dissonance between policy rhetoric that is reactive and potentially harmful, and policy rhetoric that is proactive and thus more affirming and positive in practice. As asserted by Short (2008):

State law addresses certain problems in schools, but is compromised by failing to account for the perpetuation of social norms within youth cultures. It is the hegemony of these norms that inculcates negative notions of difference, leading to homophobic bullying and other forms of violence. LGBT youth are, thus, easy targets despite state law or school policy. (p. 33)

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In other words, students who are repeatedly placed at-risk, due to the competing normative orders existing in their schools, require more than reactive laws and guidelines that reproduce social norms and negative (or entirely absent) conceptualizations of difference.

As Leck (2000) emphasizes: “…the job of school personnel is to facilitate social interaction and to provide each child with a full opportunity for success within a compulsory public school setting. That means it is not appropriate to ask someone to hide – or deliberately try to make invisible – the sexual diversities represented within and among the students in our schools” (p. 333). In Victoria’s interview, they reflected on the ways their daughter perceived their active role in the school as negative, and would only further her discrimination and isolation as a racialized queer spawn; expressing sentiments such as: “Mommy, you raised these issues, you’re going to cause trouble for me, it’s going to be embarrassing for me, the teacher may retaliate against me” (Goldstein, 2016). These sentiments echo the fears and anxieties felt by those most impacted by the pervasive culture of heteronormativity and colonialism in schools.

Hernandez (2017) draws particular attention to this recurrent issue in Scarborough, when she explores the intricate ways that systemically marginalized students navigate the education system to avoid penalization:

Indian kids who go into that office with cereal dust in their eyes are referred to an eye doctor who diagnoses eye disease and gives you a prescription, which your parents can’t afford, and the next thing you know, Children’s Aid is all up in your parents’ business wondering why they can’t afford any medicated drops for their children’s busted-up eyes. You walk in there a kid; you walk out there a ward of the state. You can’t trust them… (p. 25)

This excerpt is important as it highlights how discrimination based on gender and sexual diversity is compounded by race, class, and ability. Further, Hernandez (2017) reveals how the prevalent culture of education both reproduces and sustains the reification of social hierarchies and colonial values.

Thinking through the personal accounts provided by Michael and Ernst, Catherine and Nazbah, and Victoria Mason (Goldstein, 2016; 2017), it was significant to note how each participant

84 expressed positive of negative experiences largely based on their alignment with school culture and practices. In the participant interviews, there appeared to be a difference in experience whenever a queer parent or queer spawn questioned what was being practiced and taught in their schools. In the interviews with Victoria Mason (Goldstein, 2016), for example, they noted several equity issues that they had encountered in schools and how these moments caused a particular strain on their relationship with the school. Victoria also emphasized that the overall schooling environment made it difficult to address several issues their daughter had experienced due to her race. Thus, addressing issues pertaining to equity was perceived as a disruption to the overall school climate, and ran the risk of creating bigger issues and tensions for their daughter.

Ultimately, when school climate surveys and school policy rhetoric produce narratives of student belonging and wellness, it is imperative that this work deepens understandings and perceptions of school climate and culture by asking why or how some students, parents, guardians, and staff feel more safe, accepted, and included in schools over others. While ensuring positive, accessible, and equitable opportunities and experiences within education remains the ultimate goal, school climate surveys need to focus more on the negative experiences between particular students and school cultures in order to create the policies and practices that are responsive and accountable to all students in school.

As indicated in a study conducted by Wolowic, Eisenberg, and Saewyc (2017), which focuses on the various impacts that Pride semiotics (i.e., the use of rainbow symbolism) has on students and school culture, context is extremely important when analysing the differing ways students react to and navigate symbols of gender and sexual diversity and inclusion in school, specifically when it comes to the increased use of the rainbow as a symbol of LGBTQ inclusion. To better understand how students conceptualize and utilize LGBTQ symbolism both within and outside of their schooling environments, Wolowic et al. (2017) use a semiotic analysis to unpack the rainbow as a powerful communicative symbol that holds positive benefits for LGBTQ youth, as well as significant limitations.

As such, the use of semiotic analysis as a methodological approach to examining “66 go-along interviews” with LGBTQ youth from , , and British Columbia holds powerful significance (Wolowic et al., 2017, p. 557). Such an approach to student interviews

85 takes the necessary steps in revealing the social and identity affiliations that differing LGBTQ youth make in perceiving various Pride semiotics, such as the rainbow for example, as either indicators of safety, inclusion, and acceptance; or for other youth, indicators of conditional inclusion, potential risk, and hesitance.

While the study highlights the positive outcomes attributed to having rainbows included in the overall schooling environment (Wolowic et al., 2017), what I found most revealing were the student accounts that described how the rainbow does not speak to them, nor necessarily represent a supportive space that would both recognize and respect their lived experiences and identity expressions. Although many of the youth interviewed in the study understood the rainbow as an “informational shortcut about spaces and people” (Wolowic et al., 2017, p. 566), there were fundamental inconsistencies surrounding the extent of information offered by the rainbow symbol, and expectations surrounding space and the bodies intended to access and occupy those spaces. Such inconsistencies and uncertainties raise several pertinent questions.

If, as showcased by (Wolowic et al., 2017), “young people use the rainbow to construct meanings related to affiliation and positive feelings about themselves, different communities and their futures” (p. 557), what then, does this mean for those students who do not perceive the rainbow as a beacon of positivity, inclusion, and safety? How can students who feel excluded by rainbow semiotics access “positive feelings about themselves, different communities and their futures” (Wolowic et al., 2017, p. 557)? How are practices of inclusion taking direction from, making space for, and affirming the layered identities that students are bringing to schools and their communities?

Reflecting on several participant responses that located rainbow symbolism as only for “mainstream gays and lesbians, to the exclusion of trans, bisexual and other identities” (Wolowic et al., 2017, p. 567) one of the youth participants explained that, “rather than identifying with the broader umbrella identity symbolized by the (or not), some people may prefer to affiliate with a more specific group they identify as their community such as a bisexual or trans flag” (Wolowic et al., 2017, p. 567). Such a response from a bisexual identified female youth echoes similar concerns with the rainbow as a symbol that largely supports and speaks to more mainstream gay and lesbian sexualities and expressions, which consequently contributes to the

86 erasure, exclusion, and increased levels of risk and harassment towards bisexual and/or trans identifying youth.

Another youth participant in the study, who is a straight-identified trans-woman, expressed similar concerns in encountering and navigating Pride symbolism, reflecting that: “It’s scary, because some places have pride flags and support gay people, but they don’t support trans- [people], you know?” (Wolowic et al., 2017, p. 567). Thus, their experiences with the rainbow flag drew both caution and a learned awareness that their particular identity may not be supported, nor expected within rainbow-bearing spaces. As highlighted throughout the other participant interviews: “Some young people had a more positive outlook on the meanings of spaces that displayed rainbow flags, but several agreed that the rainbow flag was not always inclusive of all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer identities and subcultures” (Wolowic et al., 2017, p. 567). Ultimately, such personal responses from LGBTQ youth offer a unique opportunity to both re-examine and reconceptualize dominant practices and narratives of inclusion as it pertains to gender and sexual diversity in schools.

Indeed, not only does a focus on youth perceptions of inclusion and their navigation processes influence and increase the effectiveness of inclusive policies and practices in school, such responses also provide a more critical approach to both positive and negative accounts of gender and sexual diversity and experiences of inclusion in school. In other words, an intersectional and contextual approach to inclusion and student perceptions of gender and sexuality deepens understandings of positive and negative experiences in ways that are often unaccounted for or deemed ‘insignificant’ in school climate surveys and reports.

While the experiences of two-spirit youth, for example, are either largely absent from data collecting processes or considered ‘insignificant’ due to a smaller response rate, school climate surveys often miss crucial opportunities for which to adequately consider, assess, and respond to the needs of this significant community. Consequently, the development of policies and practices (as informed by data collection) will remain unable to reconceptualize and restructure the conditions for which Indigenous students who are queer, trans, two-spirit, and/or disabled access and experience inclusion and wellness in school.

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In reading through Sylliboy and Young’s (2017) final report, several participants drew particular attention to the disparities found within schooling environments, specifically in terms of access to support systems, culturally responsive resources, and an overall culture that made them feel included, heard, and valued. Within the report, Sylliboy and Young (2017) found that: “60% of participants identified their main supports coming from their friends, 45% from parents and 35% from siblings respectively…25% identified supports coming from health and 15% from the school or campus setting” (p. 17).

Thus, what the report was able to discover through an incorporation of community context and other lived experiences outside of the school, is an alarming percentage of schools or campus settings that continue to be unwelcoming, unsupportive, and inequitable spaces for queer Indigenous and two-spirit persons. Moreover, to echo Sylliboy and Young (2017): “This begs the question whether there is lack of identified supports for LGBTQ individuals in First Nations or cultural specific supports in the urban centres, or whether existing supports have components of cultural safety for Two Spirits, or a combination of reasons” (p. 17).

As Wilson (1996) explains, from her personal experiences as Neyonawak Inniniwak and two- spirit within her Opaskwayak Cree Nation, Western assumptions about sexuality and gender, as perpetuated within educational and other social institutions, often fail to account for the various ways in which the construction and development of sexuality and gender connects with other aspects of identity development within Indigenous communities. In particular, Wilson’s (1996) reflections on her two-spirit identity and her encounters and navigation processes with more Eurocentric spaces highlights how dominant Western assumptions and knowledge systems “generally fails to recognize the existence of and to acknowledge the contributions of ‘two-spirit’ peoples today” and stresses the need to better recognize and value the lived experiences of two- spirit peoples, as “Two-spirit identity affirms the interrelatedness of all aspects of identity, including sexuality, gender, culture, community, and spirituality” (p. 305).

What is important to note about Wilson’s (1996) above assertion, especially when developing safer spaces and educational environments that aim to increase inclusion, well-being, and leadership for Indigenous youth, is the recognition that “the sexuality of two-spirit people cannot be considered as separate from the rest of an individual’s identity…Two-spirit connects us to our

88 past by offering a link that had previously been severed by government policies and actions” (p. 305). Such an approach to understandings of identity expression and orientations in both schools and society also broaden and deepen traditional understandings of gender and sexuality to the benefit of all students in school. As Leck (2000) argues: “Heterosexual and homosexual designations negatively limit our understanding of others and ourselves…This becomes particularly pointed when we begin to explore cultural meanings along with personal expressions of sexual identity” (p. 325).

Thus, in order to teach and learn in spaces that are more inclusive, expecting, and affirming of a wide range of expressions and orientations, schooling environments do well when two-spirit and queer Indigenous worldviews and practices are centred and valued as an imperative approach to reimaging and reconstructing traditional binaries and practices that reify heteronormative and colonial standards of belonging. As previously discussed, the predominant framework employed by school climate and culture surveys upholds heteronormative binary understandings of gender and sexuality. In doing so, accounts of school climate and culture fail to consider how intersecting identities, orientations, and expressions impact how students experience and navigate their schooling environments. As Wilson (1996) further explains: “While this simplifying division may make it easier to generate theory, it may also make it less likely that the resulting theory will describe peoples’ real-life developmental experiences” (p. 303).

As demonstrated in the research study, Coming Out Stories: Two Spirit Narratives in Atlantic Canada (2017), as well as the two-spirit web booklet, Safe and Caring Schools for Two Spirit Youth: A Guide for Teachers and Students (2011), the incorporation of historical, community, and lived experience remains imperative in unpacking the ways in which two-spirit and queer Indigenous persons conceptualize and navigate their identities and practices in conjunction with their surrounding environments. That said, a contextualized and intersectional lens becomes crucial in better understanding and developing the practices and discourses that both positively and negatively influence institutional and societal approaches to gender and sexual diversity.

What Wilson (1996) perceives as the transformative potential behind the term ‘two-spirit’ are the various ways in which: “This term is drawn from a traditional worldview that affirms the inseparability of the experience of their sexuality from the experience of their culture and

89 community” to which Wilson “offers her personal story as a step toward reconstructing and strengthening our understanding of identity” (p. 303).

Within Wilson’s (1996) Opaskwayak Cree Nation and surrounding communities, there is a profound, cultural, and intergenerational understanding that “the spiritual, physical, emotional, and intellectual parts of ourselves are equally important and interrelated. When one aspect of a person is unhealthy, the entire person is affected. This too is true for the entire community; when one aspect of the community is missing, the entire community will suffer in some way” (p. 308). Thus, there is much at stake when our education systems continue to separate gender and sexuality from other significant aspects of a student’s identity.

In doing so, institutional measures and practices of inclusion and well-being remain unable to account for the ways in which students experience gender and sexual oppression and violence in conjunction with racism, anti-Indigeneity, Islamophobia, misogyny, ableism, classism, etc. As Benaway (2018a) explains:

Transphobia is always about power over trans people, about a need to control who we are and what we can do in the world. Gender is one of society’s most powerful forces, structuring our lives from the moment of birth. Trans people represent a threat to many cisgender people’s understanding of gender, which endangers their own sense of security and wellbeing. (Maclean’s)

Additionally, a reductionist and oversimplified approach to gender and sexual diversity inhibits the ways in which all students can positively recognize, embrace, and fully come into their identities, communities, cultures, languages, and sense of worth and belonging.

As stressed by Wilson (1996), not only does the persistent positioning of gender and sexuality, and heterosexuality and homosexuality, within binary and stable conceptualizations inhibit the ways in which two-spirit students come into their communities, but such oversimplifications also fall prey to the mainstream assumption that ‘LGBTQ’ identifying students come out and into their communities in similar ways. For Wilson (1996), as Neyonawak Inniniwak and two-spirit, she critically reflects that: “When confronted with racism and homophobia, I had internalized many of the devaluing judgements of the dominant culture […] Most significant, though, is the

90 fact that when I sought support in the mainstream lesbian and gay community, it simply was not there” (p. 313).

In further examining the intersecting experiences of social exclusion and inequities faced by trans people living in Ontario, Canada, the “Trans PULSE Project” (2004-present) draws upon the lived experiences of gender and sexually diverse communities to highlight the various barriers in accessing health care, education, and social services as compared to the more mainstream gay and lesbian experience. As a trans community-based research project, the “Trans PULSE Project” provides personal accounts and crucial information regarding structural and systemic limitations to care, support, education, and wellness, and in doing so, powerfully disrupts dominant perceptions of access, equality, and acceptance within the mainstream LGBTQ narrative. As similarly highlighted by Wilson (1996): “…we need to stop assuming that all lesbian and gay people can find support in mainstream gay culture, and that we make a point of creating opportunities for two-spirit indigenous people to find their place in their traditional communities” (p. 315).

Indeed, what is inspiring about the “Trans PULSE Project” are the positive changes in policies and practices that has been gained through the input of gender and sexually diverse communities across Ontario. Moreover, built into the very fabric of the “Trans PULSE Project” is an unwavering commitment to respectful, community-based research methodologies and the dissemination of intersectional data that focuses on strengthening marginalized communities through the elevation of unheard voices and perspectives, encouraging gender and sexual minority leadership, and increasing advocacy for:

• trans community members to conduct health research • cisgendered (non-trans) health researchers and students to understand and address trans health issues • providers, advocates and policy makers to enact change to improve the health of trans communities. (Trans PULSE: Project History, 2019)

Thus, what “Trans PULSE” and other community-based, narrative driven research projects seek to illuminate are the various complexities and nuances surrounding inclusion and equity that can only be revealed through first-hand, personal experiences and navigation processes. In critically

91 unpacking the intersections of inequality and social exclusion that gender and sexual minorities experience when accessing health, education, and support, first-hand accounts both disrupt powerful myths surrounding inclusion and wellness, and in doing so, assert community voices and perspectives to transform exclusionary and oppressive discourses and practices.

Further speaking to the importance of deepening and strengthening community perspectives, Wilson (1996) asserts that: “Educators and developmental theorists need to study the resistance, strength, and liberation strategies two-spirit people employ as part of their development of an empowered identity” (p. 315). Of importance, is the incorporation of differing and intersecting perspectives when developing policies and practices that seek to increase inclusion, access, and well-being for all students in school. As previously argued, when student experiences of inclusion, access, and well-being are only measured within binary, heteronormative, and colonial frameworks of belonging, the dominant conceptions of gender and sexually diverse students will continue to be positioned within narratives of risk, exclusion, and inadequacy.

As examined by “Trans PULSE” in a major study focusing on the “Barriers to Well-Being for Aboriginal Gender-Diverse People” (Scheimis et al., 2013), key findings from participants show that strategies to ameliorate the social determinants of health among Aboriginal gender-diverse people needs to be informed by “principles of self-determination…to increase access to health and community supports, including integration of traditional culture and healing practices” (p. 108). Such findings emphasize how central cultural responsiveness and community-engagement is to providing care, especially when meeting the needs of communities whose practices and values exist outside of dominant heteronormative and colonial frameworks.

Several findings from the study are particularly telling in regards to the current lack of culturally responsive care, and reveal that: “61 per cent [of Aboriginal gender-diverse people] reported at least one past-year unmet health care need. Most participants had experienced violence due to being trans (73 per cent) and had ever seriously considered suicide (76 per cent). One-fifth had been incarcerated while presenting in their felt gender” (Scheimis et al., 2013, p. 108). Such alarming results, as generated from first-hand experiences, are significant as they “highlight potential impacts of colonialism and social exclusion” in order to effectively address and respond

92 to the barriers and limitations surrounding access to care, equity, and culturally responsive resources and supports (Scheimis et al., 2013, p. 108).

Moreover, in undertaking research with respect to the larger and historical processes of systemic and structural oppression and social exclusion, Scheimis et al. (2013) are able to create and widely publish accessible data “regarding the health of Aboriginal gender-diverse Ontarians [that] illustrate both their heterogeneity and all-too-common experiences of individual and systemic discrimination, and barriers to care” (p. 108). Having such critical and intersectional data widely available to policy-makers, educators, service providers, and community members is an essential step towards the ameliorative action needed in order to address and effectively respond to the gaps and limitations surrounding inclusion and access to well-being in schools and society.

To conclude this section, I would like to draw upon the sentiments of Sylliboy and Young (2017) in emphasizing that such approaches to student belonging and well-being in both research and in the production and dissemination of data “is not mere research protocol, but a deep need to reflect on cultural identity and culturally specific supports for Two Spirits [and other gender and sexual minorities] through ongoing community building relationships” (p. 24). Gender and sexually diverse students and communities have a wealth of knowledge to offer regarding the limitations of inclusion, safety, and belonging that impacts all students in school.

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Summary

As I bring this study to a close, and prepare for the next stages in examining the limitations and contestations surrounding the inclusion of gender and sexually diverse youth in schools, I am reminded of the dire need for this work. While writing this section, I read on the news that Nigel Shelby, a 15-year-old, queer, black high school freshman in Alabama, has committed suicide after experiencing sustained, and unaddressed homophobic bullying.34

I am devastatingly reminded of the various ways in which current measurements and practices of inclusion, safety, and belonging within education systems remain unable to protect particular students (namely, queer and trans students of color, and queer Indigenous and two-spirit youth), and all that is at stake when our benchmarks for inclusion, acceptance, and well-being revolve around heteronormative, colonial, and ableist norms and values.

Further, my partner, who is currently writing a narrative non-fiction account of gay, lesbian, and bisexual activism in Halifax, Nova Scotia in the early 70s and 80s,35 discovers in her own research a letter from the Gay Alliance for Equality (GAE) asking candidates running in the provincial election at that time (almost 50 years ago) the following question: “In light of the widespread ignorance on the subject, do you think that homosexuality should be one of the topics discussed in sex education programs carried out in the public schools of Nova Scotia?” (Body Politic, 1974, p. 5). The letter continues to state that candidates who fail to respond and return the questionnaire would be considered in opposition to the social inclusion of homosexuality, and that “they do not consider the civil rights of homosexuals worthy of their attention, and that they condone existing discriminatory policies and practices affecting homosexuals” (Body Politic, 1974, p. 5).

34 For more on Nigel Shelby’s story, see: https://www.out.com/news/2019/4/22/15-year-old-nigel-shelby-dies- suicide-after-anti-gay-bullying

35 Rose, R. (2019). Before the Parade: A History of Halifax’s Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Communities, 1972-1984. Halifax, NS: Nimbus Publishing.

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As stated, the above letter and questionnaire was proposed to those seeking election almost 50 years ago, but could have easily been proposed verbatim today. Given the latest attempts by the Ford government in Ontario to eradicate a modernized sex-education curriculum, which would dangerously implicate the well-being of all students in school through the elimination of: gender identities and expressions; sexual orientations; healthy relationships; various family structures; consent; safe, affirming, and positive information and practices for diverse sexualities; Indigenous languages, histories, and efforts towards decolonization and reconciliation; cyberbullying; and sexting, among others, and the Trump administration’s policies aimed at undermining years of progress for gender and sexual minorities, such present-day attacks on education are critical reminders of the pervasive and sustained attempts to preserve policies and practices that centre white, cisgendered, colonial, heteropatriarchal, and capitalist power and privilege.

One of the major goals of this study was to draw critical connections between school climate surveys; school policies and practices; political influences; mainstream Pride narratives; and first-hand accounts of gender and sexual diversity in schools to emphasize how interconnected these seemingly separate components of schooling are – which, when examined together, deepen understandings of the various, insidious ways that particular narratives and conceptualizations of gender, sexuality, and inclusion come to impact how students acquire a sense of self and of others in school.

As discussed, what soon became apparent in researching the commonalities between several narrowly defined and conditional instances of inclusion, both within and outside of schooling environments, such as: the noxious responses from BLMTO in Pride; enforcing zero tolerance and SROs in schools; mandating Appropriate Dress Codes; and reproducing non-intersectional climate surveys and data, was a significant lack of understanding and compassion towards queer and trans students of color, as well as queer Indigenous and two-spirit students. That said, there remains a dire need for practices and discourses that effectively decenter and deprioritize homonational and colonial frameworks of inclusion and acceptance, which continue to hinder the possibility for intersecting identities to both exist and thrive in schools and society.

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As stressed by Walcott (2003): “…what is ultimately at stake is the space and place that bodies, both actual and symbolic, occupy in the nation’s imagination” (p. 54). Thus, through a comparative analysis of first-hand experiences and bodily encounters with schooling systems, alongside various policies and practices put forth by the TDSB, the Ministry of Education, and several key studies focusing on the inclusion of gender and sexual diversity in schools, it became quite clear how struggles over race, identity, space, and place play out in schools through the continued practices and ideologies that do not value certain bodies and experiences.

While a comparative analysis of school policies, practices, and first-hand accounts drew attention to the perceived place that particular bodies and identity expressions occupy in the national imaginary, such a limited and conditional perception of gender and sexual diversity and inclusion highlighted the ways in which a neoliberal framework of progress and liberation is quite dangerous and harmful to all students in schools.

Drawing upon student voice and experiences concerning the inclusion of diverse genders and sexualities thus provided critical insight into the effectiveness and limitations of practices that seemingly advocate for students most at-risk in schools, yet uphold binary, heteronormative, and colonial frameworks of belonging. It is my hope that the findings and discussions that emanated from this study will provide an opportunity for teachers, administrators, and policymakers to question and re-evaluate how schools are fostering a sense of belonging and inclusion for all students in schools. In order to better address school climates and cultures that continue to be hostile towards 2SLGBTQ+ students, there needs to be new discourses and practices available for which to envision change.

Thus, it is my hope that an increased understanding of student perception and intentionality will lead to new understandings and directions for the inclusion of gender and sexual diversity in schools. In questioning the mainstream narratives of gender and sexuality that emanate from dominant discourses and practices of inclusion, I am encouraged by the alternative frameworks and bodily horizons offered by gender and sexual minorities for which to reimagine the conditions of acceptance and inclusion (Walcott, 2019).

As further examined by Walcott (2019), the parameters of inclusion, within the national imaginary, often offer what is widely perceived as the one horizon for which to imagine the

96 conditions and entry points into acceptance and belonging. However, as illuminated in this study, we need to look towards other bodily horizons for which to radically reimagine and re-make the conditions in which students live.

In an attempt to respond to Erevelles (2011) question: “Is it even possible for us to reimagine the historical conditions within which Other bodies can be made to matter?” (p. 7), I believe that making space for two-spirit analysis and Indigenous frameworks that long pre-date binary, colonial worldviews, moves us towards a place in which our relationships to land, bodies, and value systems reject a national imaginary, and all of its colonial, heteropatriarchal, ableist, and capitalist frames. Reshaping inclusion meaningfully, therefore, comes from fundamentally reconsidering and remaking our reference points and entry points of inclusion, thus opening up different ways in which to live individually and collectively.

In exploring student response in relation to other personal, institutional, and societal accounts of gender and sexual diversity and inclusion, there were several moments that highlighted the conditions and parameters for which queer bodies were able to move within and outside of dominating narratives of diversity and belonging. Such moments were particularly revealing, as they provided a clearer understanding of the ways in which colonial, ableist, and heterosexist standards of normality manifest in inclusive discourse and practice.

Thus, as previously asserted, what remains crucial in moving towards more socially equitable and just spaces is a fundamental shift towards a position that does not imagine whiteness and heteronormativity as fundamental to conceptualizations and configurations of belonging, restoration, activism, queerness, history, knowledge, and power. For, as insisted by Walcott (2019), when a paradigm shift occurs, something else emerges.

In centering narratives and bodily horizons that have been historically erased in the preservation of a national imaginary, societal institutions will be able to foster meaningful, intentional cultures and environments that make space for differing points of arrival and processes of becoming. In doing so, schools, policy-makers, researchers, students, and staff can move beyond damaging discourses that hinder the positive development of queer, two-spirit, trans, and questioning students, and in particular, students whose queerness intersects with their race, class, and/or disability.

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Indeed, there is powerful, transformative potential in both looking towards and telling different stories regarding gender, sexuality, inclusion, and belonging. There is much to learn from centering student voices and personal accounts in reimagining the parameters and conditions of inclusion. Crucial to this approach, is an intersectional framework for which to meaningfully consider, and fundamentally reimagine the increasingly narrow entry points of inclusion and acceptance.

As BLMTO revealed to us through their contentious encounters with Pride Toronto, mainstream narratives of gender and sexual diversity, inclusion, and equality can also mean increased oppression, exclusion, and risk towards those who exist outside of the nations limited and threatening frames. As Walcott (2003) puts forward: “the rhizomatic black cultures of Canada have much to teach us, especially about national policies like multiculturalism, which support identity politics and limit political imaginings and possibilities” (p. 35). That said, a driving force in analyzing the particular narratives and values that uphold inclusive policies and practices has been Bourdieu’s (1989) notion of habitus, which underlines how social practices and structures organize a “sense of one’s place” as well as a “sense of the place of others” (p. 19), as well as Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to better understand how particular bodies interact with, navigate, and perhaps internalize certain notions surrounding gender and sexual diversity and inclusion.

Further, the act of researching and writing from an intersectional lens facilitated the necessary rejection of policies and practices that continue to position queer, trans, and two-spirit expressions and experiences within frameworks of deficit and risk. Ultimately, an intersectional approach to schooling experiences and perceptions of school culture moves us away from what Tuck (2009) refers to as the dangers of “damage-centered research,” in that it is a “pathologizing approach in which the oppression singularly defines a community” (p. 413). To echo the sentiments of Sylliboy and Young (2017): “coming out stories can be analyzed using an intersectional framework especially with respect to class, gender and race. The most important consideration using narrative analysis is how the stories were told from Two Spirits as actors who lived through levels of narratives: individual, interpersonal, institutional, cultural and social. Their voices are being heard” (p. 17).

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Moving forward with this study, I will continue to draw upon student perceptions and experiences of school culture, in order to illuminate the various ways in which discourses of gender, sexuality, and inclusion impact student belonging, risk, safety, and well-being. As will be outlined in the next section focusing on “Future Directions,” researching GSAs in particular will play a crucial role in this process, as GSAs are both narrative-making and “culture-making apparatuses” (Muñoz, 2013, p. 122). Accordingly, in order to better understand GSAs and their role in shaping narratives around gender, sexuality, and inclusion, the following study provided a contextual landscape for which to understand the prevailing conditions and parameters made available for GSAs to exist in schools.

As further inspiration and motivation for future work, Alok Vaid-Menon (2019), a gender non- conforming writer and performance artist of colour, offers a compassionate and powerful reflection to carry this work forward with great intentionality, stating that:

I know it’s difficult to shift habit & language but this is something TGNC [transgender and gender-nonconforming] people are doing as well! We were not magically bestowed with these knowledges & sensibilities, we are coming in to them through struggle, trying to excavate over time a more kind & gentle way to recognize & affirm ourselves & one another. Heed our invitation to do this work & receive it as a blessing, not an inconvenience – one that allows you to journey beyond the tedium of the visual, the fatigue of the normative, and the brutality of the assumptive. We surpass all of this – we occupy more than physical space – we transcend convention & form – we birth language & ritual – we defy & in that refusal we create. Let’s do better!

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Findings and Recommendations

In an attempt to address the prevailing quantitative and qualitative gap in understanding the experiences of gender and sexual diversity in schools, I came across several critical studies, surveys, and first-hand accounts that added complexity and nuance to 2SLGBTQ+ experiences, and clearly illustrated the necessary and accessible steps that schools, researchers, and community members can take to better account for, affirm, and respond to the unique and intersecting experiences of many youth in school. Of significance, were the various ways in which each community-based study, survey, and first-hand account showcased that the role and responsibility of social institutions is to start asking different questions, so as to prevent the reproduction of heteronormativity, colonialism, and inequitable access to inclusion, safety, and wellness in schools.

Ultimately, what emerged from a comparative approach to research was a significant disparity between institutional accounts of inclusion, access, and well-being in schools, and first-hand experiences and encounters with institutional policies, school cultures, and expectations surrounding gender and sexual diversity. Thus revealing the limits of gender and sexual diversity within institutional frameworks of inclusion.

As asserted by Sylliboy and Young’s (2017) imperative research study entitled, Coming Out Stories: Two Spirit Narratives in Atlantic Canada: “…narratives are powerful, insightful and knowledge building processes to understand how the coming out process is for Two Spirits and indigenous LGBTQ individuals. The collection of narratives is a primary source of expanding the analysis to explore how gender and sexuality can be further explored or understood” (p. 16). Similar to Wolowic et al. (2017), Sylliboy and Young’s (2017) intentional focus on gathering narratives that are so often unacknowledged and ignored revealed the various needs and limitations surrounding institutional practices of inclusion, and further contextualized both negative and positive perceptions of gender and sexual diversity in schools and other social spaces.

What was so imperative about Sylliboy and Young’s (2017) research study was the methodological approach used to deepen understandings of the ways in which particular bodies

100 and identity expressions navigated their social worlds. As Sylliboy and Young (2017) put forward, their methodological approach “incorporates elements of community perspectives, participants’ lived experiences, stories, focus groups, and the research team in collaboration to ensure a community-based approach to research” (p. 5). Such an intersectional and community- based approach, I have argued, is essential if educational institutions are to adequately, respectfully, and effectively acknowledge and address systemic oppression and inequitable access to education, wellness, and inclusion in schools. As asserted by Wilson (1996): “…we need to stop assuming that all lesbian and gay people can find support in mainstream gay culture, and that we make a point of creating opportunities for two-spirit indigenous people to find their place in their traditional communities” (p. 315).

What I found through an extensive review of inclusive policies within the TDSB’s database and the Ministry of Education (with a particular focus on language), school climate surveys (with a focus on intersectionality), and inclusive practices (with a focus on standards of inclusion and belonging) was that the dominant rhetoric of inclusion and/or accommodation of diverse genders and sexualities often failed to consider the interplay of identity, social power, and the surrounding environment (Kosciw et al., 2013; Payne et al., 2013; Saewyc et. al, 2009, 2013; Smith et al., 2016; Toomey et al., 2012; Wolowic et al., 2017). Moreover, there was a notable absence of alternative possibilities towards the inclusion of queer, trans, and two-spirit students beyond heteronormative, colonial, and ableist frameworks on both institutional and ministerial levels.

Indeed, what was so inspiring about the “Trans PULSE Project” were the positive changes in policies and practices that has been gained through the input of gender and sexually diverse communities across Ontario. Moreover, built into the very fabric of the “Trans PULSE Project” is an unwavering commitment to respectful, community-based research methodologies and the dissemination of intersectional data that focuses on strengthening marginalized communities through the elevation of unheard voices and perspectives; encouraging gender and sexual minority leadership; and increasing advocacy for the trans community.

Thus, what “Trans PULSE” and other community-based, narrative driven research projects seek to illuminate are the various complexities and nuances surrounding inclusion that can only be

101 revealed through the integration of first-hand experiences and encounters with educational systems. Ultimately, first-hand accounts both disrupt powerful myths surrounding inclusion and wellness, and in doing so, assert community voices and perspectives to transform exclusionary and oppressive discourses and practices. As Leck (2000) asserts: “Knowing the extent to which a young person reflects, integrates, sorts, or repels peer pressure, adult prescriptions, and popular culture influences can also be important for our understanding of that individual’s educational needs” (p. 334).

Given the first-hand accounts from students, families, guardians, and staff regarding their experiences and encounters with various social institutions (all of which attempt to define, regulate, and speak to individual behaviours and identity expressions), these challenging and nuanced responses offer a critical entry point into possible actions that could create more equitable and socially just spaces. Such spaces, as Genovese and Rousell (2011), Goldstein (2017), Scheimis et al. (2013), Sylliboy and Young (2017), Wilson (1996), and Wolowic et al. (2017) argue, can only come to fruition through intentional, respectful, intersectional, and meaningful community engagement.

As discussed, when students feel that they are welcomed, respected, and already a part of the schooling environment, they are more likely to feel comfortable expressing their experiences in school, and will feel that their voices are being both valued and heard in the discourse surrounding safe, inclusive, and positive schools. In continuing to mobilize and strengthen “community evidence-based knowledge” and individual narratives, dominant discourses and practices of care, acceptance, and social inclusion can begin to “build relationships and partnerships with health sectors, support organizations” and gender and sexual minority communities to ensure that school cultures are built on a foundation of respect, recognition, and resilience (Sylliboy & Young, 2017, p. 23).

As stressed by Khan-Cullors (2018), the interspersed, yet all-too-common experiences of harassment and social exclusion based on racial bias and profiling in schools often escape major studies and school data collection processes, which is largely due to the normalization of school cultures that reify colonial, heteronormative, and Eurocentric standards of inclusion and belonging. In addition to a systemically oppressive school culture, is a climate of fear that stems

102 from the daily marginalization experienced by racialized students in school. Further responding to this, Khan-Cullors (2018) reflects that:

By the time Black Lives Matter is born, we not only know that we have been rendered disposable because of our lived experience – which few listened to – but also from data and finally from those terrible, viral images of Black girls being thrown brutally out of their seats by people who are called School Safety Officers, for the crime of having their phones out in the classroom. Monique Morris’s reporting will tell us about the 12-year- old girl from Detroit who is threatened with both expulsion and criminal charges for writing the word ‘Hi’ on her locker door; and the one in Orlando who is also threatened with expulsion from her private school if she doesn’t stop wearing her hair natural. (p. 27)

Some of the powerful approaches I have found that better account for such hostile and oppressive experiences (which, as reflected by Khan-Cullors, often disappear from view), were in the following studies by Denison (2015); GLSEN (2018); and Saewyc et. al (2013).

In the first and largest international study on homophobia in sport, Out in the Fields, Denison (2015) explores the glaring disconnect between homophobic attitudes and behaviors prevalent in team sport, and the contradictory belief that such spaces are still inclusive and accepting on an institutional and structural level. Given the extensive scope of Denison’s (2015) study, which interviewed nearly 9500 participants from various backgrounds and positionalities,36 such findings provided a critical reminder of the ubiquitous, and damaging potential of language, and thus the need to constantly interrogate this on both the individual and institutional levels. Moreover, Denison’s (2015) critical focus on institutional and individual dissonance further problematizes the disconnect between what gets claimed in discourse, versus what actually happens in practice.

36 For more on Denison’s (2015) findings, methodology, and other tools and resources from Out in the Fields, see: http://www.outonthefields.com/

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I have also found that the development of a general stigmatization measure offered by Saewyc et. al (2013) provides both the conceptual framework and practical tool for which to better assess and interrogate the multiple dimensions of exclusion and harassment occurring in schools. What Saewyc et. al (2013) perceive as the “three dimensions of stigma: enacted stigma (rejecting hostile behaviours targeted toward stigmatized people), perceived stigma (awareness you possess a stigmatized characteristic and others reject you), and internalized stigma (acceptance of the dominant groups’ negative judgments about you),” provides a holistic and complex understanding of the various practices and behaviours that produce stigmatizing affects.

Moreover, the notion of “layered stigma” or, the compound effects of stigma from multiple stigmatized characteristics (Saewyc et. al, 2013), provides a much needed approach towards thinking about oppression from various vantage point, such as personal, institutional, and structural, and the layered impacts this may have on students in school. Through a deeper understanding of stigma, for example, we can better understand the layered impacts of oppression on 2SLGBTQ+ students in school, and address the underlying narrative structures that maintain hostile and unwelcoming spaces for gender and sexual minorities.

Lastly, the latest National School Climate Survey (2018) by GLSEN demonstrated significant results when considering the unique experiences of LGBTQ students with disabilities, and experiences of LGBTQ immigrant students in school. The National Climate Survey also took into account the impacts of institutional and structural forms of discrimination (such as the oppressive use of school policies and practices, binary bathrooms, heteronormative curriculum, and educator bias), in relation to a student’s personal characteristics. This was the first time that GLSEN considered an intersectional and multi-dimensional approach to schooling experiences, and is a hopeful example of what this work can look like in future.

The conceptual frameworks offered by Denison (2015); GLSEN (2018); and Saewyc et. al (2013) highlight nuanced methodological practices for which to better understand the layered realities of inclusion and well-being in school. In particular, these approaches critically question how prevalent concepts of ‘inclusion’ and ‘well-being’ are being reproduced, operationalized, and experienced by all students in school. What I have taken from these studies, among others in my research, is that policy-makers, administrators, researchers, and educators must:

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a) Exercise inclusivity from a place of humility, thoughtfulness, and intention (Wright, 2019b) by centering the voices and lived experiences of queer, two-spirit, and disabled communities, i.e., allocating more structural and discursive power;

b) Utilize a queer-informed and intersectional lens when designing and analyzing school climate surveys to better understand who has access to inclusion, acceptance, and wellness in schools;

c) Ensure equitable focus is placed on the minority of student responses to better understand why these particular students continue to report unmet needs;

d) When collecting school data, provide students with optimum personal characteristic options that are both expecting and affirming to address the prevailing fear and hostility many students experience from schooling environments; and

e) As illuminated by Goldstein (2004) and the End Dress Codes Collective (2018), ensure the consistent and equitable implementation of anti-oppressive policies by providing staff and students with appropriate information and training for enhancing inclusion and equity in schools.

Ultimately, what is critical to consider in the work of creating educational systems that are more thoughtfully and intentionally inclusive, is that this work is an ongoing, critically reflective process, which needs to be fundamentally rooted in person/community perspectives and their unique lived experiences. When our institutional foundations are built upon the principle that person/community perspectives are fundamental in developing school policies and practices of inclusion and equity, the outcomes will be transformative. As this study found, first-hand accounts of inclusion and wellness offer the conceptual and practical frameworks for which to transform and enhance how we approach and operationalize inclusion and equity in schools.

When our educational systems begin from a place of awareness and recognition that there are layers of explicit and implicit forms of stigma and discrimination operating at both the

105 institutional and individual levels, then our ability to enhance the conditions and effectiveness of this system will vastly improve. As Wright (2019b) further explains:

…one of the things that has entered [inclusive] work for me lately is, if you’re going to go down that road, you need to start with the understanding that the reason you are engaged in activities to promote diversity and inclusion is because most spaces are hostile and dangerous for people who represent diversity. And unless you can actually accept that possibility, that the place where I work is hostile and dangerous for people who identify as queer or people who are racially visible, people who are black […] if you can’t imagine that someone else might be feeling a certain way, fearful, then you really aren’t going to be inclusive or welcoming because you aren’t starting from the reality of that. (CBC Radio, 2019b)

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Future Directions: Queering Measures of Inclusion

As a white, able-bodied, queer, cis woman who participated in their high school’s GSA (over a decade ago), I have always been intent on revisiting these spaces to further examine student affect and the prominent narratives underpinning these spaces, with regards to inclusion, acceptance, and belonging. Currently, GSAs maintain a prominent position in narratives surrounding inclusion and acceptance in schools. As one of the prevailing models for the inclusion of diverse genders and sexualities, I plan to take my research into various high schools to learn more about student experiences with GSAs (in terms of inclusion and belonging) and their knowledge of gender and sexuality (as generated from these spaces). While GSAs have gained prominence and support in a vast majority of high schools, little is known about student affect in relation to these spaces, and moreover, how dominant narratives surrounding gender and sexual diversity (as communicated by school policy, practice, and mainstream Pride) impacts the composition of GSAs in terms of student inclusion and belonging.

Many of the studies conducted up to this point in Canada have not placed a more critical lens on GSAs and their impacts on gender and sexually diverse students in schools. In critically examining GSAs as powerful sites of knowledge (re)production, I have been eager to explore the ways in which GSAs both influence and are influenced by dominant narratives of gender and sexuality, and how this further influences student perceptions of themselves and others. In continuing to follow Ahmed’s (2006) observation that “bodies take shape through tending toward objects that are reachable, which are available within the bodily horizon” (p. 543), I will focus on the following questions: (1) How are GSAs affecting student perceptions of gender and sexual diversity, and inclusion? (2) How does this impact school climate and the inability to move beyond GSAs as the dominant practice of 2SLGBTQ+ inclusion? (3) How are GSAs influencing how students perceive their social positioning in relation to others? (4) How is this social positioning accentuated along the lines of race, class, and ability?

As observed from this study’s exploration into contemporary discourses and cultures of 2SLGBTQ+ inclusion in schools and society (as limited by a gay rights discourse and mainstream Pride narratives), a persistent and concerning gap is that educators, administrators, policy-makers, students, and families are still not learning enough about the experiences of

107 minority voices in school. Meaning, there is still much to be done on institutional and structural levels. Given my research on prominent institutional approaches to addressing the needs of 2SLGBTQ+ students in school (through anti-bullying, at-risk, and accommodation frameworks), students are still not reporting incidents of discrimination, harassment, and exclusion due to environments that sustain fear, shame, and inequitable access to safe spaces, such as bathrooms and locker rooms for example.37

As Meyer (2008) further argues, anti-oppression and anti-bullying approaches to creating safer and more accepting schools fail to address “the underlying power dynamics that such behaviors build and reinforce” (p. 83). Thus, my study in future aims to interrogate the ways in which schools also act as spaces that exacerbate issues faced by 2SLGBTQ+ youth, through the use of isolated and temporary frameworks of inclusion and belonging, for example (e.g., GSAs, Pride Weeks or one-day Pride events), and other structural and discursive “processes through which cultural systems reward hegemonic gender and heterosexuality” (Meyer, 2008, p. 83).

In further interrogating such processes, my methodological approach will focus on my anonymous survey tool,38 where I will collect primary quantitative data from high school students (grades 10-12) regarding their experiences of gender, sexuality, and inclusion in school. As stated, in an effort to ensure diverse perspectives and positionalities are considered in both the data collection and analysis stage, the questions I pose in the anonymous survey offer limitless options for students to locate themselves in myriad configurations of identities and orientations. It is my hope that the use of intersectional and queer frameworks will create a much needed entry point into new ways of understanding the inclusion of gender and sexual diversity in school, and thus new and exciting opportunities to transform how we teach and learn in school settings.

As I have argued in this study, a good place to start in examining and altering the conditions in which students experience their schooling environments is to begin by asking different questions

37 GLSEN’s (2018) infographic highlighting the positive impacts schools have on gender and sexually diverse students when they have supportive and inclusive policies and practices: https://www.glsen.org/sites/default/files/NSCS-Infographics-Trans-Good-News-1200x630.png

38 Found on p. 128, Appendix A.

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(Hernandez, 2017). Which is why the development of an innovative quantitative survey tool was imperative to this process.

My theoretical approach to reviewing and analyzing primary and secondary data will draw upon the field of social geography, as the study of people and their relations towards spatial structures and social identities; and of phenomenology, as the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. Foucault’s concept of the “discursive field” as part of his attempt to understand the relationship between language, social institutions, subjectivity and power, will also be critical in guiding this process. As remarked by Weedon (1987): “Discursive fields, such as the law or the family, contain a number of competing and contradictory discourses with varying degrees of power to give meaning to and organize social institutions and processes. They also ‘offer’ a range of modes of subjectivity” (p. 35). Thus, not only will such critiques provide a nuanced examination into social affect, but will help to unpack the organizing influences within discursive and institutional structures of subjectivity in school.

Following this line of thought, I will also draw upon the tenets of poststructuralism and the argument that, in order to “understand an object (e.g., a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object” (Raulet, 1983). In my case, the object under study will be GSAs, and the systems of knowledge I will be referring to will be the surrounding school environment, and its various interpretations of gender and sexual diversity through school policy, practice, Pride Weeks, etc. From this position, institutional ethnography, as the study of how social interactions influence our institutionalized structures and systems of knowledge (Smith, 2005); in conjunction with Lacanian psychoanalysis and the formation of subjectivity through “the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real” (Lacan, 2010, p. 1159), can lead us to further interrogate how the communication of ‘2SLGBTQ’ in school (through one-day events, Pride Weeks, and school policies and practices) impact how students conceptualize gender and sexual diversity and their sense of belonging, both within and outside of educational spaces.

For the purposes of this study, applying a psychoanalytic and intersectional lens will allow me to unpack how the social landscape of schooling informs, and is informed by, unconscious desires, fears and anxieties surrounding gender and sexual diversity, and to what extent, as put forth by

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Nast (2000), “exteriorized landscapes and interiorized psyches have historically structured one another” (p. 219). The theories of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan will be particularly relevant here, as his accounts of the “symbolic order” (i.e., a pre-existing social order that humans are predisposed to at birth, and which influences the trajectory of their ensuing lives) provides a critical reading of social environments. In looking beyond the surface of dominant identity categories, Lacan’s assessment of the symbolic order brings society’s unconscious and conscious desires to the fore, in an effort to question and re-evaluate the production and maintenance of social meaning and subjectivity.

I also plan to conduct extensive background research on the beginnings of GSAs in school, with particular attention to the socio-political context of the day. I will also focus on the specifics of school climate and culture when considering the particular narratives and perceptions surrounding GSAs in school, i.e., what policies and practices schools have in place in order to assess and speak to student inclusion and well-being. Within the TDSB, for example, this would entail a thorough review of reports, such as TDSB Census Portraits, Understanding our Students’ Backgrounds: Sexual orientation report (2015); Black LGBTQ Students in the TDSB: Highlighted Findings from the 2011-12 Student Census (2017); Transgender Students in the TDSB: Highlighted Findings from the 2011-12 Student Census (2017); as well as the TDSB’s 2017 Student and Parent Census: Overall Findings (2018), with a particular focus on census infographics and students’ emotional well-being.

In future, I hope to further expand and diversify my approach to consider the correlation between quantitative and qualitative narratives, and the influences of place (such as differences between rural and urban schools) when determining the contextual layers that influence how students orient themselves around the presence of GSAs in school (or lack thereof).

This said, despite my critiques of GSAs, I profoundly recognize the importance and continued need for practices and discourses that advocate for gender and sexual diversity in schools; especially during such a perilous political juncture, when gender identity and sexual orientation is under constant scrutiny and threat of erasure. My intent in pursuing this research is neither to diminish nor disregard the significant progress made within schooling environments and beyond. Rather, at the core of my studies, is an unwavering belief in the possibilities brought about by

110 queer students (more specifically), and queer moments (more broadly), in creating the narratives and practices still needed for which to envision change in schools.

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Developing an Anonymous Survey Tool: Implications for Future Practice

To further explore how students experience inclusion in school, and gain insight into their understandings of gender and sexual diversity, I had originally designed an anonymous student survey consisting of approximately 40 questions that asked students to provide information regarding their knowledge of gender and sexual diversity, as well as their own gender identity, expression, and sexual orientation.39 The survey also contained questions focusing on bullying, discrimination, perceptions of school climate, and the purposes of GSAs in schools. The survey was to be taken anonymously, either online or on paper, with the provision of a unique code identifier.

The aim was to reach approximately 300 students from grades 10-12 to explore how external influences of gender and sexual diversity (such as school policies, practices, Pride narratives, and school climate) mediated perceptions of gender, sexuality, inclusion and (dis)orientations towards their schools GSA. Grade 9 students were intentionally omitted from the data collecting process as most students in Garde 9 are encountering their schools environment and structures therein, such as GSAs, for the first time.

In order to gain a deeper understanding of student perceptions and experiences of gender and sexuality in school, my anonymous student survey (Appendix A) attempted to go beyond the prevailing single-axis framework, which I often encountered in institutional school climate surveys, and instead, adopt what Fisher and Stockbridge (2016) refer to as a “prismatic inquiry methodology” (p. 53), which “utilizes the convergence, divergence and juxtaposition of data in the exploration of hidden or unexpected relationships, opening the paths to other ways of knowing while maintaining a criterion of quality and definitions of success” (p. 54). Thus, in an effort to ensure diverse perspectives and positionalities were considered in both the data collection and analysis stage, the questions I pose in the anonymous survey provide optimal

39 The anonymous student survey designed for this study can be found on p. 128, Appendix A.

112 options for students to locate themselves within myriad configurations of identities, expressions, and orientations.

In order to critically consider how students, staff, and parent(s)/guardian(s) encounter 2SLGBTQ+ identities, spaces, and their sense of place either within or outside the ubiquitous umbrella term, an intersectional approach to narrative collection and analysis provided a pivotal lens for which to examine why and how certain bodies and expressions orient themselves around particular understandings of gender and sexuality, and how this informs feelings of belonging, safety, and acceptance in school. That said, my approach to data collection and narrative analysis aims to provoke a deeper understanding into the correlations between identity and intentionality when considering student perceptions of gender and sexual diversity, and inclusion in school.

Thus, in structuring my own climate survey tool, it was important to situate my own analytical framework within the following questions: What are the intersecting factors that determine a positive and inclusive school climate, and for whom? Who has access to inclusion in school? What is at stake when student surveys and subsequent narratives of school climate fail to consider students who experience intersecting forms of oppression in school? And lastly, in what ways do diverse perspectives and positionalities deepen understandings of inclusion and belonging in schools? Thus revealing “paths to other ways of knowing” (Fisher & Stockbridge, 2016) and practicing inclusion in school?

Although my anonymous student surveys were not implemented in practice at this stage, given the time constraints of a Master’s thesis, I am intending to use this survey tool to collect primary data from my students in future. Fortunately, in choosing to focus on secondary data at this stage of my research process (school climate surveys, student census reports, interviews, as well as school policies and practices) the alternate direction my study was extremely beneficial in providing a rich, critical framework for which to continue this work. To echo the sentiments of Chamberland and Saewyc (2011), what I learned from this study, is that “the complementary nature of these approaches makes it possible to pinpoint our existing knowledge and our knowledge gaps, and to orient future research with a better accounting for diversity, complexity and dynamic interaction between stigma and resilience processes that affect the mental health of sexual and gender minorities” (p. 2), as well as all students in school.

Works Cited

The Advocate Mag. (2015, June 25). Beyond Stonewall: 9 lesser-known LGBT uprisings. Retrieved March 02, 2019, from https://www.advocate.com/pride/2015/06/25/beyond- stonewall-9-lesser-known-lgbt-uprisings?pg=full

Ahmed, S. (2006). Orientations: Toward a queer phenomenology. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 12(4), 543-574. doi: 10.1215/10642684-2006-002

Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.

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Appendices: (Appendix A) Anonymous Student Survey Tool

Jillian Stagg MA Candidate OISE, University of Toronto

Anonymous Student Survey

Instructions

1. If using paper, please use pencil or pen to fill out the anonymous survey: Shade in the circles like this → • Not like this →  or 

2. Answer the following questions to the best of your ability. 3. If there are any questions that you do not wish to answer, please write N/A as your response. 4. If you need to make any changes to your answers, simply erase or cross out the answer you wish to change and write a new one. 5. Feel free to add any information you need to best answer the questions. 6. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact myself or the teacher in the room.

Summary

Dear Student,

Thank you again for participating in my research study exploring how students experience and understand inclusion, gender, and sexuality, as it relates to Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) in schools. As previously stated, the most important part of this study will be your input as a student.

Your participation in this study is entirely voluntary, and neither your name, nor signature will be required to complete the following survey. To ensure your participation is kept confidential, you have been given a unique code identifier for completion of this survey. Please keep this code for your personal records and do not share with other students. Should you choose to withdraw your consent to participate, you can use this code to revoke your data. To do so, please feel free to contact myself at [email protected] or your Principal with your unique code, and your information will be removed from the study.

At the end of the survey, you will have access to an “open-text box” to include any additional information. You will also be provided a list of resources should you be interested in further information and/or support.

This survey should take approximately 30 minutes to complete.

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Unique code identifier:

Demographics

1. Grade: (Select one) 10; 11; 12

2. Racial Background: (Check all that apply)

• Black (For example: Ethiopian, Jamaican, Kenyan, Nigerian, Somalian, Vincentian) • East Asian (For example: Chinese, Japanese, Korean) • Indigenous (For example: First Nations, Inuit, Métis, Anishinaabe, Dene, Cree, and/or Iroquois) • Latin American (For example: Colombian, Cuban, El Salvadorian, Mexican, Peruvian) • Middle Eastern (For example: Afghani, Iranian, Lebanese, Saudi Arabian, Syrian) • South Asian (For example: Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani, Tibetan, Sri Lankan and Indian-Caribbean such as Guyanese) • Southeast Asian (For example: Filipino, Malaysian, Singaporean, Thai, Vietnamese) • White (For example: British, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Armenian, Russian, Slovakian)

If not listed, please include in the text box:

3. Age:

4. Do you identify as having a disability? Yes; No; Not sure;

If Yes, or Not sure, please write your answer in the text box: (Some examples could be: Learning disability; Speech difficulty; Physical disability; Deaf/hard of hearing; Blind/low vision; Mental illness; Anxiety disorder; Depression)

If not listed, please include in the following text box:

5. Creed: (Check all that apply) Agnosticism; Atheism; Buddhism; Christianity; Hinduism; Indigenous Spirituality; Islam; Judaism; Sikhism; Spiritual; No Religion

If not listed, please include in the text box:

6. First Language(s): English; Other Language(s) – Please include in the text box:

7. Language(s) Spoken at home: English; Other Language(s) – Please include in the text box:

8. Place of birth:

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9. Time Spent Living in Canada: 1 – 4 years; 5 – 9 years; More than 10 years

Background Context on Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs)

10. Are you aware that your school has a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA)? “Yes” or “No”

11. How much do you know about your school’s GSA? A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing

12. To what extent have you been involved with your school’s GSA? A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Not at all

Understanding of Gender and Gender Identity

13. How much do you know about the following Gender identities?

• Cisgender: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Female: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Genderfluid: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Genderless/Agender/Non-gender: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Male: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Non-binary: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Transfeminine: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Transgender: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Transmasculine: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Two-Spirit: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing

If not listed, please include in the text box:

14. Your own Gender identity: (Check all that apply) Cisgender; Female; Genderless/Agender/Non-gender; Genderfluid; Male; Non-binary; Transgender; Transfeminine; Transmasculine; Two-Spirit

If not listed, please include in the text box:

Gender Expression

Meaning, the performance of one’s gender, especially how it is communicated to others through behavior, clothing, haircut, voice, and other forms of presentation (Reiff Hill & Mays, 2013)

15. At school, I think about how I express my gender:

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Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure

16. I am comfortable with my own gender expression: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure

17. I experience discrimination and/or exclusion based on my gender expression: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure

Understanding of Sexual Orientation

18. How much do you know about the following Sexual orientations?

• Asexual: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Bisexual: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Gay: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Heterosexual: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Homosexual: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Lesbian: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Pansexual: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Queer: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing • Two-Spirit: A great deal; Quite a bit; Some; Very little; Nothing

If not listed, please include in the text box:

19. Your own Sexual orientation: (Check all that apply) Asexual; Bisexual; Gay; Heterosexual; Homosexual; Lesbian; Pansexual; Queer; Two-Spirit

If not listed, please include in the text box:

20. I am comfortable with diverse expressions of gender and sexuality at school: For example: having gender and sexual diversity in the curriculum, being around various types of relationships and expressions, etc. (Sliding scale response): Strongly Agree – Strongly Disagree

21. 2SLGBTQQIA+ (Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual) students experience school differently than others: Strongly Agree – Strongly Disagree

22. I have access to resources and supports regarding gender and sexual diversity: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure

23. Gender and sexual diversity is discussed in my classroom: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure

24. Gender and sexual diversity is respected in my classroom: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure

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Perception of School Climate

According to the Toronto District School Board’s (TDSB’s) Equity Policy released in 2018, a Positive School Climate may be defined as “the learning environment and relationships found within a school and school community. A positive school climate exists when all members of the school community feel safe, included, and accepted, and actively promote positive behaviors and interactions.”

With this in mind, please respond to the following questions:

25. Climate in the classroom: In terms of… Belonging; Acceptance; Inclusion; Safety; Diversity. (Sliding scale response for each): Positive one direction – Negative the other

26. I feel comfortable at school: Strongly Agree – Strongly Disagree

27. My identity is respected at school: Strongly Agree – Strongly Disagree

28. I feel safe outside of the classroom:

• Bathroom: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Cafeteria: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Hallways: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • School yard: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Social/Extracurricular school groups: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure

29. Have you ever felt excluded based on the following reasons?

• Appearance: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Disability: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Faith/religion/spirituality: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • First language: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Gender expression: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Gender identity: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Income level: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Racial/cultural background: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Sexual orientation: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure

If not listed, please include in the text box:

30. How often do you experience the following concerns while at school?

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• Academic (for example: learning difficulties, low expectations, high expectations): Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Attendance: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Accessibility: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Bullying: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Discrimination: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Exclusion: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Harassment: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Homophobia: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Islamophobia: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Racism: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Suspension: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure • Transphobia: Almost always; Often; Sometimes; Rarely; Never; Not sure

If not listed, please include in the text box:

Group/ Extracurricular Involvement

School groups and Extracurricular activities can refer to, but are not limited to: Academics, Arts, Culture, Diversity, Equity, Faith/Religion/Spirituality, Gender and Sexuality, Math, Music, Science, Social Justice, Sports (Individual and Team), etc.

31. At your school, do you participate in any school groups or extracurricular activities?

If Yes, please write your answer in the text box:

Then answer questions 34 and 35…

If No, please explain in the text box:

Then answer question 36 …

32. Are any of these groups focused on equity or social justice? “Yes” or “No”

33. Why do these particular groups or activities interest you?

34. Are there any other school groups or extracurricular activities that you would like offered at your school?

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Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs)

For the purpose of this study, the term “GSA” is used to broadly address school groups that advocate for gender and sexual diversity in schools. I acknowledge that these groups are also known by other important, thoughtful, and expressive names.

35. Our school’s GSA is: (Check all that apply) Welcoming; Inclusive; Diverse; Active; Supported; Respected; Inactive; Unorganized; Exclusive; Unwelcoming; I’m Not Sure

If not listed, please include in the text box:

36. Our school’s GSA focuses on: (Check all that apply) Education; Events; Safety; Inclusion; Diversity; Advocacy; Social Justice and Equity; Allyship; Community Outreach; Equality; I’m Not Sure

If not listed, please include in the text box:

37. My knowledge of “gender and sexual diversity” has increased because of these spaces: Strongly Agree – Strongly Disagree

38. I have become more aware and accepting because of these spaces: Strongly Agree – Strongly Disagree

39. I am comfortable with my school having a GSA: Sliding scale response: “Very Comfortable – Not Comfortable”

40. I feel more included because of these spaces: Strongly Agree – Strongly Disagree – Not Applicable

41. GSAs are enough for 2SLGBTQQIA+ students: “Yes” or “No”

If possible, please explain your answer:

42. My school could do more to include 2SLGBTQQIA+ students in our school: “Yes” or “No”

If possible, please explain your answer:

Thank you for your participation!

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Please use the open text box for any further thoughts or questions:

Thank you again, and please refer to the following resources should you be interested in learning more/sharing more about gender and sexual diversity:

Resources adapted from The Unicorn Glossary by benjamin lee hicks (2017)

519 Community Centre: http://www.the519.org/education-training/media-reference-guide

Chelsea Vowel (Métis writer and educator): http://apihtawikosisan.com/

Intersex Society of (ISNA): http://www.isna.org/

Kanopy (Toronto Public Libraries): https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/kanopy-help/ - Allows you to access a diverse database of films focusing on gender and sexual diversity.

LGBT Families Speak Out: A video interview study about the school experiences of LGBTQ families living in Ontario (2014-2020). http://www.lgbtqfamiliesspeakout.ca/

LGBTQ Parenting Network – Trans Parenting http://lgbtqpn.ca/trans-parenting/?doing_wp_cron=1486564285.6289639472961425781250

Native Youth Sexual Health Network http://www.nativeyouthsexualhealth.com/resources.html

Rainbow Health Ontario – Training and Education http://www.rainbowhealthontario.ca/wp- content/uploads/woocommerce_uploads/2015/05/Training-Description.pdf

Safe and Caring Schools for Two Spirit Youth: A Guide for Teachers and Students (2011) www.safeandcaring.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Two-Spirited-Web-Booklet.pdf

Sex is a Funny Word – Illustrative book by Cory Silverberg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22889878-sex-is-a-funny-word

Supporting Our Youth (SOY) – A community organization based in Toronto, Ontario. http://soytoronto.org/

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TDSB Office for Gender Based Violence Prevention http://www.tdsb.on.ca/AboutUs/Innovation/GenderBasedViolencePrevention.aspx

The Gender Book – Online resources and ‘pay what you can’ downloads: http://www.thegenderbook.com/about/4577563603 http://www.thegenderbook.com/safer‐spaces-pack/4583019812

The No Big Deal Campaign (NBD campaign): http://www.nbdcampaign.ca/ - Shareable images and infographics: http://www.nbdcampaign.ca/shareable-things

They is my Pronoun: http://theyismypronoun.com/

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