2025 Theses Doctoral

“Policy without teeth is just window dressing”: Using Trans-inclusive Education Policy as a Tool for Change in K-12 Schools

Kushner, Anna

Across the United States, the right for transgender youth to simply exist has become a widely discussed topic. In 2024 alone, nearly 700 bills concerning transgender people were introduced. In response, schools, districts, and state education agencies have introduced education policies committed to supporting and including trans students. State-level legislation and district-level policy are becoming increasingly critical for the protection of trans and gender expansive youth. With so many decisions now left to local decision-making bodies, it is more important than ever to consider the implications of trans-inclusive policy in schools.

Advocates and policy analysts often decide that a state, district, or school is inclusive or progressive based on whether they have policy in place. However, written policy alone does not ensure organizational and behavioral change in a given context. To that end, this dissertation used a qualitative, critical case study informed by comparative case study methodology to study the implementation of trans-inclusive education policies to understand what these policies actually do in schools.

To do this, I recruited two schools within Evergreen Public Schools, a large school district in the western United States that has adopted trans-inclusive policies. Using document analysis and semi-structured interviewing methods, I used neoinstitutional theory and queer theories of performativity to understand how organizational, behavioral, and ideological change take place at each site. Drawing from the sociological tradition of neoinstitutional theory, I considered how policies gain legitimacy as well as how the phenomenon of loose and tight coupling shape new policy and/or prevent it from catching on. In addition to documenting how district policy and administrative guidance was implemented at the school level, this project also used critical discourse analysis (CDA) to document the ideas, beliefs, and ways of being made possible by policy itself. As an analytic tool for critical policy analysis, CDA considers not only policy problems but also the values and attitudes that make the problems themselves seeable, knowable, and fixable.

I found that, while schools in the district of Evergreen benefited socially from establishing trans inclusion as a priority, most policies were too loosely coupled to be enforced, thus creating a paper trail of (non)performative policy that communicated the district’s values without effectively changing practice. Looking at implementation across sites, it became clear that individual actors, especially LGBTQ staff, played critical roles in establishing trans-inclusive practices at each site. Informal networks of queer and trans teachers and their allies shaped districtwide discourse and understanding of trans-inclusive policy and practice.

Building on theories of inhabited institutionalism, I showed that as policy becomes embodied, it can be shared and communicated through a queerly inhabited institutionalism, even in the absence of knowledge of written policy documents. A queerly inhabited institutionalism is one that shapes and is shaped by the queer performance of trans and gender expansive (TGE) students and staff in schools, shaping what is knowable and possible about gender in a given secondary school.

Policy guidance and school-based staff’s beliefs about TGE students acted as a normative force, creating expectations for how TGE students think, act, and behave. Additionally, policy guidance and staff members’ beliefs about the experiences and identities of TGE students drew on discourses of trans vulnerability. This reinforced TGE subjectivities defined by harm and negative affect. Taken together, these inclusion efforts reinforced hegemonic beliefs about gender and transness while also working to make schools more welcoming spaces.

While inclusive policy is necessary, it alone is insufficient for creating more positive outcomes for TGE youth. Policy is inherently normative; it defines groups and how members of those groups should be treated. However, the normative forces of policy can uphold and reify hegemonic beliefs about the group policy seeks to support and include. This challenge can be mitigated through gender facilitative teaching practices and the performative presence of queer and trans teachers themselves.