Tran inclusion - resisting the culture wars in ITE (Initial Teacher Education)

Dr Lyndsay Muir spoke about resisting the ‘culture wars’ in ITE as part of the Equalities keynote panel at the UCET conference in November 2023. This year she was asked back to talk at the 2024 conference in more detail about the work being done in collaboration with UCET colleagues on supporting Trans and Non-Binary (TNB) people who are joining the teaching profession.

She outlined the heightened visibility of TNB people in the first decades of the 21^st century, alongside the misrepresentations, misunderstandings and hostility that are likely to be within the lived experiences of TNB people.

Many gender diverse people who wish to become teachers may be wary of the kind of media attention that someone like Lucy Meadows experienced in 2013 - a teacher who transitioned whilst in post, who wrote in an email to a friend on New Year’s Day 2013

I'd like to be able to say I've given something back. I suppose the best way for me to do this would be to educate the people around me and children at school – I am a teacher after all!

After intense, intrusive and highly sensationalised media coverage, later criticised by the coroner (Pidd, 2013), she took her own life on the 19^th March that same year. (See Trans teacher Lucy Meadow's death turns town against press | Transgender | The Guardian (Pidd & Murphy, 2013)).

The combined effect of such sensationalised, often negative, media coverage (Gupta, 2019), with more recent draft DfE guidelines for consultation on ‘gender questioning’ pupils (Department for Education, 2024) and the publication of the Cass report on NHS Services for Young People (Cass, 2024) is the context in which the UCET Equalities sub-group has been discussing how best to support Trans and Non-binary entrants to the teaching profession. Lyndsay shared her insights into this collegiate dialogue, which is much needed and continues to evolve.