Transgender Students in Elementary School: Creating an Affirming and Inclusive School Culture

Transgender Students in Elementary School offers guidance to educators who want to provide a supportive school culture and climate for transgender and gender-expansive students. The book provides recommendations for creating learning environments that facilitate all students’ sense of belonging and reduce the constraints inherent in binary gender norms.

Through this book, teachers and school leaders can deepen their understanding about why they need to make schools gender-inclusive and how to make it happen. Focusing on case studies of five schools, Melinda M. Mangin provides real-life quotes and vignettes that candidly illustrate the learning curve of leaders, staff, and families. These stories demonstrate both the successes and challenges of creating affirming school environments for transgender and gender-expansive students.

Mangin argues that while educators are powerfully motivated by the desire to meet the needs of the transgender children in their care, change should not be limited to one-time efforts to meet one child’s needs. Rather, the focus should be on creating a comprehensive school culture in which children of all gender expressions and identities can thrive.

Melinda M. Mangin is an associate professor in the Department of Education Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University, where she teaches and conducts research related to teacher leadership and transgender identities in the context of K–12 schools. Dr. Mangin’s scholarship is informed by her previous experience as a public high school Spanish teacher in New York City. She is a frequent speaker on the topic of transgender children and teacher leadership, presenting at national conferences as well as at local schools and teacher education preparation programs. Dr. Mangin is a founding member and organizer for Stepping Stones, a New York City, PFLAG-affiliated support group for families of transgender and gender-expansive children. She is the author of “Supporting Transgender and Gender-Expansive Children in School” (Phi Delta Kappan, 2018) and “Transgender Students in Elementary Schools: How Supportive Principals Lead” (Educational Administration Quarterly, 2019). In addition to her work with transgender communities, Dr. Mangin is a nationally recognized scholar of teacher leadership, the author of a coedited research volume (Teachers College Press, 2008), a coauthored book of case studies (Teachers College Press, 2010), and numerous peer-reviewed journal articles. From 2013 to 2018, she served as associate editor for Educational Administration Quarterly. Dr. Mangin is the principal investigator of two projects funded by the Spencer Foundation. Transforming Public Education: A Research Agenda is a collaborative project that brings together the expertise of twenty educators and activists for the purpose of improving education research related to transgender students and educators in K–12 schools. The second project, Transgender Studies in Education: Building a Field of Study, is a small learning community of education scholars whose collective efforts focus on articulating a vision for the future of educational scholarship informed by transgender experiences and communities.