Not Only My Loss

The end of the school year has come, and it is irrelevant to my life. For the past four years I lived and breathed on the academic calendar as I taught middle and high school students. (For many years more I dealt with the academic world with my children’s schooling, which is also not an issue now.) It is a rather weird feeling, actually, to not be tied to a school schedule. In some ways I love it. But parts of me miss working with the students, because I really loved that as well.

I haven’t written much about my job that ended last summer after I came out. It’s a painful memory, because I didn’t want to leave it. I was good at it and I enjoyed it. My students liked my classes. Many kept taking German or Russian more than the year or two they had originally intended because they wanted to be in my classes. We had that much fun. Yes, we worked hard too. I had high expectations, but I made learning fun and gave students confidence that they could be successful at a second language.

I taught in an online school, so you would think that my gender identity would be relatively irrelevant. Had I taught this year my students would have heard the same voice they had heard the previous year. I had no intention of “pushing” an agenda on them, though I would have been honest and open about who I am. But the school was a conservative Christian school that largely works with homeschooling families, and they were definitely not keen on having a queer person like me in their program. Realistically, most of my families probably wouldn’t have responded well to my transition either, and since I was paid per student, I might have found myself in an untenable situation economically. So I walked away while my health and well-being were still intact. It was a difficult decision. Not only was I leaving something I loved, but I was doing it because of prejudice.

I’ve moved on with my life. Thankfully I found new work and have established myself in a new field. I think of my former students though. I never had the opportunity to say good-bye to them, much less to explain the reason I didn’t return last fall. That troubles me deeply. I am also saddened by the thought that those students lost an opportunity not only to keep learning from me, but also to have their worldview expanded. That’s part of what education should be about, being exposed to ideas and learning to think critically for oneself. Unfortunately, the school I used to teach in had a different understanding, one that circles the wagons against anything coming from a different worldview. Yes, I see the world through a different lens. But having me as a teacher isn’t going to make a student transgender. It might help students understand what that means (and perhaps give support to any who are trying to come to terms with their own identity) – which is precisely what I was told I must not do under any circumstances.

I wish the best for my former students. I hope that my replacements (if they ever found a replacement Russian teacher) were good. I hope they will succeed in high school and in life. I hope that as they interact with the wider world they will discover a richness and diversity that they did not encounter in their earlier years. If any are reading this, please know that you may always contact me. I’d love to hear from you.

Sometimes when I talk about losing this job, people express surprise that my gender identity could result in that. Yes, it can. There are still not any clear and definite protections for transgender people in employment rights, nor in most other rights. Some courts have upheld protections for us based on gender discrimination, but under the current administration (chaos would be a better term), the limited protections we have enjoyed are in grave danger. One’s ability and opportunity to work should not depend on whether one conforms to an arbitrary standard of gender normality. Equal protection under the law must extend to the transgender community, just as it should extend to all minority and marginalized groups.  Our fight for full civil rights has only begun.