Journal Club: How Anti-Trans Policies Hurt Students
Following the enactment of cruel anti-trans policies, a 2026 review looks at the impacts of these policies on trans students. Journal Club dives into this review to see the real harms of these kinds of policies.
by Veronica Esposito
Recently the United Kingdom made headlines with the announcement that it was eliminating most pathways for trans youth to attend school in ways that are authentic and true to who they really are.
Guidance released on February 12 by the United Kingdom's Department for Education asserted that trans youth should only be permitted to socially transition at school in “rare” situations, must wear school uniforms that do not correspond to their correct gender, and will be restricted from accessing appropriate accommodations, such as bathrooms and locker rooms. Children who request different names and pronouns will be nonconsensually outed to their parents, and overall schools will not be expected to help children live as their authentic selves.
This comes at a time when schools across the United States are also increasingly changing their policies in ways that trample upon the needs of trans youth. Among other things, 21 states currently have bans on trans youth using the correct bathroom in schools, and the recent Supreme Court case Mahmoud v. Taylor enshrined a right for schools to discriminate against LGBTQ+ identities in curriculum.
What does the science say about these policies? Earlier this year, researchers Mahaila Day & Annette Brömdal published a review of some 1,704 research papers to see exactly what the science says about how schools can best help trans youth to flourish. To find these papers they combed databases and then read through the 1,704 potential papers, eventually getting down to 28 that they included in their research.
Unsurprisingly, they found that the exact policies being promulgated throughout the UK and much of the U.S. impose barriers that harm the mental health of trans youth and limit their right to receive a quality education. As they write,
The restrictions placed on transgender and gender diverse students in school, such as exclusion from physical education, school sports, bathrooms, uniforms, learning and teaching material, including picture books and the alike, jeopardize their innate human dignity. The current environment constitutes a crisis that requires all stakeholders to work in collaboration to prevent further loss of transgender and gender diverse student lives.
Day & Brömdal cite one study in particular, a qualitative study published by Cal Horton in 2023, that gives a glimpse into the damage the can be done by policies being instituted in the UK and U.S. Among the mistreatment that Horton identifies trans youth being subjected to are:
“being denied access to appropriate toilets, denied access to changing facilities, or experiencing forced isolation on school trips, with trans children not permitted to share rooms with their friends”
“three types of non-affirmation . . . including non-affirmation from pupils, non-affirmation from adults including teachers, and systemic delegitimization”
Systemic delegitimization can be as simple as youth seeing that teachers are afraid to use the word “trans,” or seeing that school lessons go out of their way to avoid including trans identities.
The consequences speak for themselves. For instance, Horton notes that parents of the youth in the study saw signs that their children were developing internalized transphobia, connecting it to school policies: “This year, for example, is the first time that I’ve ever heard [Child] say, I wish I wasn’t trans. Because I think he looks at cis kids and thinks, God their life is so much easier than mine.” Due to treatment at school, many of the youth studied developed coping methods that included “protecting themselves from harm by assuming all people are transphobic unless overtly shown otherwise.”
Moreover, Horton found that in many cases youth were not yet mature or aware enough to realize that it was even possible to fight back against the victimization.
Across references to victimization two sub-themes were identified, corresponding to child powerlessness and a lack of understanding of transphobic victimization. Where schools were not proactive in ensuring physical and emotional safety, several parents and children described feeling they (or their child) had no choice but to endure persistent unchallenged victimization, or drop out of school.
This is often the case for children, who rely on adult caregivers to help them learn that they do not deserve to be victims of abuse, and that they deserve to be treated with respect and dignity Yet across the UK and U.S. schools are less and less likely to be places where these sorts of lessons can be learned.
The results that Horton found in his study were echoed in many of the others that Day & Brömdal analyzed in depth. For instance, the duo summarized the findings of Parodi et al. as follows: “The findings underscore the importance of fostering school-connectedness and tailoring support for diverse gender identities to address mental health disparities among transgender and gender diverse adolescents.” Certainly ongoing policy changes in the UK and anti-trans U.S. states do anything but.
The results of this discrimination against trans youth is clear: worse educational outcomes—exacerbating already large disparities for trans people in areas like income and employment—less opportunity to build community that is essential to lifelong thriving, and increases in deleterious mental health outcomes like depression, anxiety, and suicidality. As Day & Brömdal note, this is in clear violation of Article 28 in The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which requires that all youth have access to education free from discrimination.
With discrimination against trans youth being increasingly normalized—and even written into state and national law—it is unfortunately clear that a generation of trans people are being traumatized. It is implicit on those with capacity—be it other trans people, allies in the education field, or others—to take up the slack and do what they can to support these children in avoiding the worst.
Veronica Esposito (she/her) is a writer and therapist based in the Bay Area. She writes regularly for The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and KQED, the NPR member station for Northern California, on the arts, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues.