This is the second story in a three-part series. In Part One, we hear from Q Daily and his family about Q's transition to identifying as a boy. In Part Three, we hear from a therapist who works with transgender kids.
Q Daily, a third-grader at P.S. 146 The Brooklyn New School, said now that he identifies as a boy, he believes he has greater freedom to be friends with both boys and girls.
“Mostly in the lunchroom, girls sit on one side of the table and the boys sit on the other,” Q observed. “But I usually sit in the middle.”
Confident and social, Q said he feels at ease in his classroom. And his peers have helped him move comfortably from identifying as a girl to a boy. He transitioned over the course of second grade. That’s when he started to more regularly dress in boy clothes and dropped his given name in order to go only by his first initial.
Changing gender identity requires community buy-in. Q asked teachers and friends, as well as his brother and parents, to use a different pronoun, call him by a different name and perceive him as a boy instead of a girl.
His classmates complied and, quite frankly, seemed not to care. Plus, Q was not unique in his class; there is another student who identifies as transgender.
Katherine Sorel, one of Q's classroom teachers, said having two transgender students was a non-issue partly because her students were young.
"I don’t know what their experience is going to be and I imagine it’s going to become more difficult for them," she said. "But right now it’s not really difficult. Right now, it’s sort of irrelevant."
The Brooklyn New School had to make a change around one key issue: the bathroom.
Q started to use the boy's bathroom on his own last year in second grade. This led staff members to stop and think, and do a bit of research. They came to the conclusion that students should be allowed to use the bathroom of their gender identity. The guidance was announced at a staff meeting last school year, said Anna Allanbrook, the school's principal.
“I think 10 years ago, I would have said, 'She’s a girl, she goes to the girl's bathroom,'" said Allanbrook. "But I think society has changed in the last 10 years and I think we’ve all been made much more aware of this continuum.”
New York City's Department of Education issued transgender guidelines for schools last year. They specify that students should be able to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align to their gender identity.
School staff, according to the guidelines, should also address transgender students by their preferred name and pronoun although a student's permanent record must reflect the student's legal name.