‘A square peg in a round hole’. Transgender and gender diverse youth and schooling in South Africa

Abstract

There is a continuing thread of research evidence that schools acknowledge just two self-evident genders and that trans and gender diverse (TGD) youth face significant marginalisation and exclusion. Drawing on a qualitative study of educational staff and seven TGD school-attending youth in South Africa, this paper explores two lines of inquiry – how schools as cultural and social spaces produce and resist cisnormativity and how TGD school-attending youth orientate themselves in or out of line with normative power? Shedding light on how orientation marks out boundary lines and practices of differentiation, the analysis highlights how schools produce a field of objects that ensures that schooling is orientated around the cisnormative body. The paper argues that schooling is a space where TGD youth learn their place, which is exclusion and marginalisation. The findings point to the need for urgent school reform, highlighting the need for important intervention paths to address gender diversity and schooling.