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Our Student Support Team opened the discussion about how to support transgender students. This is a new concept to this district as a whole - it has a "small town" mentality and is geographically in a weird environment (part farm/part inner city) so there are cultural beliefs that come into play.
What resources can you point me to to help this support get off the ground?
16 hours ago, NutmeggeRN said:It can be a challenge when parents refuse to acknowledge the child's preferred identifier. (Born Sally, wants to be called Steve). When I address the kiddo, I call them what they prefer. It gets a little trickier when said child is next to me and I need to call the parent....
I struggle with this as well. I have multiple kids in my building that have different preferred name/pronouns that parents do not use. I have to be really careful and intentional when making calls home. I don't want to cause any riffs at home but at school I do my best to use preferred with my students.
I work at the preschool level now so we don't have this come up.
But my first year as a Summer camp nurse we had a transgender camper. It is an all girls camp and he was allowed to attend still because it was his last year before aging out and he had been coming for many years (as a female camper) before that.
No one had informed us in the health center that he was transgender though. So when he came to take medication, I asked his name and he gave me his preferred name but his medication was under his legal name so I couldn't find it. It took us a couple minutes to figure it all out and I was able to make a note on the medication package with the new name so there wouldn't be an issue the next day.
7 hours ago, cowboysandangels said:This is something that, as an elementary school nurse, I have not encountered yet. I am sure I will at some point in my career and I want to be as educated as possible on the issue. There has been some talk about the topic of transgender and similar topics being included in our social studies curriculum for the upcoming years. If so, I want to sit in on the class to learn what we are teaching so that I can be helpful.
Received this information last week
On 4/12/2021 at 9:27 AM, BrisketRN said:Know your state laws! I don't know if Texas has any on these issues, but Illinois does and somehow I was the only one who looked into it (administrators had no idea).
Unfortunately, here in Texas, there are no laws in favour of transgender rights.
1 hour ago, BunnyBunnyBSNRN said:Unfortunately, here in Texas, there are no laws in favour of transgender rights.
Even more unfortunate is that here in Texas there probably never will be. Thank goodness we have people like you and the other school nurses who have responded who will keep the kids best interest at heart. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I thank you.
NutmeggeRN, BSN
2 Articles; 4,743 Posts
Very true!