Transcending Barriers in Queer Education: Conversations with Finn Menzies

Bryan: 0:27

Teaching While Queer is a podcast for 2S LGBTQ+ educational professionals to share their experiences in academia. Hi, I'm your host, Bryan Stanton, a theater pedagogy and educator in New York City, and my goal is to share stories from around the world from 2SLGBTQIA+ educators. I hope you enjoy Teaching While Queer. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Teaching While Queer. I am your host, Bryan Stanton. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Finn Menzies. How are you doing, Finn?

Finn: 1:06

I'm doing great. I'm so glad to be here.

Bryan: 1:08

Awesome. Thank you for inviting me. Well, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Finn: 1:13

Okay, well, I was a teacher. I just left. This is my first year in more than 10 years that I'm not going back to the classroom, but I am the kind of teacher that has done a little bit of everything. So I have taught in almost every classroom, from preschool to community college.

Bryan: 1:33

Oh wow, You've run the game.

Finn: 1:35

Yeah, and now I'm transitioning into coaching families, with an emphasis on coaching families with kids who are showing gender diversity.

Bryan: 1:52

That's so interesting. Right now I'm doing a lot of research for my graduate program. I'm getting an MFA in theater pedagogy like how we teach theater but my research areas are really about queer theater and one of the plays I just read is a kid like Jake. They made a movie about it a few years ago and it's not necessarily that Jake has come out as transgender. It's that Jake is four and he likes to play with Cinderella and he likes to play, dress up and all this stuff, and it just talks about, like, his mom's struggle with like allowing quote unquote too much of this kind of gender play at home and now it would be affecting his life outside, like getting into the right schools and whatnot. So that's such an important thing to have as somebody to be a resource to help parents do that transition, because I think there are a lot of things that happen in my experience with students where parents just needed more help. They needed someone like you to be there along the way. So I think that's super cool.

Finn: 3:12

Yeah, I'm snapping to that. Yeah, I know I got to the point of my career where I felt like more of my energy and capacity was channeled towards parents than it was to even the students in my classroom and that really sort of like made a fracture in my relationship with parents because it was distracting to the thing that I wanted to be doing. So, in order to like heal that part in myself, I decided that I'm just gonna do that, like I'm just gonna help caregivers get the help that they need to support their kids.

Bryan: 3:58

I definitely seen over the last few years that there is a push for more parent involvement, which is adding a bunch more to the plate of educators.

Finn: 4:10

Yeah, especially in early education too.

Bryan: 4:13

Yep, so before you left the classroom you were working pre-K.

Finn: 4:18

Yeah, I did the last 10 years, almost 10 years, eight years in preschool to first grade. But the very last classroom that I was in was in a blended preschool program kids with IEPs and kids without IEPs together.

Bryan: 4:37

Oh cool, that's awesome.

Finn: 4:39

It was cool.

Bryan: 4:41

I had a class for the first four years of teaching that was a blended class, like that for theater, where we had students from our SST classes which are severe disabilities, whether it's like non communicative non-speaking I don't say non verbal because those students are very verbal but they just are not able to say the words that they want to get out or they have a cognitive disability and we would put on place together. It was literally my favorite time of day, every day.

Finn: 5:21

Aw, that resonates with me. So much too.

Bryan: 5:23

Yeah, so let's take a little trip back in time. Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like for you as a queer student?

Finn: 5:31

Yeah, I was a very typical brown noser. I feel like I'm the most might have been. I know this is. The thing is I think that early on I realized that school was a place that you could display status or cache. I wanted to be a good student because I wanted to be valued and loved. I know that's kind of crazy, but I think I read into it at a very early age. In fourth grade, I think, I got a student a month four times or something that should be illegal Okay.

Bryan: 6:11

That's like a record at the school.

Finn: 6:14

Yeah, let's see, I think I was very lucky because I lived in a really affluent suburban area Also. Okay, so I'm from Orange County.

Bryan: 6:36

Okay, I'm from Whittier. Oh, you are Right there on the border.

Finn: 6:41

Yeah, okay. So you probably understand it's progressive, but that's only a bit near. And then there's like this covert and sometimes overt conservatism. But I think I was lucky in that I didn't really have exposure to that in my really small elementary school and so from kindergarten to about sixth grade it was just unspoken. So I will say there was no representation, no, zero. Like we didn't read one book with a queer character. There was no curriculum around queer people. There was no. There was not even the sense that kids could be queer. So that was not available to me. So I had no mirrors and I was in charge of the tickle train with all of the little girls during story time. Like there was like an intimacy that was definitely blooming out of me from very young age. That wasn't hindered, so that was good. But then when I got older and like I was also early to start puberty, that's when, like the slurs started happening and rumors, and I think the way that I coped with that is that I masked with a very binary performance of the gender that I wasn't just to protect myself.

Bryan: 8:26

Does that mean they get excluded to hyper femininity?

Finn: 8:29

Yeah, I was like a mean girl. I know, which is, like you know, the antithesis of like my, my authenticity, you know of my alignment. But I think I just did it like because I was a dog eat dog world, you know, and it just felt so. I felt so much shame, I think. So I did that for a little while All the way through high school is kind of like the weird clown in the cool group. And then it's only when I got to college that I really like detox from all of that. And you know what's interesting is I never even it never occurred to me, not until I was an adult that teachers may have been able to play a role in helping me. I didn't even know that teachers could do that for me.

Bryan: 9:23

That's wild, it's. It's so interesting because I think that society has been so heteronormative and so, like so many teachers will be like or at least when I was a kid, would talk to us about, like, just you know, heteronormative relationships and whatnot. And I think you're absolutely correct that if there had been even one person who talked about something just even slightly non heteronormative, it would have made the process so much easier.

Finn: 9:56

So much easier because I would have had like a reference point, one reference point to say like, oh, this feels resonant for me, I mean, and it was like definitely coming through all the cracks. Like I always had very intense, like platonic relationships and I mean, for my 17th birthday I took all my friends to Ellen, you know, it was like definitely coming out, but in this, like I was so deeply afraid, sort of way, you know, of like holding it all in, yeah, and it didn't come up. It didn't come up at all, we didn't even read, we didn't even read queer authors, you know. So like there was really. Now, you know, just by talking to you, brian, I'm realizing it wasn't just negligence, because if that were true there would have been some. It was like definitely purposeful.

Bryan: 11:04

Yeah, absolutely yeah, the curriculum was purposely built in a way that the representation didn't exist and I would be willing to say that even like from where I'm from in Whittier. So Whittier is a suburb of LA for those of you who are not familiar. And then Orange County is just south of all of that and quite literally where I lived, I lived on the last street of Whittier, so I was right across the street from Orange County, like literally, the county line went right down the street. But I grew up also in a pretty, pretty white, dominant neighborhood and so it's interesting to me because, like you have Black History Month and you have there's a lot around Cesar Chavez, because Southern California, that's where the union movement happened for farm workers and all the work that he did, and so I know those people right. I know, Martin Luther King and I know Cesar Chavez and I know the I'm going to choose the big names so that you're aware of them. Never did I learn about a queer person and then, quite literally outside of you know Cesar Chavez Day and Black History Month. The rest of my curriculum had nothing in it about any other culture other than a white dominated culture. So it's very interesting how like the curriculum really is in really a structure that way. Actually, I just was finishing earlier watching a reel where someone is breaking down a potential curriculum coming to Florida, which is literally build as curriculum to fight the leftist agenda. And it's supposed to go into classrooms and these terms like indoctrination keep coming and keep flying at the LGBTQ community but quite literally like everything from the media to the curriculum, was really white and really heterosexual when I was growing up and we're all still here, being ourselves. So, yeah, the idea of indoctrination and the idea that, like you, could just omit people from the curriculum and it'll make them go away, is just so wrong.

Finn: 13:33

You know, isn't it wild actually? Yeah, so much of my life has been like in review and what I mean to say is that I feel like I when I was in my mean girl phase. I was very disassociated from my body, so memories weren't absorbing in the ways that they do now because I wasn't like really in there, you know.

Bryan: 13:58

Is it kind of like watching yourself from the outside?

Finn: 14:01

It is kind of like that. Yeah, it's like watching yourself from the outside and and so, yeah, so I have to sort of like recollect my childhood and I so I've been doing that for the last since 2017 when I started my medical transition and I realized as a grown up that my sixth grade teacher was a gay man and I was talking about it with my mom and she was like, yeah, like very obviously a gay man, but I had no like sense of what that was because there was no conversation around it. And so I bring it up to say like it's wild to me that they're absolutely are queer children in every classroom. 100% there is, and there's also queer teachers. And how wild would that be, you know, in the 90s, like just post the AIDS pandemic, to be like teaching and and feeling this whole around, like you can never tell anyone who you are. So it's not just kids who are, it's not just kids who don't get to be themselves or see themselves. It's grown up still.

Bryan: 15:20

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that time period was Partic particularly fraught, because I remember when I came out, like the first things that flew out of my mom's mouth Was I don't want you to get AIDS and die. And it's like there's so much, there's so much Stigmatization that was heavy at that time still from like the early 80s when Reagan was in office doing all that Anti-queer yeah, like here I was in like 2000 or 2002 having this conversation and it's still lingering heavily in the air from hollywood.

Finn: 16:06

So true, yes, like that fear From all that anti-queer legislation from the early 80s was still so present in our bodies and I think, because it was so present in our parents bodies, the information that they were giving us was, like, so fear-based. You know, I think that's why yeah, I think you make a good point of like why progress is so slow is Because even if, like, there was an event 20 years ago, people are still processing how they feel about that event for so long that All of the socialization that you're getting from it, like you're still, you're still metabolizing it years later. You know.

Bryan: 16:51

Yep, and I think there's something to be said about like Generational trauma as well as like Communal trauma, because I think about the light that like, literally every time I read or watch something that has to deal with that time period, my heart just breaks, like I'm I am reliving it when I was, you know of Newborn but, and I had no idea what was going on. But, like as an adult, I feel like I lost something because of that Time period. And so this like communal trauma or generational trauma, I think, plays a lot into it, because these fears for people get perpetuated as they get handed down to other people, and that's why it takes so long Is because you've got these fears that you're handing down. It's like this wonderful means of generational trauma where it's like parent, great-grandparent yelling at grandparent, grandparent yelling at parent, parent yelling at you, and you Stopping it and saying like I love you, you're beautiful, you're amazing to your own child. Like yeah it takes how many generations to break the fear of One inciting incident.

Finn: 18:12

Yeah, absolutely yeah, I know, like okay. So I've said a couple times already in this interview like I had no Reference of queer people and you know what? My own uncle was a gay man.

Bryan: 18:26

No way.

Finn: 18:28

Yeah, like that, isn't that so, so this is so um, just one of those I didn't talk about well, I was born in 1986 and my uncle died of AIDS in 1988, so I didn't know him and I. That wasn't talked about. And when you talk about like this inherited trauma. When I came out to my mom the first time my mom is so wonderful, she it it takes her a minute to process and then she gets vulnerable and she's able to share some of her life so that I understand her lens she told me that she wrote in her diary I think my brother's gay and then her best friend read that and Said you should burn that. You should burn your diary, oh my, so that no one ever sees it like. I think it scared my mom, like for her physical safety. So that that was what was traveling through my mom when she was teaching me. So she never said like I'm gonna clip your wings, but she did say like the world's a scary place for queer people. You know what I mean?

Bryan: 19:46

Yeah, and then you said when you came out to your first time, so Did you come out as a lesbian? And then, in 2015, 16, 17 yeah, yeah, exactly.

Finn: 20:00

Um yeah, the first time I came out was Thanksgiving, and oh my god, like wait. I was like you know, it's like multi-curse meal, I'm sweating bullets thinking about like it I know I'm gonna do tonight. I could like barely take a breath and then like, finally, after pie, I Was like mom, I gotta tell you something. And I just started like hysterically sobbing. You know, it was different back then because you are, you really have to like work through all of that pain and fear To say what you need to say. Um, and my mom's response was on a scale of 1 to 10. I'm surprised to zero at this information. Um, yeah, late the next morning I was like, oh, thank god. And then the next morning I was like hey, like stereotypes are you holding? like you know, um, the second time coming out was a lot harder actually, because, um, my mother and I really bonded over being feminists and she comes from like second wave, you know, like a radical femme who's like men are kind of gross. So To tell her, like, actually this whole time I've been one, that was tricky, that was a tricky one.

Bryan: 21:25

Do you think that? Well, let me figure out a better way to word this without having queer references. I mean, I didn't know what a transgender person was until I was an adult. Do you think, or did you feel as though you knew you were transgender at a younger age, but you needed the vocabulary? Or was it truly that transition of I'm a lesbian and then having more of a gender awakening later?

Finn: 21:58

Um, no, I definitely knew. Um, it's weird how your brain, the way trauma affects your brain, how you like put things in compartments and they can keep it there to make sense Of things. For example, like I always knew I was going to grow up to be a dad, without ever expressing to myself or other people around my own gender identity. Like I don't know how I held both those things, but like that's the way my brain was working and I remember like very vividly, like early on I've always been a romantic. I'm a poet. So even as an early child, like just professing love to women as a man. You know, in my dreams I was always like trying to stand up to pee and getting pee all over the place. You're in all over the bathroom. Like I definitely felt like I was a little boy on the inside, but I didn't know how to tell anyone else, or even myself that. And you know I was telling you how I like was able to be myself, mostly up until like around puberty. Well, around puberty also, when I saw Boys Don't Cry, that movie effed me up, like I think. I think it really did traumatize me, because what I learned from that was if you are this way, like, you will be hurt. You know, and I think the way that I internalized that was that it just went so deep and then it wasn't until I think I met my first trans person and saw that they were thriving, that I even let myself ask the question. You know, and it took me a while to even process that question. I mean, my first thing I asked my therapist because I don't know if this is still a rule, but before you could start testosterone or get surgery, you needed to go to therapy for a year.

Bryan: 24:12

So the first thing I asked you is that still true? Yeah.

Finn: 24:16

Gross gatekeeping. Anyway, I was. He was a trans person and I was like, what I don't understand is like why my body is telling me that I'm this thing that that causes so much harm on planet Earth. Like how, like why do I want to be a man, you know? So I had to do all of that on learning and healing around, like there's lots of ways to be a man, infinite ways to be a man.

Bryan: 24:44

That's so interesting. Have you seen the Barbie movie?

Finn: 24:47

Have I seen what? No, I haven't seen the Barbie movie yet.

Bryan: 24:50

It touches on this topic a little bit, so those of you who've seen the Barbie movie will kind of get that vibe but that it really does focus on, like, what does masculinity mean?

Finn: 25:00

Yeah, oh, I'm so excited.

Bryan: 25:01

Yeah, it's a good. I thoroughly enjoyed it. But I won't give any spoilers away because that's just rude. But this idea of masculinity is so interesting because that's another like I was talking about, that curriculum in Florida that's one of their lessons is like it took real masculinity to fight the Nazis and it's like basically trying to teach that toxic masculinity doesn't exist.

Finn: 25:25

Yeah.

Bryan: 25:25

And so it's funny because that idea of and I guess, like the outrage, I guess that's happening with the Barbie movie, like people are saying that the movie is anti, anti man or anti men win. Quite literally, it's really anti toxic masculinity. You know I mean it's it's anti patriarchy, and the fact that it is so closely identified as that means it's anti man just tells you how ingrained that is, which is the same situation that you went through, Like yeah all of these men have done horrible things throughout the history of this world, like why, why associate with that and just learning that they're? you know? What about those other men who did the good things in the world?

Finn: 26:14

Yeah, that's exactly. That's exactly. It is that we we've overlaid what we've call masculine traits so closely to our bodies that we in ourselves that we can't tell the difference. And there is a difference, and I think that's one of the reasons that I wanted to be a teacher. Actually, I couldn't even articulate it early on in my teaching career, but I knew that I wanted to be a mirror of a man who had the skills from being socialized as a woman. So like talking about feelings, holding space for someone else, tenderness, gentleness, quiet, like I wanted to show that a man could do that.

Bryan: 27:06

Yeah, it wasn't until later that I realized oh yeah, like I wanted to be a mirror that I needed, you know that's awesome and I think that's a fantastic segue, because I wanted to talk a little bit about like, how do you see, like your queer self and your experiences in forming your teaching, and so that's one aspect of it is that you've got this you are a man who was socialized as a woman, so you're able to show these things that are stereotypically identified as feminine, but in a male body, male image.

Finn: 27:42

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Bryan: 27:45

That's wonderful. How else do you think that your your experiences have impacted your teaching?

Finn: 27:55

Well, I think that I never. So I was often teaching kids three to six years old. I did most of my teaching with those ages and I the trope like boys will be boys. That never was a thing in my classroom. So I think, being who, I was allowed me to have a higher bar for boys, but in both ways, not just with the around their behaviors, but also around what they could ask in relationship with each other. You know, and so, yeah, all of the parents are always like you were the best for social, emotional learning. But I think what they really mean is like I'd never seen a man talk to my son about his feelings. So there is that. And then I think also I was very acutely aware that mirrors are needed, because I needed one, and so I was very proactive in making sure that there was a multitude of mirrors, not just with literature or posters, but also like just in conversation with each other. You know, and I did do, I did do like thematic learning. That's kind of like not trendy anymore, but within the theme of like what makes a family. You know, we talked about biological family, chosen family, different structures of families, and it was not even a teeny bit 1% weird. There was no part of us talking about multiple family structures. That felt unnatural in my classroom. It was only when growing up's eyes peered into our sacred space that it got a little bit difficult. Yeah, and that's the thing is that I mean teachers are really fantastic about creating comfortable spaces for their students to be in.

Bryan: 30:10

At least that's our goal for most teachers. I've definitely experienced classes and classrooms that were not very open, but for those of us who are really truly trying to create relationships with our students, we are able to have those kind of conversations in a healthy way.

Finn: 30:27

That's not like going to cause any kind of negative impact, but as soon as an outsider is observing that space, it kind of takes away from the experience or tries to I know it's so hard when, like grownups have to, like they have to wade through their own baggage, you know, before they can really have an honest relationship with children, because there's two things happening with kids One is that they have no preconceived notions, and the second thing is that they're trying their best to collect them, like they're trying to make sense, and so they want people to tell them the truth. You know, I think more information is better as long as they feel safe and that they belong, and so I think I always have the capacity to see children as people, and so I wanted to give them the information of, like, what the real world looks like. The real world is not white, cis, hetero patriarchy the global majority is not that and so I think that they often felt safe and trusted me because I was telling them the truth. You know, yeah, and then parents had different relationships to that, a very varied relationship to that I think. The other thing I wanted to say is like there were a lot of positives around being a trans man in the classroom, but there are also a lot of negatives, because I had like a double taboo going for me, which is like men in preschool classrooms. It's like a taboo for people Like they feel. Some grownups feel like that's an unsafe thing, you know. And then to be a trans man on top of that. They're definitely for parents thinking that I was trying to indoctrinate, for sure.

Bryan: 32:35

Well, what's interesting to me is like just the evolution of teaching, because in America for a long time men were the teachers, and then the roles switched to women being the teachers. And so now there's like this those of us who are men in the classroom are kind of given side eye a little bit because, it's like what are you doing there? And I feel like really the siss hat world needs to like analyze that and figure out why it is that they don't feel comfortable with men being around children and like actually go to that issue as opposed to like scapegoating other people.

Finn: 33:29

Yeah, for sure. It goes back to how, like we are carrying inherited traumas, our parents are carrying around their own relationships to sexism and misogyny, you know, and then they're projecting that. And one of the ways that it showed up was for a long time, a very long time, I was so careful and restrained around physical touch with young kids, even though I really wanted to show boys that there were multiple ways to have physicality. Like I know that boys need to wrestle. It's good for their spatial awareness, it's good for their brain development. But I also wanted to say, like there's other ways to have physical in contact with your peers too, you know, and I didn't allow myself to model that because I was so afraid of what parents were going to say. It wasn't until I really had built a strong sort of community relationship with many parents through the years that I allowed myself to have more like hand holding and just like explicitly showing like this is what gentle touch feels like and looks like. And the thing that I saw was that little boys were so thirsty for that information, like they want to know how to hold each other's hands, how to touch each other with consent and with love, like they really want to know that and I feel sad a little bit that I did not do that for so long.

Bryan: 35:26

And you know it's hard because that age group, for those of you who aren't parents, that age group is a very touch, sensitive group Like that is a lot of hugging and a lot of hand holding and a lot of cuddling and it like the kids want to be held by the people they feel safe with. And so that's got to have been especially hard.

Finn: 35:52

Yeah, because I'm noticing that I'm denying something that they're needing because of other people's perceptions of me. So I am grateful that in the last few years that I was teaching that I did more of that and it was so helpful through. I noticed that that kids were different post COVID toddlers Like they definitely had some trauma to process through. Isolation and closeness was very regulating for them. So I'm glad that I had processed my own internalized transphobia enough to like offer that to them.

Bryan: 36:36

That's great, because you're absolutely correct. I don't care what the age is, including adults, everybody had something they needed to process during that isolation. There's something else I was thinking about because, like I have a nine year old, I have four kids, but my nine year old there is this specific phenomena that happened when she was in kindergarten, in first grade, where it was like the gender binary was drawn for her. And it was like girls can't do this, boys can't do this, girls can't do that, boys can't do that, but girls can do this and boys can do this, and like it was very specific and I wish that she would have had someone like you in her life, because we at home we don't have girl and boy things. We literally have a chore chart that rotates, everybody does something, and there aren't things innately built into our household that we say are that's just for boys, that's just for girls, and we try to do our best to even like stop gendering shaving cream and shampoo and body wash and all that stuff. We will find something that just smells good. Because it just seems weird that this foam is female, this foam is female foam and this foam is male foam. But I think it's so interesting that it really was weird for us to experience her having learned the binary at school, because at home it didn't exist. And she like came home one day and it was like well, I can't do that because that's a boy thing. And I was like, well, I don't care, you go outside and you do that, and like even to at some points we have to like explain to her that like some of the things she's saying or learning from other people directly impact our family in the sense that, like my husband and I at the time, I wasn't non-binary, so that my husband and I were married and we were a gay couple. And so if you're trying to tell me that boys and boys can't get married, then what about your own house? You know, sometimes people say things and they're not true.

Finn: 39:07

I know. That's why, like the absurdity that like I'm trying to indoctrinate in a way that other sys head teachers aren't, I'm like the messaging is so consistent and so explicit around what we should and shouldn't do as boys and girls that someone else made up for us. What I'm doing is a drop in the bucket. You know, I wanted to rip it all out. I wanted to be a powerful drop, but I don't want anyone telling me that I have more power around mass cultural messaging. You know, I do wish I had your child in our class, because we play boys like, girls like, kids like and we do the opposite where we undermine gender binary. So we make lists of like what girls like and what boys like and then we double check, we're like well, wait a second. I often like to go to the kitchen to play so, and I'm a boy, so that doesn't make sense, wait a second. So then we're like wait, okay, let's just tear these lists up and let's make a list of kids like, and then we like write down all the things that kids like, and I usually do that, like in the very beginning of the year and it's so proactive for friendship making because they have language around, like you can't exclude me, you know like the little boy comes over and like wants to put on the wings, the fairy wings, and someone says something and they're like oh, kids, like this, this is a kids toy.

Bryan: 40:52

I love that so much.

Finn: 40:54

I love that so much. I like we have a shared language around that now.

Bryan: 40:57

What a cool tool, and I'm so glad that you shared that here. As we get closer to the end of the episode, I've got a couple of questions for you that I asked everyone. The first one is if you were to have a conversation with someone who's going into their first year teaching and they just aren't sure how to show up authentically in their classroom, what advice would you give them?

Finn: 41:22

I know I think this is going to be kind of surprising, but I am really an advocate for my queer family's mental health and, in the climate that we're living, I want to tell new queer teachers, like you are in charge of your own timeline, of how you want to present in the classroom, and in the same way that we want to see kids as their multiplicity, that they're not one thing Like you can be authentic in many ways. There are so many gifts that you have to give. You don't have to tell them right away who you're married to or what your gender identity is. There's other things that you can share first, and when you have the felt sense like I'm safe here, not just with kids but also with your community, then you can share the other parts of yourself. But I think that I really don't want to be minimized to just my gender. I want to be all the things. I don't want it to be neglected or ashamed, but I want people to see myself as whole and we want to see kids as whole. So allow yourself to be whole, you know, which I think is to sort of transmute the perception of like I have a dirty secret, like you don't have a dirty secret. You have just one piece of you that you can share on your own time. I think that's what I would tell them.

Bryan: 42:58

That's the thing that always drove me crazy about the coming out process is when people would turn it on you like I can't believe you kept that from me. Well, it was none of your business. I had to tell you in my own time.

Finn: 43:09

Yeah.

Bryan: 43:11

And I think that you are not far off. Like I've asked this question several times to several people and I think we always come back to you have to do what you need to do to be safe.

Finn: 43:25

Yeah.

Bryan: 43:26

And only once you feel safe do you go further in how you want to express yourself.

Finn: 43:34

Yeah, and that's not to say like. So I had a little kid tell me that they were trans. Like a little girl and yeah, I mean, they didn't know the word trans, right, they were saying like I'm a girl, you know, and they had very supportive parents. So it was a very beautiful and healing process to do that with that kid and that family. But I had I got to fulfill a meaningful thing in my life where I got to say me too, you know. So it wasn't like I was just sharing it out like on my About Me page on my newsletter, but I got to share it with a child who needed me at that time and I think it's not like a binary or a black and white, like you can share when you're needed, you know.

Bryan: 44:28

Right, and you can choose who you share it with.

Finn: 44:31

Yeah, that's right. It doesn't have to be all, or?

Bryan: 44:32

nothing in the class.

Finn: 44:33

That's right.

Bryan: 44:37

What do you think that schools and this includes the school community, so parents, administrators, community members what do you think that we can do to make schools more inclusive for 2SLGBTQIA students?

Finn: 44:54

It's like such a big question.

Bryan: 44:57

Yeah, I've told us the thesis question.

Finn: 45:01

I wish that OK. So you know how teachers they over time start to really dread that last two weeks of their summer where it's time for PD time.

Bryan: 45:20

Oh, you mean this time, right now. We're in the middle of a week.

Finn: 45:22

Like this time right now.

Bryan: 45:24

We're a week before August, folks, so this is the time.

Finn: 45:28

Yeah, so sorry. Like content warning, I'm talking about professional development. During summer, instead of focusing all on the new adopted math curriculum, there needs to be some fundamental training around how gender identity is developed and how our identities are developed in general, and so developmental milestones and then shared language. So not just a mission statement, but how do we talk to kids around their identities? How do we talk to their grownups around their identities? And so that way it's not. So teachers don't have to make decisions in the moment, because that's not how grounded decisions are made, especially if they don't have background knowledge. So I really wish that all teachers understood how identities develop in young children and then give them some language of how to talk about it and that way. And then they know that their administrators are supportive. Like it's so dangerous to put teachers out there trying to advocate for queer kids without knowing where their school district or administrator stands. So like, yeah, develop that, develop a shared language so that your teachers can use it.

Bryan: 46:45

What I think is really wild is that in Texas there's been this huge pushback against the use of pronouns, the use of pronouns which is like a requirement for language. Anyway the curriculum for that came from the Texas Education Association. Like there was a professional development in which we were all required to learn how to properly address students who are transitioning in their gender or experimenting with their gender. How do you use pronouns properly, how do you refer to the student? Like that idea came up. And then there's this huge parent pushback on it, and so I think that you're correct in that the conversation isn't how do we use pronouns, it is what does gender development look like? What does identity look like? And I'm excited because I am going to be moving to New York soon and there is curriculum that is created for middle schoolers and elementary kids where they have classes talking about identity, their own like recognizing your identity, understanding other people's identities and being respectful of them. I'll be teaching, of course, at a conference for an organization called characterorg in November, and it's gonna be about authenticity in the classroom and how to make your, your classroom, a place where everybody can be themselves. And it was funny because I had to adjust how I put my title and description in, because we wanted to be sure not to trigger backlash, because it's a queer inclusive topic. but it's not just about queerness, it's how do we work with Indigenous students, how do we work with people from rural communities? You know, like, how do we just allow your students to show up who they are and the teachers to show up as who they are in the classroom?

Finn: 49:05

Yeah, that's another thing I think. The last thing I'll say is that I think we're all tired of the narrative of parents who have queer kids saying if only I had known how harmful it was to closet my child, I would have never done it. And I want to hear more of the narrative of I know how to empower my child and I know the risks that come when I don't, because they are serious risks.

Bryan: 49:38

Well, I mean, the data is there, yeah. So for people to be like, if I would have known, like you should, you should have known, like there are statistics, right, there is quantifiable data that exists, and that's where you have to get past like, like belief, to look at facts.

Finn: 50:03

Yeah.

Bryan: 50:04

And so, and and that's a controversial topic right now, because facts, according to anybody, can be made up- yeah. So I'm going to take the opportunity at this point to allow you to ask me a question. So if you have a question that you would like me to answer, it is your time to take the mic.

Finn: 50:25

Okay, I think my question for you is when did you feel most loved in school?

Bryan: 50:38

So I talk about this in the trailer for my for the podcast, and this is as a queer student, my like days before my freshman year and I was born in September. So, like I was 13 and like my birthday was the Tuesday after school started. On Monday, days before my freshman year, my boyfriend at the time his mom outed me at school at home and then transferred him to another school and we had met and started seeing each other because we were in band together and have band camp and band camps. You know, you're spending all this time together and whatnot, and and so there was a lot of hate that I was getting from the actual band members of being like you're the reason that he's gone and all this stuff, when, like, in reality, it was his mother who was not mentally sound and later on there in life there were other things that popped up. Because he and I are still connected. He's like the ultimate what if? And the day after school started, my band director brought me into the classroom and she had only known me for three weeks. She brought me into her office on literally, was the only person during that whole time to ask me how I was doing and like in my perception and it's funny because my parents completely forgot about this situation, like I talk about it in their life they don't even remember that happening, but my perception is that they were just upset so they didn't care how I was doing. The school administrators didn't even talk to me about the situation, and so the fact that she, like brought me into a room to make sure I was okay was like probably the most significant showing of caring and love from a teacher. And like she didn't even realize that, like she doesn't remember the conversation and I'm still connected with her because we both work as arts educators and and so we had this conversation a year ago when the podcast first came out and she was just like floored because this is it's the most significant educational moment of my childhood, because it's what I wanted for students to get from me is that they could have a person who is going to actually care about them, and so like it's what I strive for and I really get this in heart. Just like really my heart breaks when I have students who have said to me, like you know, they do like in high school, they do like feedback. It's almost like rate your professor, but it's school condone and I had students who were like doesn't feel like he care, like he doesn't care about us, and I'm just like pouring myself into my students, and sometimes at the detriment of my family, because this one incident, this one experience I had with my high school band director was so impactful for me that it solidified that one day I would be a teacher. It took me a long time to get here.

Finn: 54:28

I can start teaching until I was 34, but 33, but it definitely was something that, like, had impacted me so much that I knew that was what I was gonna do and you are doing it, you know, just to make it full circle, like we talked about how we inherit other people's trauma and then we embody it and then we pass it on and like how do you, how do you metabolize trauma so that you don't pass it on? And so, like you went from somebody all alone in pain to now you're gonna be the head of a conference talking to other grown-ups of how other kids can be their authentic selves. I mean, that is a beautiful legacy that you're leaving.

Bryan: 55:23

I appreciate that I actually gave a speech. I was teacher of the year a couple years ago for my school district and thank you and gave a speech about that incident and about and it's like just donning on me what you just said. My speech was about that how the one thing that students need, especially now after COVID, is they need to know that their teachers care about them yeah so go out there, teachers, and spread that love like yeah, spread that love and heal yourself, yeah all right folks. Well, this has been an incredible time like. I've had such a great time talking with you, and I hope you all at home have really enjoyed the episode or wherever you're listening from. Thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate it me too. Thank you so much for inviting me you're very welcome and have a great day everyone. Thank you for joining us on this episode of teaching While Queer. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did make sure to subscribe, wherever you listen to your favorite podcast, leave a review, and that would help out tremendously. You can also support the podcast by going to www. teachingwhilequeer. com and hit support the show. Thanks so much and have a great day.