Why do trans people working with children face greater judgment than others? Andy Johns just wishes he could be a true role model to his pupils

Last Monday, primary school teacher Andy Johns (not his real name) arrived in his classroom at 7.20am to make an early start after the half-term break. The cleaners had been in and reorganised things, which threw him slightly. A minor thing, but Johns – who is transgender – was already feeling fragile.

It followed a week of intense media interest in trans issues, which had a profound effect on him. First, there was the campaign to halt Germaine Greer’s planned lecture at Cardiff university because of her controversial views on trans women. Then there was the imprisonment of trans woman Tara Hudson in a male prison, swiftly followed by reporting of the transition of a school lunchtime supervisor in a Cambridgeshire primary school – the school was supportive, some parents’ comments apparently less so.

Overwhelmed by what he describes as the “bullying” attitude of some of the coverage and the social media furore that followed, Johns broke down in the deputy headteacher’s office, explained a bit about his situation, then went home and made an appointment to see his GP.

Trans people working with young children in schools seem to attract an even greater level of interest and – from some quarters – opprobrium than those in other settings. Two years ago, primary school teacher Lucy Meadows took her own life after her gender reassignment became national news. The headteacher of her school had sent out a supportive letter informing parents that Meadows was transitioning to live as a woman. The media picked up the story, reporting that some parents felt their children were “too young” to deal with such a complex issue. The coroner handling the inquest condemned the “sensational and salacious” nature of the some of the coverage.

Johns is painfully aware of Meadows’s tragic story – and of his responsibilities to the children in his classroom. All the headteachers he has worked with have been supportive and accepting of his transition, but he is acutely conscious of all the stakeholders involved in a school community, particularly the children in his care. “If I’m teaching a child, my gender doesn’t matter. Anything that distracts children from learning is self-indulgent,” he says, though he is clearly torn by the different pressures upon him.

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For this article Johns has chosen to be referred to by masculine pronouns because they are congruous with his legal name and apparent gender; his identity, however, is female. He has undergone surgery and uses oestrogen patches, which help to make him feel more comfortable in his body, but he has felt unable to make the full transition to a legal female identity, not because of any opposition from the schools he has worked in, or the parents whose children he teaches, but because of his love for his family, who have found the situation difficult to accept.

After trying to be “normal” for all his teenage and adult life, Johns finally told his wife he was transgender in 1995 when they were expecting their daughter. She was devastated and told him she couldn’t live with it, so he agreed to somehow “put it away” and carry on with family life and his career, which was then in business.

“It took a couple of years to paper back over the cracks in my identity,” he says. “My strategy for dealing with the enormous force inside me was to tell friends. Knowing they knew, listened and cared allowed me to carry on.” But the issue kept resurfacing, with Johns disclosing to an ever widening circle. When his daughter had left primary school, he decided to tell her the truth. “She said she felt sad for me but it meant that she now knew all of me. We said little about it after that.”

In 2008 he broke down in front of a colleague; the force had become unstoppable and he began to plan his transition. “I didn’t want to lose my family but I couldn’t carry on the way I was.” He couldn’t get access to the hormone blockers he believed would give him peace unless he publicly acknowledged his identity.

“I decided on a long-term plan to move towards Anna – my self.” He began spending nights away from the family living as Anna, returning to the family home as Andy. “I lived two lives, kept separate by distance and the different circles in which we moved.”

He had laser treatment to remove his facial hair and voice therapy to help him develop a more recognisably feminine voice. Finally, he transitioned at work, where colleagues embraced the journey he had made. It was, he says, “a precarious but glorious arrangement. My wife just quietly put up with it. I could see how much it hurt her, but I couldn’t cope with keeping it inside.”

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Some months later, his wife decided she couldn’t stand the situation any longer and said they would have to separate, a move Johns couldn’t bear. “So I proposed a dramatic change: if I couldn’t get happiness from my identity as Anna, I’d seek it elsewhere in life.”

He’d always loved children and had wanted to retrain as a teacher, but couldn’t afford to. So he and his wife agreed to move somewhere cheaper to enable him to realise his ambition of becoming a teacher, and to help them as a couple to realign their lives so they “could find peace together”.

“I also had a bilateral orchiectomy [castration] and am now on HRT for my long-term health. It gives me a real sense of permanent change – and some of the peace I sought.”

And then there was his daughter, who in the midst of this almost fell apart. “She had suicidal thoughts and spent a long time seeing a counsellor. She said she’d bottled up all her discomfort for my sake, at some cost to herself. She still cries when there’s any mention of it.

“The picture on the home screen of my phone is of her, during the summer of my transition, seemingly happy but holding in so much. It’s a reminder of my happiness and my responsibility.”

Since his career change, Johns has worked at three different schools – all of which have been supportive. He appears in class as “unambiguously male”, both for the sake of his family and for the children he teaches, who, he says, have enough to deal with as they undergo their own changes.

None of the children he has taught knows he is transgender, though sometimes they accidentally call him “Miss”, probably because primary teachers are still predominantly female. “The clever children have said things that make me think ‘You probably know more than you are admitting to’,” he says.

Over the years he has confided to some colleagues and to a handful of parents at previous schools who became friends. “School is a tiny community. I’m just careful who I tell, when and how.” The children, however, don’t need to know, he says, though it clearly pains him that he cannot be entirely open. “I don’t want children to go through what I did to find out about myself. I used to cut myself and do all sorts of self-harm. It’s hard enough being a teenager without this additional thing.”

Johns believes his experience has made him much more aware of difference and vulnerability, and therefore better able to respond to the needs of the children in his care. “I recognise that every child really is different, and those differences really do matter.”

He imagines a time and a school where he might feel able to be truly open with his colleagues and students, but acknowledges: “So long as my wife is alive, so long as my daughter is affected by this, I have responsibilities. It affects other people.

“So I limp on through life, being open where I can because otherwise I am false to myself. When things are good at work, it’s brilliant, and I gain the joy I sought; when they’re bad, I don’t have time to feel sad. The holidays are tough, as I remember who I am and what I had. I cannot remain silent because I did so, at great cost, for many wasted years. I cannot keep entirely private because that denies who I am.

“We – transgender people – are sometimes said to have a ‘gender identity disorder’. I’ve come to realise that I am not disordered: I know who I am, and am happy to be who I am. We’re also said to suffer from ‘gender dysphoria’, an unbearable discomfort with our gender. I have no such discomfort now. The discomfort I feel is with the way that society seems to view and want to confine me.

“What’s that got to do with school? First, it is debilitating. I need to be strong, calm, flexible and resilient in a situation where there is constant change, where our pupils need more support than the average primary school. Second, it is frightening. I want to be honest about myself because otherwise transgender people – adults and children – will remain under-represented and misunderstood.”

Last Monday, after the splurge of trans stories in the media, Andy Johns felt like hiding. The next day he was back at school, teaching his kids.

outteacher.org