The first time I had to make a decision about my stance on transgender humans happened when I was sixteen years old. I was not a particularly happy teenager, and I spent a lot of my time on Goth forums hanging out with a combination of friends I knew in-person, and friends I met through the Internet, some of whom I also made in-person connections with.

One of the people I met online was called Hazel, and she and I talked on a pretty much daily basis either through the forums or through (Oh goodness, nostalgia!) MSN messenger.* A year or so after we started talking she was outed as transgender by another forum member – an adult man – who called her a freak, and a liar, and a monster, and called on the moderators to remover her and everyone to stop talking to her etc. etc. Most of my friends felt the same way.

The thing is, I’d sorta kinda guessed that maybe my friend wasn’t the same flavor of woman as most of the other women I knew. I was aware of the concept of people wearing clothes that didn’t seem to match their bodies, and living lives as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, but it was the first time that I’d been asked to take a position on how I felt about it. So I did what any technically literate teenager would do: I asked Google to tell me about transgender people, and I read the results, and I looked at the pictures, and I went, “Huh. Well I don’t see what all the fuss is about, but the internet tells me that she’s a woman, and that I should treat her as one, so that’s what I’m going to do.” And I proceeded to have quite shouty and passionate fights with my friends who wanted to take a less inclusive track on the matter, mostly because I couldn’t understand why they were so keen on doing harm** to a person who I only knew as very kind and reasonable, especially since being nice was so easy.

I tell this story for two reasons, firstly because it shows that it is quite possible to give yourself a basic literacy in issues of gender and how to treat people well if you approach the internet with that aim in mind, and secondly because I think with hindsight that surprise and ignorance were at the root of most of the horrible responses to my friend’s identity. What can we do about that?

I am the first transgender person that many of my friends are aware that they’ve met, or the first non-binary person they’ve heard of. Some of them are decades older than I am. When you’ve lived a large number of years thinking that there are only two genders, and that people are born into one and stay there, it’s very difficult to change that opinion. Similarly if you think that transgender people are a 1-in-a-million rarity, existing at a long distance from your life, it’s very easy to treat transgender issues as if they’re not relevant to you, and to treat transgender people as freaks, as sick, and as slightly less human than you are.

So I think that one of the things we should start pushing for that would make life better and more equal is to introduce young children to transgender people.

The idea that transgender people (and specifically non-binary people) exist should absolutely be covered along with binary human biology and as part of Sexual Health and Relationship Education (what the British call it, as opposed to the American term, which I believe is “Abstinence!”). But more than that, I want transgender people to go into schools and speak about what they do professionally. I want them to run workshops on career development. I want them to BE the teacher in classrooms at every stage of schooling so that children get used to the idea that we exist around them as humans, not as identity models, and aren’t shocked or surprised when they meet us as politicized entities. I know that there’s an amazing program called Drag Queen Story Hour in which drag queens lead infant story time in libraries, schools and community centers, so it doesn’t even have to be classrooms as long as it’s working with kids.

At the university level it is possible, in some places, to teach while out as trans. I do not know how possible people find it with younger children, and to be quite frank I don’t want to look because I suspect that I would very quickly get very sad. In fact I am sad already at the thought of what parents would say if they found out that their children’s teacher was trans, or that their children would be taught by someone who didn’t fully pass as one or the other binary gender. I’m worried enough about my own job search, which is for a tenure-track position in a University, and whether or not anyone will hire me as long as I go by the pronoun I currently take. What will I do if they don’t?

But since school classrooms are so overwhelmingly cisgender, it would be great if children got to meet people who were transgender and realize that they’re just another flavor of human. “This is your local fire officer, who has come to talk to you about fire safety. When we speak about them we say ‘they’ because they’re not a man and not a woman, but something in the middle that we call non-binary. Do any of you know someone in your lives who is non-binary too?” Can you imagine it? What if in English class children learned to use “they” in the same way as they use “he” and “she?” What if we stopped treating transgender people as strange and exceptional, but simply acknowledged them as part of life? Imagine doing little math problems where Xeno has four apples and they eat three, so how many apples do they have? Imagine what it would mean to a child who already knows they’re not cisgender (and you can know from a VERY young age that you are not cisgender) to see someone like them accepted and succeeding, or just to have language about what they are.

This is my vision for creating a future that moves towards equality. It won’t solve all the problems, just as adopting similar measures in schools has not solved the problem of racism or ableism, but it would at least give people some kind of learned groundwork for sharing their world with transgender individuals in a more statistically accurate way. By which I mean that we’re not that uncommon, and it’s almost certain you’ll meet one of us at some point, so let’s give people some tools to use when they do.

I know that this vision is a long way from reality, and I know that people would fight it in ways I can’t even begin to imagine. I don’t see any country – except maybe the Nordic ones – implementing any of these measures any time soon. But here is at least part of the dream of being boring: that children get to hear about us first on their homework assignments, or in their classrooms, or when we come in to speak about smoke alarms and never going back for your phone. If anyone would like someone to come in and talk to a roomful of children about being a professional dancer, and you’re willing to let me be my gender while I do it, shoot me a message, I’ll gladly volunteer.

*Yes I made friends on the internet and I met them in real life. I was never harmed, and I don’t know how I would have managed without this community that I couldn’t find in my local peers. I advocate for caution and care on the internet, but also for permission to socialize and value the connections you make.

**I’m amazed how clearly and quickly I knew that deliberately misgendering someone was deliberate harm, and harm that I wouldn’t support. I’m amazed that some people still haven’t learned this very simple lesson, or give themselves permission to hurt others in this way.