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We began by contacting around 20 English language arts teachers we have worked with in our surrounding community. We asked them to complete a questionnaire and then indicate whether or not they were interested in our proposed book group. The participants who self-selected into the book group were two secondary English teachers, a secondary Social Studies teacher, and a literacy coach. Their length of service in the classroom ranged from just beginning to finishing up eight years. They all teach high school students: two at a private school, one at an Omega Replica autonomous school, and one at a public school. The participants are female and represent various racial and ethnic backgrounds. In spite of their diverse experiences, our participants' responses to the questionnaire were quite similar: None of them has had professional development in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer issues; all of them have had experiences related to these issues in their teaching. In response to the question, "In what ways have you noticed students or colleagues responding to gender inappropriate behavior or appearance?" participants either wrote that the subject is ignored totally by students, colleagues, and administrators or is the subject of jokes and considered a novelty. When asked about the NCTE "Resolution on Strengthening Teacher Knowledge of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Issues," participants expressed enthusiasm as well as concern about the scholarship and resources that might result. As one participant wrote, "What sorts of ‘guidelines’ are intended? Who writes them? Do LGBTQ students have any voice in this?" As a designer and facilitator of safety-oriented professional development for K—12 teachers who express a desire to support gender variant or trans-gender students, Parker begins his sessions by providing a basic overview of gender identity and expression. This information is essential before teachers can develop a more complex and nuanced understanding of students' experiences. Therefore, before our first meeting, we mailed our participants a packet of resources, including frequently asked questions, a glossary of relevant terms, several recent news articles, and excerpts from the 2005 Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network's (GLSEN) National School Climate Survey (Kosciw and Diaz). We intended these readings to familiarize participants with basic information to assist them during their readings of the LBLNs that would be presented in the following two sessions. There is a small but growing body of quality young adult literature that deals with gender variant and transgender issues. While there are no universal criteria to follow when selecting texts for this professional development approach, there are some considerations that should guide the selection of appropriate young adult LBLNs and other supporting texts. In selecting the LBLNs that would serve as the basis for the remaining sessions, we kept in mind appropriateness for classroom use, level of sophistication, quality of writing, and variety of experiences and points of view. Michael Cart and Christine A. Jenkins provide guidelines for evaluating texts dealing with LGBTQ characters that also guided our search. They believe this literature should offer well-rounded characters, a realistic setting, and a character whose voice is not only authentic but also original (166). They contend that these texts should not be "the same old story, told in the same old way that readers have encountered countless times in the past". While there is a body of familiar gay and lesbian narratives that offer limited depictions of the range of LGBT experiences, there are so few gender variant and transgender young adult characters, we felt any text we selected would offer new insights and a unique perspective. Our first text was Ellen Wittlinger's Parrot-fish. In this novel, teenager Grady, who previously allowed people to conclude that he was a lesbian based on his masculine gender expression, narrates his experience explaining to his family, school, and friends that he is not a lesbian but a transgender male. In our next novel, Julie Ann Peters's Luna, the 14-year-old narrator, Regan, deals Tag Heuer Replica Watches with her sister's transition from male to female while they attend the same high school. The two texts represent the experiences of a female-to-male and a male-to-female as well as two different points of view on the experience of being transgender. One (Parrotfish) is told from the perspective of the transgender youth and the other (Luna) from the perspective of a close sibling who is the only ally of a transgender youth. We were interested in how our participants would respond to the differences in the texts and the opposing portrayals.
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