Gender Nonconforming Youth: Discipline Disparities, School Push-Out, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

This report provides an excellent explanation of why some gender nonconforming youth end up involved with the juvenile justice system. "Gender nonconformity, or GNC, is a term used to describe a person’s identity or expression of gender. A GNC person may express their gender through the clothes they wear, the activities they engage in, the pronouns they use, and/or their mannerisms. This expression may embrace masculinity, femininity, neither, or both. GNC is also an umbrella term used to describe various gender identities such as genderqueer, gender fluid, boi, gender neutral, and/or transgender. In general, GNC youth do not conform to stereotypical expectations of what it means to be and to look like a male or a female" (p. 1). The term school push-out refers to students being marginalized in school and/or forced out of school before they graduate. Sections of this report cover: gender nonconforming youth and school climate; GNC youth and the school-to-prison pipeline (STPP); GNC youth report incidents of harsh school discipline and biased application of policies; they report being blamed for their own victimization; and the multiple challenges that GNC youth have to deal with.