VA: Youngkin’s Anti-Trans School Rules Prohibit Uncommon Nicknames

The policies, which seek to make life more difficult for trans youth even when fully supported by their families, ask school personnel to determine whether a nickname is common before allowing it.

by Evan Uquhart

The Virginia Department of Education has released new guidelines that will single out transgender youth in schools, limit the ability of teachers to provide a safe environment for young people with difficult home lives, and also make it much more difficult for school children to use a nickname. The new policies were created at the behest of Governor Glenn Youngkin, who has targeted trans youth in the state to raise his national profile. In addition to forbidding uncommon nicknames without written parental permission they would also forbid all trans students from using appropriate restrooms, and require them to be grouped with their birth sex in any activity, however informal, that is split up by gender.

The difficulty of discriminating against transgender youth without impacting cis kids is again on display in these VA guidelines. In order to prevent trans youth from being affirmed, the state will now be restricting all students’ nicknames, allowing only those nicknames school officials agree are “closely associated: with the student’s legal name, unless a parent requests a different name in writing. (Students are also restricted from changing pronouns unless parents request the change in writing.)

screenshot from Virginia’s new model policies

This strict policy prohibiting uncommon nicknames, if it is enforced uniformly rather than arbitrarily against trans students, would likely impact a great many young people who aren’t trans. Americans often go by nicknames that are unrelated or only tangentially related to their legal name, and whether a nickname is “commonly associated” with a person’s name would seem to be ripe for both cultural and generational misunderstanding.

In particular, these guidelines seem to ban children with ethnic names from going by a chosen American name, unless their parents officially request that name it in writing. There’s no exception in these guidelines for children who have already been using such names, which means a Virginia high schooler who has gone by an American name since kindergarten would required by the state of Virginia to revert to their legal name. The practice of choosing an American name is common among children of immigrant parents of many ethnic backgrounds, and has always been done informally. While there are many reasons to push back against the cultural stigma against ethnic names and the pressure children of immigrants feel to fit in by adopting one, forbidding American names for these youth seems to be an unintended side effect of a policy whose goal is to make it more difficult for students to experiment with gender identity. Such experimentation has not been shown to lead to medical interventions for gender dysphoria, and in fact even for youth who have been officially diagnosed with gender dysphoria the majority do not seem to recieve any medical treatment.