Chintan Girish Modi “Son, you are a boy. You should wear your own clothes, not your sister’s.” “But I want to be a fairy! And why do you keep saying I’m a boy when I’m a girl?” “Because you are like your brother, not like your sister. Boys are boys and girls are girls, Guthli.” This conversation is an excerpt from Kanak Shashi’s book Guthli has Wings (2019), published by Tulika Books and recommended for readers above the age of six. If Guthli were a student at your school, how would you interact with her? Knowing that her home environment does not affirm her gender identity or her personal understanding of who she is, what would you do in order to create a safe and welcoming atmosphere for her? The easy and spineless thing to do would be to shut her down, and get her to fall in line. The challenging and humane response would be to listen to what she is going through, ask her about the support she needs, look for useful resources, and work with the students and teachers to get her what she needs to thrive. Uncertainty in the classroom can be a source of moral panic when you are faced with a situation that you are not trained to handle, or one that destabilizes your deeply held beliefs. It can also be an opportunity to admit that there are things you do not know, and that you need to learn about. A pamphlet titled ‘Answers to Your Questions: About Transgender People, Gender Identity, and Gender Expression’ (2014) published by the American Psychological Association states, “Gender identity refers to a person’s internal sense of being male, female, or something else; gender expression refers to the way a person communicates gender identity to others through behaviour, clothing, hairstyles, voice, or body characteristics.” Your gender identity may not coincide with the sex mentioned on your birth certificate. Check out https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/transgender.pdf to learn more about the difference between sex and gender, and to figure out what it means to be transgender, intersex and genderqueer. Guthli identifies as a girl. The author affirms this gender identity by referring to Guthli as a girl, and by using Guthli’s preferred pronoun ‘she’. Guthli’s mother takes a while to come to terms with her daughter’s gender identity. She insists that Guthli is a boy, and her son. Frustrated by the lack of acceptance in her own family, and the constant misgendering, Guthli becomes quiet and withdrawn. She prefers