An interview with Ava Dawson, one of LREI's school nurses.

Sylvie, my Citizen Action Project partner, and I walked into the learning lab and prepared ourselves for an interview with Ava Dawson, a school nurse working at LREI. As we got onto the Zoom meeting, I started to relax. Ava was kind and welcoming, which not only helped to calm my nerves but also made it easier to ask our prepared questions. Most of our questions were about upper and middle school transgender students, which she had a lot of background information about. 

Ava had been the school nurse at a public school before going to LREI, and her experiences with transgender students were much different. Not only were there much fewer trans students in her previous school, they were also mainly not receiving gender affirming care. Meanwhile, in LREI, the trans community here is much larger and more people are taking medications for their trans identities. These different experiences showed me how different certain experiences can be, and those two perspectives opened my eyes about being trans in various environments.