Learning access: minority and accommodation framing of gender affirmation in schools


Gillian Robinson, University of Alberta

Queer-inclusive policy in K-12 schools largely addresses queer youth as a special class in need of accommodations. For example, rather than focusing on educating all students about how rigid gender roles are limiting to our daily lives, queer-inclusive policy seems to instead render queer youth as deficient and naturally in need of additional supports (Airton, 2013). This policy framework re-marginalizes queer youth rather than empowering a school’s population to overcome exclusion together. As a representative on the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) 123 Alberta Educator Network and the teacher-advisor of a Queer-Straight Alliance (QSA) in a middle school, I constantly faced resistance when attempting to negotiate systemic change that would prevent the othering of queer youth in the first place. Grounded in a Foucauldian framework and drawing on Feminist Indigenous scholars (Simpson, 2018; TallBear, 2019), I seek to understand if the current model of queer inclusion in Alberta disrupts or reflects histories of colonialism and body regulation (Lorde, 1984). How does the model of queer-inclusive education in Alberta consider, reflect, or resist these systems and histories? Using critical discourse analysis, I have analyzed the various policies that emerged at the Alberta school board level after the provincial Ministerial Order in 2017 regarding Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. After a thematic understanding of the policy documents was obtained, I conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with SOGI school leads, and enriched this data with field notes from my own ongoing experiences in inclusion work. The framing of queer and trans inclusion within a human rights conceptualization means that they become referenced as minority. This in turn reinforces a queer and non-queer binary that is internalized as permanent amongst the general public and amongst educators. This logic works to shift focus from structural obstacles and instead displaces any inclusion access onto the backs of children, labeling them as deficit and as having additional gender needs. By pushing the work of inclusion onto individual youth seeking access, the education system assumes that children are non-queer and non-trans until they announce themselves otherwise. Educators then internalize the logic that they need to be careful with what they say to children. They have a sense that they will be disciplined by both administrators and families if they talk about queerness and gender in schools. This internalized belief means that queerness and transness becomes silenced in the broader school community. Educators then participate in respectability politics, which in turn results in neutralizing queerness and rendering it sexless, thus silenced and invisible in the broader school community. In some settings in Alberta, gender outside of the binary is presented as a third category. This category can reinforce educators thinking about minority and access when it comes to gender needs in schools. Although all children have gender affirming needs, the way that queer inclusion is taken up in Alberta schools tends to reinforce deficit thinking about gender in some students. Children then internalize non-binary expressions of gender as a burden, and self-police their gender in schools. 

This paper will be presented at the following session: