Towards a trans pedagogy of solidarity: creating trauma-informed, anti-oppressive learning environments to support gender diverse learners

Abstract

This Master of Education equips educators and school administrators who wish to better support trans and gender diverse students in the classroom and throughout the education system. This work introduces the historical and ongoing legacies of institutionalized transphobia, cissexism, compulsory heterosexuality, and binarism inherent within the colonial education system, which not only impedes the learning of trans and gender diverse students, but also contributes significantly to the discrimination and suicidality that they face on a daily basis. My literature review, as one piece of this portfolio, surveys contemporary gender identity and inclusion policies, contextualized by recent government attacks against such curriculum, in order to highlight the ongoing youth activism advocating for sexual and gender justice within the school system. The main task of this portfolio was to create two workshops that can be easily tailored for any educator who wishes to engage with the topic of gender as a social, political, and contextual project, as well as a deeply personal experience requiring self-reflection and safer conditions within which to consider its functionality in one’s life. With the goal of serving as a toolkit, this portfolio offers up a theoretical paradigm in which an anti-colonial, anti-fascist trans pedagogy can be used to teach critical gender studies during times of rising bigotry against oppressed peoples, trans people among them.