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In her thoughtful examination of the complexities of identity in the article "Political and Metaphysical: Reflections on Identity, Education, and Justice" (EJ1277341), Lauren Bialystok provides a full and incisive vocabulary for thinking through the tensions among authentic, political, and social recognition-requiring aspects of identity. It is a welcome article, adeptly bridging the concerns of those who find identity claims hopelessly contradictory and the concerns of those whose lives are circumscribed by misrecognitions. In this article, the author will address what is seen as strategic and complex forms of authenticity. This article is meant to continue the conversation, not contest Bialystok's excellent points.

This article suggests that science-based understandings of sex and gender can improve sex education by inviting students to consider what sex and gender mean and by encouraging recognition and respect in a gender-diverse context. In addition, decolonising approaches to gender provide another route to sexuality education that is more attendant to difference and diversity, helping students to see how culturally embedded and resistant meanings and practices have shaped understandings of gender. Together, these divergent approaches--gender science and decolonising education--provide an array of conceptual links between gender identity and other forms of innovation and reclamation. Such tactics of conceptual connection may help sex education to think about gender in different ways, some of which invite gender-diverse students into the curriculum and some of which invite normatively gendered students to consider their own complexities. Using these tactics of conceptual linkage encourages educators and students to develop a fuller vocabulary for addressing how gender, sexuality and struggles over meaning can be a core part of sex education. By thinking and teaching more carefully about the diversities related to key concepts like gender, sex education can both critically examine inequities and aim towards the possibilities of gender diversity.

In recent years, conservative advocates have obscured their transphobia by framing their concerns as religiously-based parental rights claims. They have advocated for limitations on youth rights to gender identity self-determination. This article examines policy debates over transgender-inclusive practices in schools, including conservative demands for parental notification and limitations on healthcare access for transgender youth. I suggest that schools ought to be more concerned with children's or students' rights to help enable diverse students to flourish and become who they are in supportive schools. This shift would move schools away from the distractions of conservative parental rights claims and re-focus them instead on the needs of students.

In recent years, conservative attempts to erase gender diversity—directed at transgender youth in particular—have taken on new momentum. Schools are restricted from respecting students' identities, libraries are being censored, and families are being prevented from seeking gender affirming counseling. At the same time, it is also clear that transgender, nonbinary, and other gender creative youth are increasingly demanding respect. Education about and through gender is being prevented and sometimes criminalized precisely when all students and educators need to be considering gender in more depth, breadth, and intersectional complexity. The transgender rights movement has been attentive to forms of gender diversity that draw more people into solidarity. This paper suggests following that strategy of building connections among genders while also understanding different forms of gender have different needs, structural positions, and histories, too. Understanding how to balance both a complex analysis of gender and a firm commitment to act in solidarity of gender diversities can help us to teach about and through gender, as well as resist how gender diversities are literally being pushed out of place in many states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his discussion of safety on campus, Eamonn Callan (2016) suggests a way to distinguish between two sorts of safety: "dignity safety" and "intellectual safety." As much as this author has some concerns that student activists should think more about pedagogy, she is not sure that "dignity" is the best approach to solving inequities nor does she think the key issue in the discussion about academic safety is "humiliation." Mayo does not believe that it is a minor quibble to say that by excluding someone we haven't so much humiliated them as we have made them angry at their exclusion. As much as she agrees with Callan that the tenor of some protest is disturbing, she is not sure that it is permanently destructive of critical inquiry--indeed, the vigor with which some demands are made indicates to Mayo that students are reading institutional exclusion in robust and nuanced ways and, without better support from institutions, feel that "intellectual safety" is anything but. [For "Education in Safe and Unsafe Spaces," see EJ1140343.]

This article examines the kind of space formed by philosophical discussion of education with lower-income, adult learners making their way back to structured education amidst work and life responsibilities. It explores two new social contexts that define this experience of return to education. The first is the sociability of philosophical engagement with others, and the second is the longing to give back to communities by initiating conversations with school-aged youth or with other adult learners. (Contains 9 footnotes.)

This paper examines the current state of law and policy in relation to US transgender youth and their lived experiences. We approach this from different disciplinary backgrounds, identities, and ways of writing terms related to gender identity. We begin with an examination of the current legal climate in the USA and explore how students have pushed back against gender and sexuality norms even in a restrictive climate. Some transformations are already happening in public schools and some backlash, too, is being felt. Laws and policies in some locations are encouraging students, teachers, school leaders and community members to collaborate in making schools more educationally concerned about trans student success and teaching the school community about gender diversity. In shifting among scales and experiences of youth thinking and working on gender, we aim to emphasise youth agency and outline young people's frustrations at the obstacles related to trans, gender dissidence and sexuality. In conclusion, we point to changes that can be made in schools to help professionals understand how policy and curricular innovation can bolster the openings that trans, gender creative and gender non-binary youth are already creating, whether or not those opportunities are officially recognised.

This article addresses complications to how different disciplines define, study, and theorize sexuality, gender, gender identity, and other intersecting categories of subjectivity, like age, race, class, ethnicity, and so on. Categories that seem to get stabilized in empirical work are destabilized in theoretical and narrative research. These differences in key definitions and even refusal to make definitions mark how different disciplines approach research on gender identities and expression and sexualities. The contingency, relationality, and space-related aspects of gender and sexual identity, so key to humanities-based work and qualitative research, may not be amenable to measurement by some research methods. In trying to sort out methodological quandaries in quantitative work, complex subjectivities become a problem to work around, not focus on. What subjectivities mean to those who are developing them or grappling with their limitations may not get the same attention as more measurable things. This article advocates for thinking more capaciously about what counts as research, pushing for recognition of the work queer communities and theorists have been doing for generations and for the work that gender and sexual minority youth continue do now. Complexity, instability, and relationality have been queer practices for a long time, stimulating and responding to generative perversities.

Purpose: If PK12 administrators aspire to interrupt bias-based bullying, they need to understand their role in perpetuating structural and social inequality. The purpose of this study was to examine administrators': 1) awareness of gender-based bullying, 2) initial intentions to address bullying, and 3) actions that interrupted or perpetuated gender-based bullying. Methods: This qualitative study used a purposeful sample U.S. court cases and 36 interviews with administrators and policy consultants to explore PK12 leaders' understanding of gender-based bullying and actions to disrupt bullying. Findings: Our findings provide a more expansive definition of administrative bullying and brings attention to the personal complicity of educational leaders in perpetuating gender-based bullying. Administrators in this study modeled support for bullying through each of these four types of bullying – by direct action, facilitated support, accommodating external stakeholders, and resisting efforts to educate themselves or others on issues related to gender-based bullying. All of these approaches allow bias and bullying to continue. The study also reveals how some leaders interrupt bullying by collaborating with students, parents, and community-based organizations. Implications: Policymakers, leadership preparation instructors, and PK12 administrators may be interested in how administrative behaviors perpetuate gender-based bullying. A lack of knowledge about leaders' personal complicity in bullying and about gender-diversity fundamentally interrupts two of the main roles of PK-12 leaders: implementing policies and leading instructional practices. The results of the study suggest the need for additional policies, procedures, and training to support leaders committed to interrupting gender-based bullying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Cris Mayo examines the relationship among anti-LGBTQ policies, gay marriage, and sexuality education. Her concern is that because gay marriage is insufficiently different from heterosexual marriage, adding it as an issue to curriculum or broader culture debate elides rather than addresses sexual difference. In other words, marriage may be an assimilative aspiration that closes down discussions of what sexuality is and can mean, that sidesteps other related social issues such as health care for all, and that reinforces sexuality and gender identity as privatized, not political, concerns. Mayo examines different strands of LGBTQ history that complicate the meanings of sexuality and that critique a variety of antigay or heterosexist policies for their exclusions. She concludes by suggesting that the possibilities of sexuality are not served by advocacy for one gay relationship formation and calling for a sexuality education that is instead directed at sexual diversity.

Troubled times in education means that philosophers of education, who seem to never stop making defenses of our field, have to do so with more flexibility and a greater understanding of how peripheral we may have become. The only thing worse than a defensive philosopher is a confident and certain philosopher, so it may be that our very marginality will give us renewed energies for problematizing education. Occupying our marginal position carefully and in concert with other marginal inquiries, I think, will do our field good. Because of its attention to what it takes to be willing to learn and to approach theoretical and real world obstacles with open if cautious interest, philosophy of education is about holding concepts and movements in tension, bending the implications of commonplace, commonsensical ideas about education, and carefully examining the all of these maneuvers for the exclusions they wittingly and unwittingly produce. Problematizing the certainties derived from majoritarian positions, be it whiteness, Westernness, or any other dominant perspective, can provide us with a diversity of claims to scrutinize and epistemological positions to be wary of.

This article argues that institutions need to take more risks to improve sexuality education. Understanding how risk structures sexuality may help make sexuality education more attuned to the needs of diverse students. Situating sexuality in the context of human rights can help to demonstrate the kinds of social and institutional risks that are created by limiting sexuality education. In addition to contributing to high rates of HIV and unwanted pregnancy, insufficient sexuality education augments conditions for expressions of gender-based violence that harm young people in general but also more specifically impede young women's educational attainment. By limiting information and deliberation on desire, risk and culturally based gender inequities, sexuality education in its current state continues to limit health and life options for all people.

The aim of this paper is to reconceive safety as a form of relation embedded in particular ways of speaking, listening and thinking. Moving away from safety as a relation that is achieved once and for all and afterwards remains safe avoids some of the disappointments of discourses of safety that seem to promise once a risk is taken or a gap is bridged that thereafter relations among people will be easier and calmer. This bumpier version of safety suggests that humor creates the kind of instabilities in discourse that act, perhaps ironically, as an invitation to enjoy the difficulties of communicating complex and challenging ideas. Humor, then, creates a kind of safe space, not devoid of dramatic shifts or emotional response, but organized around those shifts as experiences that are moments apart from conflict. I explore the use of humor as a form of serious play in social justice classrooms, examining the strategies of indirect teaching, contradictory lessons, and jolting pleasure that more traditional pedagogical approaches are less able to create. I see in humor a complex form of address and interaction that plays on the multiple possibilities within an utterance or concept and by reminding classroom communities of those possibilities. Humor can erupt from shared moments and disjunctive understandings and can as easily be mobilized by teachers as by students. By reopening the possibilities of concepts and relations, humor shatters simplistic readings by literally playing out what might be said and what could be tried but often manages to combine a sense of safety via shared laughter with its disruptions.

The authors review Judith Suissa's provocative book, "Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective," a text that demonstrates the central role of education in anarchist theory. Suissa compellingly argues against the charges that anarchism is overly idealistic and impractical, instead seeing its potential for innovative and liberatory educational change. The authors suggest, however, that an enhanced conversation among critical pedagogy, antiracist pedagogy and anarchist thinking on education can help to show both the continued relevance of radical and creative thinking, and that anarchist thought has been part of the development of oppositional, critical, collaborative, teaching and learning projects.

Although much recent discussion has developed around the difference between lesbian and gay studies--supposedly an approach that centralizes demanding visibility, interrogating bias, and illuminating lesbian and gay presence--and queer theory--supposedly an approach more poststructurally interested in intersectionalities of difference and disturbing foundational ideas about gender, sexuality, and transgression--these easy distinctions wind up falling apart under close scrutiny, whether one is examining the history of the movements or the brief history of educational research in minority sexualities. Similar to debates over essentialism versus constructionism, it turns out that there is quite a bit of radical problematization of foundational concepts in writings from the gay and lesbian liberation movement and the homophile movement. It turns out, to a large degree, things have been queer all along. This article first briefly examines general trends and shifts in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and queer educational research in the past two decades. Then, the author turns to a discussion of one overarching theme--that of the place of coming out in LGBT and queer research in educational foundations. In this examination of research involving questions around coming out and space, she draws on a wide range of published research as well as some observations from her own research on queer youth. She intends these accounts to show that youth are as involved in the complexity of questions researchers ask as the researchers themselves. In a sense, the turn to queer theory has enabled a theoretical coming out for educational researchers and LGBT and queer youth alike, giving everyone a chance to examine the practices of theorization that organically develop from experience as well as highlighting the centrality of theory to research.

In this essay, Cris Mayo describes a tension between recognizing gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (lgbt) people by law and giving (or denying) them certain legal rights on the basis of identity, on the one hand, and enabling queer people, not always fully recognizable as inhabiting particular identity categories, to live their potentials, on the other. Laws and rights regulate particular kinds of people, and while lgbt people have pursued civil rights energetically for the last sixty years or so, their queerness continues to complicate their attempts to gain legitimacy. Beyond civil rights claims, queer liberationist claims push the limits of the understanding of identity, sexual practices, and political life, because they prompt us to consider not just abstract possibilities and freedoms but the freedoms and possibilities of people barely recognizable. Mayo shows how these queer claims are often hard to frame in terms of liberal theory and actual law.

I will argue in what follows, following the insights of James Marshall on busno-cratic power, that resistance to this new power is already well underway, and that this resistance is potentially problematic and potentially transgressive (in Marshall's words "a reflective reconstitution"). The self is not only a chooser in busno-cratic land, it is also re-commodifying itself and in so doing, beginning to struggle at the limits of its commodified situation. I will argue that commodified selves, as much as they are constrained, are also potent sites for resistance. Part of that resistance is being waged in the terrain of the high stakes test, where the self that could "choose" runs headlong into a product that definitively limits its range of choice. In order to engage critically with this resistance, I examine the cracks in the monolithic power of testing, cracks that point to the uncertainty of numbers and the ambivalent anxieties of test takers.

The article presents the discussion on normalization of sexual harassment. Topics include exploring 43 new accusations of sexual harassment, abuse, and assault against former US President Trump; and other international research on sexual and gendered harassment in higher education containing nature of law and employment regulations of institutions.

This essay analyzes the growth of associational identity and ethical community encouraged by Gay-Straight Alliances, using queer theory to analyze their ideas and practices. Following an analysis of the Equal Access Act, which has provided space and time to extracurricular public school groups, the author turns to accounts of students involved in GSAs. Examining how they describe shared querying of normative sexuality and curiosity at possible innovations, the author argues that these students are deeply aware of the associational element of identity and very aware of how to navigate the often crushing normalizing power experienced in schools. Without the space in which to examine their lives and relations, the curiosity binding these students has less opportunity to expand into ethical self- and community-formation. (Contains 3 notes.)