Sexuality, Gender, and Education

Schools Take Responsibility

Perhaps because of the fluidity and possible variation in sexuality and gender expression, societies have endeavored to define norms that are maintained through rule creation and enforcement, individual and group vigilance, and language aimed at reinforcing notions of sexual and gender conformity. In the past, religious institutions, local communities, and extended families upheld the greatest portion of responsibility for maintaining sexuality and gender norms. As educational institutions, particularly tax-supported schools, proliferated, however, they bore ever-increasing responsibility for imparting normative sexuality and gender in youth. This shift in responsibility was most pronounced during full-scale industrialization of the economy, which had as an attendant consequence the greater involvement of parents in wage-earning work outside the home. Schools then assumed growing responsibilities for raising children to the degree that working parents declined it. Schools essentially became important agencies in defining and shaping sexuality and gender among youth.

The significant responsibility for maintaining normative sexuality and gender among youth has been carried out by schools ever since. This largely implicit work is embedded in virtually every aspect of schooling: who is hired to teach, how students and school-workers may dress, what events—both curricular and extracurricular—might be organized, how students may behave with each other and with school staff, and what content constitutes the explicit curriculum. Because the regulation of sexuality and gender norms among youth so pervades the work of schooling and is so deeply enmeshed in its culture as well, members of school communities simply have assumed that this function always has existed and therefore is a natural part of the work of schools.

This ongoing assumption, which is akin to acceptance of the sexuality and gender regulating functions of schools, has continued until persons who transgress sexuality and gender norms have challenged that authority. Over the past half-century, persons who have defined themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgen-der, transsexual, intersexual, or, to use the broader but still contentious label, “queer,” have mounted challenges to the conventional sexuality and gender order of schools. At first, only a few schoolworkers with nonconforming sexuality and gender identities publicly stood up for their employment rights. Since then, not only have larger numbers of schoolworkers and their allies campaigned for improved conditions for queer-identified persons in schools, but so, too, have students. Over the past two decades in particular, students have played powerful and central roles in winning rights for sexuality and gender transgressors in schools.

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