Chapter 10: Teaching Trans: The Impetus for Trans, Nonbinary, and Gender Nonconforming Inclusivity in Language Classrooms

Who we are deeply influences how we approach the processes of language teaching and learning. When pedagogies take into account the fullness of our identities, as more than just teachers and learners, we see that students tend to reach higher levels of proficiency (Atkinson, 2011; Dörnyei, 2014; Norton, 2013). In addition to broadly engaging with identity via critical, social justice, and feminist pedagogies, we have also begun to specifically ask what it means to be queer as language teachers and learners (Cahnmann-Taylor & Coda, 2019; Nelson, 2009; Paiz, 2020; Rhodes & Coda, 2017; Saunston, 2018). In the field of queer applied linguistics, this conversation began with and continues to be dominated by considerations of sexuality. Although important, this dominance has left little space for engagement with trans(gender) (i.e., people who do not identify with the gender/sex forcibly assigned to them at birth or who otherwise flout cisnormative ways of being) and nonbinary (i.e., people who do not align themselves exclusively with manhood or womanhood) people and communities (for more, see transstudent.org, transequality.org/about-transgender, and glaad.org/reference/transgender). In this way, trans people have often been left out of conversations about language learning. Because of this marked marginalization, it is only relatively recently that we have seen scholarship on language education that focuses on the lives, experiences, and concerns of trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people (Knisely, 2021, 2022; Knisely & Paiz, 2021). Moreover, much of this early scholarship has been based on a small number of research participants and/or has had a tendency to flatten the diversity that exists within the umbrella-term trans (Besnier, 2017; Nguyen & Yang, 2015).