Edge Hill University
How to respond to anti-gender politics in education? Reflections on queer joy
In recent times and across geographical contexts, gender has become a topic of intense contestation and controversy. As trans lives have been subject to increased public attention and scrutiny in recent years, bio-essentialist, supremacist and de-humanising discourses have mingled to produce gender as a threat to the natural order, with affect being mobilised to advance ‘gender critical’ thinking. Sometimes also referred to as ‘radical feminism’, these narratives — whilst not new — have travelled swiftly in recent times, gaining a renewed purchase and notoriety through high profile characters, cases and moments that have appealed to ‘common-sense’ logics around a range of topics such as ‘womanhood’, the family, sport, public bathrooms and ‘academic freedom’. These logics take a particular form in education and schooling contexts where the figure of the child is conjured and strategically mobilised as ‘at risk’ of what has been termed ‘gender ideology’. In this way, children and young people have been emotively and sensationally positioned as easily-influenced victims — and therefore in need of protection from — ‘woke’ ideas about gender. In this paper, I work with and beyond Butler’s (2025) recent analysis of the ‘anti-gender ideology movement’. I do this — less in an exploration of ‘the phantasm of gender’ —and more to inquire productively into how best to respond to the workings of anti-gender politics in education. Thinking through the strategic, affective and instinctive dimensions of potential responses to anti-gender politics, I home in on queer joy generally (Ingram & Jacobsen, 2024) and in education specifically (Bryan & Mayock, 2017; Greteman, 2018; Henry, 2024), exploring what it might offer for children, young people, researchers and educators who find themselves at the front lines of the economy of anti-gender politics in the current moment.
References
Bryan, A. & Mayock, P. 2017. Supporting LGBT Lives? Complicating the suicide consensus in LGBT mental health research. Sexualities, 20(1-2), pp. 65-85.
Butler, J. 2025. Who’s afraid of gender?. Random House.
Greteman, A. 2018. Sexualities and genders in education: Towards queer thriving. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Henry, S. 2024. Queer Thriving in Religious Schools: Encountering Religious Texts, Values, and Rituals. New York: Routledge.
Ingram, M. & Jacobsen, K., 2024. Both because of and in spite of: Towards the reclamation of queercrip joy. Sexualities, 0(0), pp. 1-16.