Occasional Paper Series

Occasional Paper Series

Issue 52
The Adventures of Trans Educators: A Comic Book Issue

Introduction

Comics allow so much freedomby Harper B. Keenan, Lee Iskander, and Rachel Marie-Crane Williams

Through our work in teacher education and trans advocacy, the three of us (Harper, Lee, and Rachel) are lucky to regularly hear about the important work trans educators do every day. Whether it’s helping students to organize gender and sexuality alliances, mentoring trans youth, working with teachers’ unions to improve health care benefits for people of all genders, or simply showing up to school and being present for their students, there is no doubt that trans educators are making important and necessary contributions to learning environments across North America and beyond.

We are also keenly aware that appreciation of the work trans educators do is rare. Over the last five years, trans people of all ages have become increasingly targeted and demonized, especially in relation to schooling. Around the world, lawmakers and politicians are drumming up anti-trans prejudice among the public, positioning trans people as scapegoats for manufactured moral panics and, ultimately, advancing socially conservative political agendas (Reid, 2024). In many places, including the U.S. and Western Europe, transness has frequently been framed as a kind of harmful “social contagion” (Broderick, 2023). Not only is such rhetoric rooted in the belief that transness itself is a problem, the concept of social contagion has been used as justification for widespread efforts to pass legislation that would heavily restrict the rights of trans youth and educators. Too often, the rhetoric of social contagion has led to efforts to push trans people out of public education and to separate trans adults from children. This issue of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series aims to do just the opposite: to celebrate and learn from the presence of trans educators in young people’s lives and to work toward a field of education that is far more inviting to trans people of all ages.

Read the Full Comic (pdf) Full PDF of OPS #52

Guest Editors

Harper B. Keenan is the inaugural Robert Quartermain Professor of Gender & Sexuality in Education at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Keenan’s scholarship examines how adults and children relate to each other within the structures of schooling and other educational contexts, and what their interactions reveal about the possibilities and challenges of public education. He is also the founder of the Trans Educators Network, a mutual aid organization for support and connection among trans people working in K-12 schools. Before becoming an academic, Dr. Keenan was an elementary school teacher in New York City.

Harper B. Keenan

Lee Iskander (they/them) is an artist and scholar working at the intersection of trans studies, curriculum studies, and teacher education. Lee’s research examines how discourses of gender and sexuality shape identities in educational spaces and has been published in the Journal of LGBT Youth, Teaching Education, and Teachers College Record. Lee’s interest in gender and sexuality in schools arose from their experience as a youth activist. They are currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia.

Lee Iskander

Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, a native of North Carolina, earned a BFA in Painting and Drawing from East Carolina University and an MFA in Studio Art and a PhD in Art Education from Florida State University. She spent 22 years as a professor and, later, department chair in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at The University of Iowa. She is lucky and happy to be the dean of liberal arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, a position she has held since 2022. She is the creator of two graphic historiographies, Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching (Verso Press) and Run Home If You Don’t Want to Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943 (UNC Press and the Duke Center for Documentary Studies). Her writing has also appeared most recently in Southern Cultures, Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures, Meridians, Feminist Studies, and Visual Arts Research. Her work as an artist is grounded in narrative painting, printmaking, and illustration. The natural world, field research, scholarship, ephemera, and drawing heavily influences her imagery. She works in oil, aqueous media, and digitally.

Rachel Marie Crane Williams