Tools for Creating Trans- and Gender-Inclusive Educational Spaces

What is this project?

This project will be a dynamic collection of resources we are gathering and creating for the K-12 space. These tools are designed to support anyone committed to creating an educational environment which supports all students’ ability to access a comprehensive and affirming education spanning from district administrators to classroom teachers to office clerks. While we are writing towards concrete changes that can be made to make school systems more queer-inclusive and gender-affirming, in order to reduce the harm that young people experience in our classrooms, schools, and districts, we recognize that there are myriad other identities and differences that our students bring with them to school everyday. It is not just gender nonconforming people who are targeted by transphobic violence, nor just queer people who are harmed by homophobia. When we fail to create spaces where all forms of expression are safe and celebrated, no one is able to be their full self. The ideas and tools we present are intended to create spaces where all are able to thrive. 

  • We will be gathering resources throughout 2024 and publishing this consolidated material as a book in 2025. These resources will include tools to engage with the different growing edges and opportunities for change that educators encounter across the political and social spectrums of the United States. Some topics we will address are:

    • Responding to changing policy mandates 


    • Assessing and implementing queer-inclusive curricula 


    • Centering families and caregivers


    • Supporting access to bathroom and changing facilities 


    • Developing a gender-inclusive sports practice


    • Auditing extant practices for LGBTQ+ inclusion 


    • Addressing school climate concerns 


    • Adopting inclusive health education pedagogies


    • Managing formal and informal name changes


    • Creating affirming spaces


    • Engaging your school and broader community 


    • Strategies for navigating the politicization of board of education and other administrative spaces


    • Clever work-arounds for awful systems

    • Etc.


Why Now?

We are launching this project at a particularly acute political moment. For the past few years in the United States we have seen a backlash to increased LGBTQ+ inclusion and visibility in public spaces, including our public schooling systems. School boards, curriculum, and classrooms have become leverage points by conservative groups attempting to turn whole states into spaces that are hostile to queer and gender expansive students, families, and communities. This is also a part of increasing efforts by these groups to dismantle equity-based programs and approaches nation-wide, stretching into other institutional spaces beyond K-12 schools.

While we approach this project at a specific historical moment, we also understand that the institutional violence and exclusions faced by queer and gender expansive students is not new or unique to our era. We are consolidating resources for our immediate conditions, but also designing tools with an understanding that as these conditions shift these tools must also adapt. We intend this project to be useful for the particularity of our moment, as well as a long lineage of struggle for a more just world.

Who are we?

Kena Hazelwood is a genderqueer Black educator who works to promote trauma informed non-hierarchical models of gender and racial equity drawing upon universal design. Ey currently brings eir over 20 years of experience – working across all age and grade ranges – to eir role as district coordinator of LGBTQ+ Student Services, for San Francisco Unified School District. Ey holds a BA in political studies and an MS in TESOL.

Juliet Kunkel has been an educator in many different spaces for about twenty years, and holds a PhD in education looking at the history of the eugenics movement. She is a queer person committed to reducing the harm our young people experience in schools and more broadly. She trends towards abolitionist thought in orientation towards education institutions, while also supporting public education, which is one of the many fun contradictions to live and grapple with.