In the face of growing anti-trans legislation across the United States, educators are finding creative ways to resist and protect their students. The fight for trans visibility in schools is not new, but the strategies being employed today are evolving in response to increasingly restrictive policies.
For many trans educators, this fight is deeply personal. As a trans professor who began teaching in 2005, I have seen firsthand the impact of these policies on students and educators alike. The absence of language and recognition for trans identities can be devastating, but it has also sparked a wave of resistance in classrooms across the country.
Creative Resistance in the Classroom
In Utah, a high school English teacher found a narrow opening in state law that allowed Gender Queer to remain in her classroom under administrative supervision. Every lesson had to be documented, and every discussion tied explicitly to state standards. Most teachers removed the text, but she transformed literary analysis into a defense of reading itself. Students examined memoir, symbolism, rhetoric, and censorship while documenting every objective and state standard. Eventually, the scrutiny intensified, and the teacher lost her position. Yet her students refused to let the record end there. They organized a public read-in, archived lesson plans, and documented what had actually occurred in the classroom. One parent later wrote that the book had helped their child survive suicidal thoughts.
This is just one example of the creative resistance happening in classrooms across the country. In Montana, a fourth-grade teacher continues to center a student’s affirmed name throughout mathematics lessons despite HB 400, the Free to Speak Act. In Alabama, a social studies teacher asks students what makes a democracy stable and invites them to examine civic participation, belonging, and power through historical inquiry rather than political slogans. In Georgia, a coach organizes runners according to stride rhythm, endurance, and cooperative pacing rather than gender categories in response to SB 1, the Riley Gaines Act. In Texas, a college professor projects statutory language onto a screen and asks future teachers how social-emotional learning, literacy, and relationship-building might still create affirming classrooms within legal constraints.
The Cost of Resistance
But refusal carries a cost. Some teachers are reprimanded, watched, reassigned, dismissed, or pushed out. Some leave because the cost of staying becomes unbearable. Yet we need educators in these spaces. We cannot surrender entire states, districts, and communities to policies of erasure. We need stronger protections for educators willing to remain and stronger systems of support for the students who depend on them.
The work begins with understanding the law. De jure is what is written. De facto is how it is lived. The distance between the two is where refusal operates. Laws contain ambiguity. They contain openings. They leave space, even as they attempt to close it. If we do not read them, we cannot find those openings. If we cannot find them, we surrender the classroom before we begin.
Building a Network of Support
No educator can do this work alone. Teachers need librarians, counselors, healthcare providers, families, legal advocates, faith leaders, journalists, unions, community organizations, and administrators willing to stand beside them. Protecting students is not the work of a single profession. It is the work of communities willing to defend one another.
Protest matters. It builds visibility. It signals collective refusal. But protest alone does not change what happens inside a classroom on a Tuesday morning. Educators operate in that space. Refusal is a sustained practice. It is the decision, repeated daily, to ensure that students remain.
Today, I teach because I know what happens when young people cannot imagine a future. Refusal begins by helping them believe and know they have one.
