Conference Program

In Italy, where Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) is not institutionally established and is increasingly targeted by anti-gender actors seeking to censor or delegitimize it, the integration of gender and sexuality perspectives in secondary schools depends largely on individual teachers’ initiative. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with twelve teachers in italian public secondary schools, analyzed through a critical feminist lens using thematic coding, this contribution explores how transfeminist principles are embodied in their everyday pedagogical practice and mobilized in efforts to promote or implement CSE interventions.

Findings show that participants, who identify both as transfeminist activists and public school teachers, describe transfeminism as a transversal pedagogical orientation (Barcelos, 2019) that shapes both classroom relations and CSE pathways. A recurring theme across interviews was a critical reflection on teacher positionality: the awareness that the teacher is a body in the classroom, embedded in asymmetrical power relations that must be continuously examined and renegotiated.

Through work on language, spatial arrangements, evaluation, and curricular choices, teachers seek to dismantle hierarchical and performative logics that reproduce exclusion and epistemic injustice. In this perspective, CSE (UNESCO, 2018) is understood as a transformative framework enabling students to critically analyze the social and cultural norms shaping sexuality and relationships, and to make autonomous, informed choices about their bodies and relational lives. By recognizing that sexual health is deeply influenced by gender norms and power structures, CSE becomes a vantage point from which to interrogate the norms that determine who is recognized, whose experiences count as legitimate knowledge, and who is enabled to participate meaningfully in collective life.

The contribution argues that these embodied and relational practices emerging from the interviewed teachers’ experiences enact forms of intimate citizenship within the classroom, transforming everyday pedagogy into a site of democratic struggle. The contribution shows how intersecting personal and professional trajectories translate into concrete transfeminist pedagogical approaches recognizable within the CSE UNESCO framework: an especially significant finding in the Italian context, where such practices face institutional obstruction. In polarized contexts marked by anti-gender backlash (Prearo, 2024) and attempts to censor or neutralize sexuality education, CSE and transfeminist pedagogies become sites of resistance and a practice of democracy in action, reshaping how we inhabit bodies, relationships, and shared social worlds.