Conference Program

Across Canada, sex education rarely reflects the lived realities of queer and trans youth, particularly those navigating the intersections of queerness, race, disability, and neurodivergence (Bialystok & Anderson, 2022; Burkholder & Keehn, 2024; Maradiya et al., 2025). Historically, sex education has imagined a “normative” student—affluent or middle-class, white, thin, able-bodied, cisgender, endosex, heterosexual, and male (Bruno et al., 2025; Roberts et al., 2020; Wong, 2024)—assumptions that continue to shape curricular content and classroom practice in Canada and elsewhere (Bialystok & Andersen, 2022). As a result, sex education often reproduces cisheteronormative and colonial futures by erasing or marginalizing queer and trans desires, relationships, bodies, asexuality, disability, and intersex variations, producing what Ahmed (2020) describes as disorienting sites of learning. In these contexts, gender and sex education becomes a site of epistemic injustice, where some bodies, knowledges, and relational possibilities are rendered unintelligible or unworthy of recognition. Relately, teachers are frequently positioned to frame gender identity as fixed, bodies and sex as binary, and desire as heterosexual, leaving intersex, trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer youth without language or recognition for their experiences (Burkholder & Keehn, 2025; Collier-Harris & Goldman, 2017). As Robinson et al. (2024) note, queer and trans rights and visibility have far outpaced Canadian sex education, a gap intensified by recent anti-trans political violence and state interventions that restrict support for queer and trans students and curtail school-based sexual health programming across the country (Awde, 2024; French, 2025). Within these conditions of polarization, sex education emerges not only as a pedagogical site but as a democratic arena in which questions of rights, recognition, care, and intimate citizenship are actively negotiated.

Responding to these conditions, this presentation draws on scholarship in queer joy (Duran & Coloma, 2023; Keehn, 2025; Tristano Jr., 2022) and critical queer theory (Muñoz, 2019) to ask: How might sex education function as a democratic practice that foregrounds agency, embodiment, and relational ethics? Queer joy unsettles deficit-based narratives of queerness and transness by insisting on affective complexity—lives marked not only by harm and constraint, but also by contradiction, ambivalence, pleasure, agency, and joy, even within hostile conditions (Burkholder, Wright, & Keehn, 2025). In my presentation, I propose that queer theories of joy can offer teachers tools to reimagine gender and sex education as a form of intimate citizenship—one that recognizes young people as relational, embodied subjects capable of participating meaningfully in plural and equitable communities. Drawing on my teaching in a sex education methods class with pre-service teachers, I share DIY and arts-based pedagogical practices—such as sewing reusable menstrual pads, queering classroom language, and engaging young people in expansive conversations about bodies—to demonstrate how practices of care, joy, creativity, and play can disrupt normative, risk-saturated approaches to sex education. These pedagogies foreground youth agency and relational accountability, repositioning sex education as a site for democratic learning, epistemic justice, and more livable, affirming educational futures.