Swiss trainee teachers know more about transgender issues but think more positively about intersex people

The aim of the research was to diagnose the knowledge of students in the field of disorders of sex development, gender dysphoria and social functioning of intersex and transgender people, as well as to learn their opinions on the challenges related to intersex and transgender education. The research was carried out by focus interviews with 78 students of teaching specialties. It has been shown that students – future teachers – in Polish schools consider it necessary to include gender identity issues in the curricula, mainly in the biological and ethical aspect, but not everyone feels prepared to help intersex or transgender students.

INTRODUCTION: BRIEF GUIDANCE THROUGH TRANSGENDER TERMINOLOGY Gender identity is one of the most fundamental aspects of life. According to the Yogyakarta Principles, gender identity refers to each person's deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth, including the personal sense of the body (which may involve, if freely chosen, modification of bodily appearance or function by medical, surgical or other means) and other expressions of gender, including dress, speech and mannerisms. Transgenderism is an umbrella notion and includes people whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned at birth and also people who feel the need to express themselves differently from the expected gender role assigned at birth, through clothing, decoration, behaviour, speech form, cosmetics or body. Those people do not identify or express themselves as male or female. Therefore, transgenderism includes transgender and transsexual people, transvestites, cross-dressers and very oft en intersex people. Transsexuality is defined as an extreme form of gender dysphoria: when a person with all external characteristics of one sex at the same time firmly believes that he or she belongs to another sex. The syndrome of gender dysphoria means feeling uncomfortable due to incompatibility between one's own gender identity and gender role, on the one hand, and biological sex, i.e. primary and secondary sex characteristics, on the other hand. In addition, transsexuality is considered a gender identity disorder according to the 10th Revision of International Classification of Diseases (‘ICD-10’) that was officially adopted at the 43rd Assembly of World Health Organization in May 1990. Therefore, transsexuality is a desire to live and be accepted as a member of the opposite sex, usually accompanied by a sense of discomfort with, or inappropriateness of, one's anatomic sex, and a wish to have surgery and hormonal treatment to make one's body as congruent as possible with one's preferred sex. LEGAL PROBLEMS PRIOR TO LEGISLATIVE CHANGE Until recently, in Serbia there was no legal framework to change legal gender status or personal documents of transgender persons after having undergone gender reassignment surgery.

Queer issues in English language teaching (ELT) have received increasing attention in recent years. This has included calling for interfaces between queer theory and ELT theorizing and descriptions of what is at stake in heteronormative classrooms, as well as exploring normative discourses reflected in language learning materials. Despite this considerable progress, there is still much work to be done regarding how teacher trainers and practitioners might go about queering practice. This article seeks to explore how English as a second language (ESL) classrooms can be meaningfully queered to create safer and more respectful spaces for students to engage with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues in a second language. This discussion begins by looking at how ESL teacher training can be queered, for example, including representation from queer TESOL literature and modeling queer teaching practices. The conversation concludes by arguing that there also exists a need for teachers to seek out ways to queer commercially available classroom materials.