You don’t know me: Welcoming gender diversity in schools via an ethic of hospitality

Abstract

Canadian public school authorities are busily producing gender diversity policies in order to meet their new legal responsibility to provide an environment free from gender identity and gender expression discrimination. These policies tend to offer specific guidance about how administrators and educators should respond to the needs of particular students: those who are (currently legible to school actors as) somehow transgender. Leveraging Claudia Ruitenberg’s writings on enacting a Derridean ethic of hospitality in education, however, I argue that it is ethical to not intend that policy, pedagogy, and curriculum address the needs of particular children and youth in order to do something about how gender rigidly organizes life in schools. De-centring these subjects does not mean doing nothing about this problem; it means doing something paradoxically impossible, yet ethical precisely because it is so impossible: preparing to welcome a student who may never arrive and who the teacher can never know, gender-wise, even and perhaps especially if there are out transgender students in one’s very own school. I offer three orientations to guide teachers, in particular, towards enacting this welcome: not seeking to know the transgender student in advance of their arrival, not trying to be a good teacher for transgender students in particular, and being wary of curricular representation as a strategy of welcome.