Sustaining Through Refusal: Queer and Trans Teachers and the Upheaval of Respectability

Queer and trans teachers navigate compounded risks in school systems built on colonial standards that define the "respectable" teacher as diligent, authoritarian, and state-approved. Queerness, by contrast, is rendered institutionally precarious unless it assimilates. In this paper, I ask: what becomes possible when queer and trans teachers refuse this assimilation? Drawing on Walcott and Ahmed, I argue that legibility to the state is precisely what renders queer teachers vulnerable to institutional capture. Refusal, then, requires disorientation: a deliberate turn away from institutional legibility and toward community. I trace this disorientation in Prideful Pedagogies, an arts-based teacher collective grounded in Black and Indigenous feminist practices that aims to sustain and strengthen from the margins of public education.