This article engages with Robert Mizzi’s theorization of heteroprofessionalism to describe the experiences of two queer professors in the fields of Education and Psychology. We explore how heteronormative and cisnormative expectations of post-secondary professors impact professional practices and increase the regulation and surveillance of queer professors in academia. We methodologically employ Grace and Benson’s queer life narratives approach to retell and ground our personal stories of being queer higher education faculty. To do this, we analyze our experiences teaching and working in higher education through a queer poststructural theoretical lens. We then deconstruct how normative ideas regarding professionalism in higher education have regulated our professional practices as professors, particularly pertaining to our respective embodiments, genders, and sexualities. We focus on two nexuses of heteroprofessionalism: paradoxical (in)visibility and queer relationality. These nexuses are used to illuminate heteroprofessionalism as a neoliberal mechanism in higher education that regulates gender and sexual diversity by promoting respectability politics.

Open conversations regarding sexuality education and gender and sexual diversity with young children in early childhood education settings are still highly constrained. Educators report lacking professional training and fearing parental and community pushback when explicitly addressing these topics in their professional practices. As such, gender and sexual diversity and conversations of bodily development are left silenced and, when addressed, filtered through heteronormative and cisnormative frameworks. Through a Foucauldian post-structural lens, this article analyses data from open-ended qualitative questions in a previous research study regarding early childhood educators’ perceptions on discussing the development of sexuality in early learning settings in an Ontario, Canada context. Through this Foucauldian post-structural analysis, the authors discuss forms of surveillance and regulation that early childhood educators experience in early learning settings regarding the open discussion of gender and sexuality. The authors explore how both the lack of explicit curricula addressing gender and sexuality in the early years in Ontario and taken-for-granted notions of developmentally appropriate practice, childhood innocence, and the gender binary – employed in discourses of sexuality education in the early years – regulate early childhood educators’ professional practices. The authors provide recommendations which critique the developmentalist logics – specifically, normative development – that are used to silence non-heterosexual and non-cisgender identities in the early years, while articulating the need for explicit curricula for educators in the early years regarding gender and sexuality in young children.

Comprehensive sexuality education is increasingly being employed on a global scale, with controversies arising regarding the content of such education and the rights of children to access sexuality education versus parents’ rights to decide the moral education of their children. In this paper, we utilise crip theory and a critical disability studies lens to analyse controversies surrounding parents’ rights versus children’s rights in the context of comprehensive sexuality education in Ontario, Canada. Using a disability studies perspective, this paper discusses the erasure of disabled children and youth in debates over children’s and parents’ rights while problematising the liberal humanist and legal frameworks often employed in comprehensive sexuality education and children’s rights. As such, we theorise how a more relationally attuned version of both children’s rights and comprehensive sexuality education can avoid oppositional politics and the reification of liberal humanist and ableist ideologies.

Schools are often sites of surveillance for students as behaviors are governed and regulated by gendered norms and sexed expectations. For transgender and gender non-conforming students, school environments can produce anxiety as students are categorized into gender binaries. This article draws from Canadian policy in public schools and higher education, interview data, as well as transgender teen narratives, to analyze gender policing in schools through gender binary washrooms. Building upon prior research and writing on gender binary washrooms [Cavanagh, S. L. 2010. Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; Ingrey, J. C. 2012. “The Public School Washroom as Analytic Space for Troubling Gender: Investigating the Spatiality of Gender Through Students’ Self-Knowledge.” Gender and Education 24 (7): 799-817; Ingrey, J. C. 2013a. “Shadows and Light: Pursuing Gender Justice Through Students’ Photovoice Projects of the Washroom Space.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 29 (2): 174-190; Ingrey, J. C. 2013b. “The Public School Washroom as Heterotopia: Gendered Spatiality and Subjectification.” PhD diss., University of Western Ontario. http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3175&context=etd], we argue that through advocacy, policy implementation, and the creation of gender-neutral washrooms, safe(r) and more positive school environments can be created for transgender and gender non-conforming students.

This article engages in an autoethnographic analysis to offer an argument for the importance of bringing mad studies to pre-service early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs. Through both analysing reflections on two "maddening moments" during pre-service teaching as a mad-identified pre-service ECEC educator and discussing relevant mad studies literature, I aim to forward an argument for the criticality of maddening pre-service ECEC programs and pedagogies. I argue that mad studies can provide ruptures to normativities ingrained in the developmentalist curricula and pedagogies in pre-service ECEC post-secondary programs and offer new ways of thinking of children, educators, and ECEC outside of developmental and normative tropes of early childhood educators (ECEs). As such, I examine how a maddening pedagogy in pre-service ECEC can bring affect into the classroom and disrupt how sanism functions through the knowledges and normativities prioritized within pre-service ECEC.