Resisting Uniformity: How Transgender and Gender-Diverse Teachers Subvert School Dress Codes for Self-Affirmation and Possibility

Abstract

Transgender and gender-diverse teachers occupy a precarious position within educational spaces, often facing increased scrutiny and regulation aimed at disciplining their gender expression. This article brings to light original and significant insights by exploring how transgender and gender-diverse teachers resist and subvert cisnormative dress codes, as acts of self-affirmation and resistance within their professional educational contexts. Through an unconventional lens of Barad’s feminist new materialism combined with Wieringa’s continuum of symbolic subversion, our analysis offers an important theoretical contribution by interpreting how these individuals negotiate and challenge institutional cisnormativity, unsettling the tacit expectations of gendered professionalism in their trans embodiment. Drawing on the experiences of three transgender and gender-diverse teacher participants, a group often overlooked, this paper integrates findings from two distinct qualitative studies which used a participatory-focused ‘object-interview’ methodology. Findings from these in-depth studies reveal that transgender and gender-diverse teachers trouble dress code regulations by simultaneously embodying resistance and compliance, effectively reshaping and disrupting gendered expectations and institutional norms. While some forms of self-affirmation expressed by participants remained unseen, others materialised as embodied subversions of normative organisational expectations. Additionally, the degree of agency these teachers have in resisting binary dress code constraints is contingent on the entanglements of the teachers themselves, students, school policies, leadership and institutional climates. Unexpectedly, this research suggests that schools can act as sites of visibility and safety for transgender and gender-diverse teachers, where gender expression is validated and extends beyond the classroom. This article concludes by recognising that, when transgender and gender-diverse teachers resist uniformity and dress code norms, they embody their affirmed identities and, in doing so, offer vital representation for transgender and gender-diverse students, providing a sense of belonging, possibility, and authenticity within educational spaces.

1. Introduction

LGBTQ+ teachers have sustained a prolonged history of public oppression within education, punctuated by persistent discrimination and marginalisation (C. Lee 2019; Brett et al. 2024). This subjugation has been, and remains, most acutely felt by transgender and gender-diverse teachers (that is, individuals whose gender identities and expressions differ from cisnormative expectations, including but not limited to transgender, nonbinary, and genderqueer people), who are routinely situated as “border residents” (Anzaldúa 2012, p. 2), within school climates troubled by pervasive political and institutional uncertainty. This is particularly pertinent when considering the recent Cass Report (Cass 2024) or the “gender questioning” guidance (Department for Education 2023), the UK Supreme Court Ruling (For Women Scotland Ltd. v The Scottish Ministers 2025) and the EHRC response to the Supreme Court Ruling (Equality and Human Rights Commission 2025). Despite the introduction of progressive legislation in certain countries around the world (Herre and Arriagada 2024), increased protections are under continual assault from the incessant culture wars and divisive public debates (House of Commons 2025; Keenan et al. 2024; Ullman 2023) that help to shape and perpetuate the cisheteronormative inclinations of school systems, cultures, and structures. The duality of the cisheteronormative environment and the tireless public debate on gender and its location within education contribute to the heightened precarity felt by transgender and gender-diverse teachers, particularly those with other marginalised identity intersections (i.e., transgender and gender-diverse teachers of colour). Such conditions can and do play a fundamental role in identity management and decision making for those who resist permissible normative identities (Brett 2022; Gray 2021). Research within the field of LGBTQ+ teachers has generally focused on lesbian, gay and bisexual teachers or transgender and gender-diverse teachers under the wider LGBTQ+ umbrella term. However, and most importantly, scholarship within the field has begun to address this gap with the intent of increasing the visibility of the experiences of transgender and gender-diverse teachers (Ullman 2023; Rice and McEntarfer 2023; Suárez and Mangin 2022; Palkki 2023; Keenan et al. 2024; Bartholomaeus and Riggs 2017; Iskander et al. 2025).

This paper seeks to contribute to this body of recent work by exploring how transgender and gender-diverse teachers can unsettle and, potentially, begin to dismantle cisheteronormative understandings of professional dress codes for self-affirmation. It reports on three distinctive participant intra-active assemblages (Barad 2007, 2022), drawn from two larger qualitative projects, to challenge the deficit framing of LGBTQ+ individuals and presents how specific subversions of and resistance to the dominant cisnormative-authoritarian regimes are made visible through material-discursive emergent entanglements of individuals, objects, school spaces and organisational practices. Both studies adopted object interview methods, where participants were invited to bring personally significant objects to their interview to support the exploration of their lived experience and unearth aspects of their lives that might otherwise remain hidden (Holmes 2020). The use of objects within the interviews made space for these research encounters to move in unanticipated directions and “opened up considerations of materiality, practices and biographies” (Bundock 2025, p. 217). The findings within this paper draw attention to the various ways that transgender and gender-diverse teachers engage in symbolic subversion of traditional and cisheteronormative dress codes to find self-affirmation and open up new possibilities for “doing gender” (Butler 1993, p. 41) in the workplace. The study addresses the following three research questions: How do transgender and gender-diverse teachers navigate and subvert professional dress codes within school contexts? In what ways do material objects (e.g., clothing, accessories, and bodily alterations) mediate acts of self-affirmation and resistance? And how do these everyday material-discursive negotiations reveal broader institutional entanglements of gender, professionalism, and power?

1.1. Theoretical Framework

It is important to emphasise at the outset of this writing, our acknowledgement that the paper depends for its theoretical coherence, and thus any claim to its purchase on practice, crucially on Butler’s foundational work in the development of ‘gender performativity’, ‘constrained agency’, and ‘subversion’ (Butler 1993). However, to extend this Butlerian grounding and attend more closely to the material conditions through which our participants’ gendered lives unfold, we draw on key feminist new materialist ideas, specifically Barad’s (2007) philosophical framework of agential realism. Using this philosophical perspective allows us to consider matter beyond its discursive constructions and view it as actively participating in the ongoing formation of gender. Feminist new materialism and Barad’s (2007) agential realism align with Hickey-Moody and Willcox’s (2019, p. 4) assertion that bringing together new materialism and feminist scholarship foregrounds the “co-implication of bodies, subjectivities, places, and histories”. Barad’s (2007) reimagining of philosophical engagement can be understood through an agential realism that disturbs the authoritative role that language has continued to occupy as the primary source of influence in representing knowledge, meaning and the interpretation of the wider world (Kirby 2013; MacLure 2017). Through this agential realist lens, we are then able to approach gender instead as a set of dynamic processes to be understood in action, rather than a fixed category to be defined, revealing how transgender and gender-diverse teachers’ daily contemplations of professional dress are intertwined with affective, social and political forces. Agential realism has been conceptualised in order to “give matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming, in its ongoing intra-activity” (Barad 2007, p. 136). Central to our analysis are the concepts of entanglement and intra-action, drawn from Barad’s agential realism (Truman 2019), which are particularly relevant to our use of object interviews as a means of engaging with the material-discursive experience and understanding how gender comes into being.

Entanglement refers to the intermeshed “dynamics of social, material and semiotic flows and forces that make up the diffractive movements through which life emerges, assembles itself, and endures” (Davies 2020, p. 2; Aranda 2017). Significantly, entanglement does not signify a coming together or a merging of separate units of meaning; it is recognition of an absence of ‘independent, self-contained existence’ (Barad 2007, p. ix). Extending this, Barad (2007) understands the material-discursive world to be entangled through “phenomena” and explains that ‘‘phenomena are the ontological inseparability/entanglement of intra-acting agencies’ (p. 139). Intra-action, therefore, is a term Barad (2007) deliberately employs to distinguish from the concept of “interaction”. Interaction refers to the interrelations between already existing separate entities or agencies (e.g., teacher, clothing, policy), whereas intra-action affirms that “distinct agencies do not precede, but emerge through their intra-action” (Barad 2007, p. 33). These concepts acted as theoretical foundations for our project, guiding our research questions and our diffractive analysis.

When applied to the experiences of transgender and gender-diverse teachers, these feminist new materialist ideas permitted us to extend our analysis to include what transgender and gender-diverse teachers do to resist professional dress codes and also how their resistances, affirmations, and professional identities emerged through the ongoing entanglements of bodies, clothing, school policies and affective connections. This Baradian lens also shaped our interpretations of the data, attuning us to moments where material objects and discourses intra-actively produced particular configurations of gendered professionalism (i.e., moments where a binder, tattoo, or staff dress code policy actively participated in shaping what forms of gendered professionalism became possible for participants).

Attending to the Baradian elements of entanglement and intra-action allowed us to amplify the vitality and materiality of gendered practices, classroom spaces, and institutional regulatory policies that are continually and collectively formed through emergent material-discursive relations. Applying these concepts brought into conversation how transgender and gender-diverse teachers’ professional lives are produced through the continual interplay of bodies, spaces, language, and regulation. Conducting the research through this lens also revealed dynamics that representational or social-constructionist approaches might overlook, showing how matter itself participates in knowledge production. These concepts offer an analytic orientation that considers and values the liveliness and materiality of everyday practices (e.g., decisions about professional dress, navigating physical spaces, negotiating visibility), and also helps to illuminate how broader policy frameworks and cultural discourses intra-act with these practices to shape experience and possibility.

From within this framework, agency doesn’t reside solely within the individual. Critically, it takes shape in relationships and is continually emergent across human and more-than-human doings (Murris and Zhao 2021). Moreover, notions of resistance and subversion, likewise, aren’t attributed only to humans. They materialise through intra-actions within and across workplace assemblages—understanding assemblages to be dynamic configurations that bring into view relations of power, nonhuman forces, and the ongoing ‘(de)formation of territories’ (Fullagar and Taylor 2021, p. 32)—constituted through bodies, objects, spaces, clothing, and institutional policies. As such, we suggest transgender and gender-diverse teachers’ experiences are co-constituted within and through a material-discursive relationality. Dress code policies and institutional expectations of professionalism are co-implicated in the production and reproduction of gendered practices within the school workplace by inscribing cisheteronormative structures onto transgender and gender diverse bodies.

To deepen our understanding of how gendered resistance is materially enacted, we also draw on Wieringa’s (2014) concept of symbolic subversion, which makes explicit the ways in which individuals challenge dominant gender norms through situated, contextually dependent acts that range across a “sliding scale of subversion” (p. 210). These subversive acts are not always overt or easily recognisable; they might include appropriating or altering elements of dress to affirm gender identity while also navigating cisnormative expectations. Viewed through a feminist new materialist perspective, such acts open up our understanding beyond the symbolic, revealing them as material-discursive events that intra-act with broader regulatory forces, shaping and being shaped by the spatial, affective, and institutional environments of schools.

In this paper, Wieringa’s (2014) sliding scale of symbolic subversion productively intersects with Barad’s agential realism, allowing us to trace the multiple, embodied, and often subtle forms of resistance that emerge through the entangled intra-actions between teachers, dress codes, professional norms, and school environments. These acts of subversion are co-constituted within systems of power, regulation, and self-expression, and signal moments where cisheteronormative regimes are unsettled, if not undone. Collectively, symbolic subversion and agential realism allow us to map the distributed agency of transgender and gender-diverse teachers, highlighting the relational and material processes through which gendered resistance becomes possible.

1.2. Literature Review

Within the UK education system, dress codes serve as regulatory-enforcing mechanisms (Foucault 1980) and material-discursive apparatuses that actively produce and sustain gender-normativity. This paper understands dress as a vital site of intra-action (Barad 2007, 2022), where institutional expectations, professional norms, bodies, clothing, and affect co-constitute gendered subjectivities. For transgender and gender-diverse teachers, dress codes are entangled sites through which gender materialises in complex negotiations of visibility, risk, and resistance.

There has been limited research, in recent years, which has begun to trace the affective and political labour involved in these negotiations. Bancroft and Greenspan’s (2023) study in rural northwest England offers insight into how non-binary teachers can disrupt normative gender expectations by wearing clothing typically coded as masculine (i.e., shirts and ties) within environments that require strict adherence to gender performance. The participant’s account in Bancroft and Greenspan’s (2023) research is important because it shows how clothing actively shapes and responds to school rules, physical spaces, and the wider social messages about gender. The account also draws attention to how geography, class, and gender expression intersect to influence respectability and professionalism.

Research examining dress and bodily presentation in education has recognised the role these elements play in moral and professional regulation of teachers (Brown and Diale 2017; Joseph 2017; Moorosi 2012; Workman and Freeburg 2010). Professionalism in teaching is demonstrated through skill and competence but has been found to be embodied through certain aesthetics of modesty and classed behaviour (Cano Diaz 2024; Ingram 2024; Keenan 2017; Pajaziti 2025). These norms are historically racialised and gendered, reflecting white, middle-class ideals of respectability that frame deviation as unprofessional (Costello 2005; Keenan 2017; Joseph 2017; Ramdeo 2022; Rogers 2022). Such constructions place teachers’ bodies and dress as signifiers of moral order, positioning transgender and gender diverse teachers especially visible (and vulnerable), when their embodiment challenges institutional norms. This inequity in presentation can be seen in research by Airton et al. (2024) which highlights the commonly overlooked labour that transgender and gender-diverse teachers perform to navigate cisheteronormative institutional expectations. In their research, Airton et al. (2024) argue that the uneven implementation of equity commitments across schools places transgender and gender-diverse teachers in situations where they must often navigate differing levels of support, contingent on informal relationships and the responsiveness of senior leaders. With such dynamics of uncertainty, transgender and gender-diverse teachers may struggle to determine to what extent they have the capacity to express their gender, disclose their identity or embody who they are at school.

Along similar lines to Bancroft and Greenspan (2023), Phipps and Blackall (2021) highlight how gender-neutral facilities serve as practical interventions and material symbols that reconfigure the spatial and affective elements of schools. Ingrey’s (2016) research advances this spatial-material framing by conceptualising school environments as “heterotopic” spaces which simultaneously reproduce and destabilise a cisheteronormative gender binary through their material and architectural arrangements. For example, toilets, corridors, staff rooms, and other areas within schools function as heterotopias which serve to mark, organise and occasionally invert normative forms of gendered legitimacy. Juxtaposing Ingrey’s (2016) analysis with dress codes illuminates the intersections of transgender and gender-diverse teachers’ gender expressions and these “heterotopic” organisations within schools become more apparent. Clarity and examination of this intersection allow for deeper analysis into where potential spatial and professional, unsettling of cisheteronormativity occurs as embodied praxis. These studies suggest that schools function as assembled spaces, constituted through the ongoing entanglements of policy, affect, architecture, and bodies, that shape teachers’ abilities to perform, resist, or conceal parts of their gender. Omercajic and Martino (2020) argue that leadership support, policy framings, and access to LGBTQ+ affirming infrastructures are essential components, agentively shaping ongoing efforts toward gendered agency, beyond being background conditions. In unsupportive contexts, the teacher’s dress code becomes a tactical site of strategic intra-action. This practice, referred to as ‘strategic conformity’ (Dvorak et al. 2025, p. 558), involves transgender and gender-diverse teachers blending in enough to maintain safety and, at the same time, layering minor disruptions to normative professionalism within their appearance.

Approaching these forms of dress as expressions of fixed identity can overlook their co-constitution within and across institutional policies, cultural scripts, and material conditions. Bancroft and Greenspan (2023) note that transgender and gender-diverse teachers are continually engaged in a quasi Duboisian double consciousness (1903, 1990), where they are aware of how their body is read in its most visible moments while simultaneously also having to navigate the political and social implications of their non-conforming embodiment. Through an entangled and intra-active lens, these moments can be interpreted as resistive acts as well as emergent becomings shaped by the gendered school environment.

Visibility is a fraught and burdensome issue that is approached uniquely and in strategic ways by transgender and gender-diverse teachers (Green 2017; Harris et al. 2021; Payne and Smith 2014). Some transgender and gender-diverse teachers embrace visibility as a form of resistance and affirmation for both them and their students (Ferfolja and Ullman 2020; Frohard-Dourlent 2016), while others experience it as a site of risk and precarity. Green (2017) argues that these moments of transgender and gender-diverse visibility signify a “trap”, whereby symbolic recognition of transgender and gender-diverse people is accompanied by intensified surveillance, containment, and vulnerability. As a result, and as Green (2017) articulates, visibility becomes a double-edged issue, capturing how teachers may be celebrated as markers of institutional progress but remain liable to heightened scrutiny over their bodies, dress, and aesthetics delineating degrees of professionalism. These dynamics of visibility contribute to what Iskander (2021) identifies as the fragility of inclusion, where teachers often feel compelled to suppress or delay expressions of gender nonconformity during recruitment processes or within conservative institutions. Altogether, these studies demonstrate how visibility functions on a personal level, even as it remains an uneven, relational process contorted by institutional norms, professional expectations, and the material-discursive conditions that codify whose gendered presence is rendered acceptable.

Brown and Diale (2017), in their study of twelve self-identifying lesbian and gay pre-service teachers, described some instances of overt professional dress code disruption (e.g., a lesbian teacher refusing to wear skirts or choosing to display her tattoos). However, more commonly, participants adopted more subtle forms of subversion to be accepted as legitimate teaching professionals. These subversions ranged from tailoring their voices to be less squeaky, avoiding wearing colourful clothes or being more mindful of flamboyant hand gestures. They all align with what Wieringa (2014) describes as a “sliding scale of symbolic subversion”, or a continuum of action ranging from subtle shifts in self-expression to explicit and overt acts of resistance that push against entrenched institutional norms. A feminist new materialist lens enables us to frame these subversions as material acts of resistance that intra-act with institutional assemblages to produce or conceal alternative gendered realities.

Despite the emergence of a small body of literature on transgender and gender-diverse teachers, the existing research rarely focuses on clothing and presentation; these elements tend only to appear tangentially within broader accounts of identity and school climate (Bartholomaeus and Riggs 2017; Rice and McEntarfer 2023). This omission is significant given evidence that dress is a constitutive element of professional identity and classroom interaction, and that school dress codes actively organise gendered possibilities (Adomaitis et al. 2021; Katić 2025; Sotak et al. 2023). The under-theorisation of school dress codes as sites of material-discursive negotiation leaves a gap in understanding the everyday entanglements shaping transgender and gender-diverse teachers’ lives in schools. Paying attention to these dynamics is essential for moving beyond instances of inclusion focussed solely on representation.

In summary, the literature suggests that transgender and gender-diverse teachers’ negotiations with school dress codes tend to be understood as personal and symbolic acts of resistance. However, a feminist new materialist perspective enables these acts to be considered as distributed, relational practices constrained by institutional power. Drawing on Barad’s (2007) agential realism and Wieringa’s (2014) symbolic subversion, this paper argues that gendered resistance materialises through the intra-active forces of bodies, clothing, professional norms, space, and policy. These ongoing entanglements shape what is possible within the classroom and also provide examples of where cisnormative regimes may be unsettled, reconfigured, or subtly undone.

2. Materials and Methods

This paper draws on two in-depth qualitative doctoral research projects. The first project was developed with 17 transgender and gender-diverse teachers. The second study comprised 31 individual interviews and 11 talking circle-style focus groups with students and/or teachers. Both studies included participants working within the English education system at various points between 1988 and 2024. Each study made use of ‘object interview’ methodology where the interviewee brings an object of particular life-story significance to the interview (Holmes 2020). Participants were asked by each researcher to bring their object with them to interview. Individual interviews in each study lasted approximately an hour and a half and were audio-recorded and transcribed, with participants’ consent, using Microsoft Teams software.

The two studies were originally designed for thematic analysis, with the objects shared at the participant interviews conceived as elicitation tools to make visible a discursive understanding of lived experiences, memories and understandings of identity. However, through discussion it became apparent that these objects demanded an analytical framework that exceeded our original methodological plans. The entangled data, within which we too were relationally implicated, offered a recounting of lived experience while simultaneously ‘glowing’ (MacLure 2013b), calling for a shift in our analytical attention. This meant that the object-based interview approach was further guided by MacLure’s (2013b) idea of “data glow” where specific aspects of data carry an affective connection drawing in the researchers’ attention and build “wonder” in their analytic appreciation. In this circumstance, “wonder” refers to an openness to the material-affective intensities that emerge in participants’ entanglements with objects instead of relying solely on the meaning of the verbal content they shared in the interviews. While these concepts shaped the orientation of the interviews, they are not considered as disjointed or separate aspects in the analysis due to the focus and scope of the present paper.

We therefore identified three distinct participants and their chosen objects from the larger datasets of each study for closer analysis. This selection was guided by interpretive engagement rather than statistical representation. These participants were chosen because their narratives and objects exhibited rich material-discursive entanglements that illuminated the complexities of gendered professionalism. Their experiences and explanations remained with us long after the interviews, provoking thoughtful reflection and drawing us into deeper engagement with their data’s sense of ‘glow’ and ‘wonder’ (MacLure 2013b). Each transgender and gender-diverse teacher participant’s material-discursive entanglements (Barad 2007) provided important insights into how transgender and gender-diverse teachers resist and subvert cisnormative school dress codes. Transcripts were read iteratively by both researchers using a process of diffractive analysis (Barad 2007; Jackson and Mazzei 2022), which involved tracing patterns of resonance and difference between the empirical material and theoretical concepts (entanglement, intra-action, symbolic subversion). Through collaborative coding and discussion, we identified emergent thematic assemblages that reflected both affective and material intensities. NVivo qualitative software supported this process by enabling us to organise excerpts that illustrated how materiality and embodiment enact resistance and subversion, challenging or reshaping dominant expectations of professionalism.

By situating this study within the field of feminist new materialism, we became attentive to the responses our three participants shared in relation to their object/s and also to the relational, entangled nature of the object, the participant, policy expectations and our own intra-actions that extended far beyond the initial interview (Thorpe et al. 2024). As MacLure writes, we became ‘open to the emergence of the unforeseen’ (MacLure 2023, p. 217) and recognised the object as possessing agentic and vibrant capacities (Thorpe et al. 2024; Bennett 2010).

Our analysis, therefore, draws from feminist new materialism and, in doing so, puts MacLure’s (2013b) concepts of ‘data glow’ and ‘wonder’ to work to ‘explore another potentiality associated with data, beyond and beside their capacity for mute surrender to the colonialist administrations of social science’ (MacLure 2013b, p. 228). Importantly, while this paper centres the experiences of transgender and gender-diverse teachers, it is essential to note that the three main participants are all white teachers. This demographic limitation reflects the broader racial homogeneity of the teaching profession in England and raises critical questions about how racialised and classed expectations of professionalism intersect with gendered embodiment.

3. Findings and Discussion

In this section, we present our analysis of three individuals, their objects and our entanglements and intra-actions with them. Before doing so, we wish to make explicit our own positionalities as researchers and how we are co-implicated in the production of these analytical assemblages (Barad 2007), something we wish to note but recognise is an area that easily extends beyond the scope of this paper: Lis Bundock, a white, queer, cisgender doctoral researcher and former teacher; Kayden Schumacher, a white, pansexual, transgender man and former school counsellor. Our analysis is shaped by our own lived experiences and professional histories, which intra-act with our shared material-discursive data. Each individual’s intra-active account begins with a vignette focused on an object the participant brought to the interview and is followed by an introduction to the participant. It was the agentic capacity of these objects to make the data “glow” (MacLure 2013a, p. 661) that prompted our analytical approach.

Following these introductions, our analysis explores the entangled and material-discursive ways transgender and gender-diverse teachers subvert cisnormative school dress codes. Through a feminist new materialist lens (Barad 2007) and Wieringa’s (2014) symbolic subversion, we examine how acts of dress and presentation operate as more-than-symbolic resistances. Across the intra-actions of Charlie, Oli, and Blue, two thematic assemblages emerged, we use the term ‘thematic assemblage’ deliberately to indicate that these are not fixed themes; they are emerging configurations (Barad 2007; Deleuze and Guattari 2004), tentatively situated and shifting. These assemblages are framed as c/overt self-empowerment, affirmation, resistance and possibility in gendered professionalism.

3.1. Charlie (He/Him)

When we meet, I (Lis) ask Charlie to share the object he has brought to the interview (the request was to bring something that reflects his gender identity). We are meeting on MSTeams, so rather than place the object between us, Charlie leans in and holds it close to the camera. I reach for my glasses as the item is grey, and it is difficult for me to determine what it is as he holds it up, closer to the screen. As my eyes adjust, I can see that it is a binder, and it looks well-worn and somehow familiar. As Charlie presents his binder (Figure 1) he laughs, almost apologetically, and shares that it is pretty old, stretched and tattered at this stage. He stretches it out to its full shape so that I can see it clearly, and I too notice that it has been well used and has begun to lose the elasticity it might once have had. Charlie smiles, adding, ‘it was my first binder’, and then, after a short pause, he shares that it was “like my saviour when it first came in the post”. Despite the digital divide between us, there is a real intimacy in this moment, both of us recognising that there is much more to this binder than the fabric material and thread that holds it together. It is evident in Charlie’s words, his touch and the way his hands hold the binder that it is something that holds a threaded history, one of risk, relief, challenge and change.

Charlie (he/him) is a white transgender man in his early twenties. He ‘passes’ as cisgender (i.e., he is a transgender and gender-diverse person who is perceived by others as cisgender) and works in a primary school in the south of England. While Charlie ‘passes’ as a cisgender man, he is not publicly out to his pupils, their parents or the majority of his colleagues, a position that can afford him certain privileges of safety or legitimacy. However, he recognises that it also reinforces normative gender binaries. He is open about his gender identity with his headteacher and a small group of trusted colleagues. His reasons for concealing his gender are related to concerns about safety and being misread as a ‘threat’ by the wider school community influenced by a climate of uncertainty and transphobia. Despite this, Charlie is committed to inclusive practice and regularly leads staff training, plays a key role in developing a more inclusive curriculum and recognises the importance of his own capacity to disrupt cisheteronormativity, while ‘passing’ as a cisgender man.

3.2. Oli (They/Them)

Oli and I (Kayden) meet in a queer friendly café after a local transgender and gender-diverse community group meet-up. It is a rainy, cold, Friday night, and Oli appears open and interested to get to know me. Prior to our meeting, I had requested that Oli bring an object that had impacted their experience in the English education system or their gender journey, or both. When Oli and I both sit down across from each other and exchange awkward pleasantries, I ask if they are ok if we begin. Oli is keen and retrieves from their backpack a pair of starry spotted trousers (Figure 2). They seem to fit Oli’s material style as they turned up to the interview wearing a similar pair. The trousers are, as Oli described, “made of a sort of jean-esque material” and are clearly one of their favourite pairs as they appear to be well worn—the elastic waistband is a bit misshapen due to stretching and continual use. The navy colour of the trousers is also a touch lighter in specific areas, between the thighs, from wear and tear.

As Oli holds onto their trousers and displays them with pride, I ask why they decided to bring this particular object to the interview. Oli responds stating, “they are trousers I would try to routinely wear for teaching, and after I taught in them for two or three times, I’d been told they were not appropriate for school.” Oli continues offering some justification by referring to aspects of their school’s dress code, “they are unrevealing in any way, they are perfectly full length and are effectively very similar to what other colleagues would wear except the colleagues would wear ones that were one single colour and mine have some more pattern or nice shapes”.

Serving as a witness to Oli’s story and having seen this physical, material, representation of ‘inappropriate’ clothing, we find ourselves implicated in this moment as transgender and gender-diverse teachers. I recognise some of the pain in Oli’s voice as they try to contort their expression of their gender into the school dress code and the significance around policing such clothing in their post as a non-binary teacher. Their emotion, word choice, and proud, strong grip on the starry trousers trigger in me echoes of similar uniform constraints I had lived through all those years I had grown up in restrictive educational spaces. We exchange words on the surface, but we both know that beneath these dress code policies, our self-concepts as transgender and gender-diverse people were being constrained, distorted, and deemed ‘inappropriate for school.

Oli is a white 25-year-old non-binary identifying teacher who uses they/them pronouns and the honorific ‘Mx’. Oli works in a mainstream secondary school and teaches IT (information technology). They are an early career teacher, having taught for less than five years, and have always wanted to use their gender identity to create spaces and pedagogies where students can explore who they are, question assumptions, and embrace curiosity. While this is Oli’s intention, they have often struggled to sustain a visibly gender-nonconforming presence. Their Instagram account has been trolled by grandparents of their students posting hostile criticism, and despite consistently challenging school policy for the benefit of themselves and their students, they have seen little change.

Blue (they/them)

It is a weekday evening when Blue and I (Lis) finally meet on MSTeams for our interview. As with most of my participants, I feel a sense of connectedness with Blue that is unusual for a first meeting, and there is also a real easiness to our conversation that feels comforting. We are partway into the interview when I ask Blue to share their object that represents their gender identity. Even before they share it, I feel a twinge of embarrassment at my request to distil gender identity into one individual object. As if reading my mind, Blue says, “I find that difficult because everything does” and I nod in agreement. Blue then rolls up their sleeve to reveal a distinctive and beautiful tattoo (Figure 3).

Blue’s tattoo spans the majority of the lower, outward-facing part of their arm. The colours are unmistakably those of the trans flag, and the symbol is non-binary. Without prompting, Blue begins to tell me about how it came to be: “I just felt it was a really important moment to kind of just, you know, literally just brand myself. Because you can’t take that away from me. You know, nothing you can do can take that away. That’s part of my skin. It’s in my body”.

As I scan the tattoo across the screen and listen to Blue’s words, I too understand its importance. Blue’s tattoo is a site of physical resistance and a clear refusal for their identity to be erased. The entanglement of ink, colour, body and speech intra-acts to offer new possibilities and the potential for doing gender in ways that sit outside of institutional norms.

Blue is a 52-year-old white non-binary teacher who uses they/them pronouns and the honorific ‘Mx’. They work in a SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) school, teaching both primary and secondary pupils, and live in the north of England. With over 20 years of teaching experience, Blue chose their current setting due to the LGBTQ+ representation within the school’s leadership team. They are out as a non-binary teacher to pupils, parents, and colleagues, and describe their workplace as one where they can authentically express their identity. Blue is committed to supporting LGBTQ+ rights and plays an active role in an organisation that actively campaigns for transgender equality. Within their school, Blue has developed the curriculum and supported annual events that celebrate diversity and promote inclusion.

3.3. C/Overt Self-Empowerment and Affirmation

The implicit and explicit demands of professional dress codes within the school workplace can serve to place transgender and gender-diverse teachers in a continual state of precarity where the extent to which they can visibly affirm their identity is largely determined by perceived risk and their own desire or capacity to reveal or conceal how they wish their gender to be read by others (Cumming-Potvin 2023; Adomaitis et al. 2021; Department for Education 2023). Within school organisations transgender and gender-diverse teachers and students are, therefore, expected to toe the normative line (Ahmed 2006, p. 16) and adhere to these codes or render themselves susceptible to unwelcome scrutiny or misrecognition, and the enduring symbolic violence of gendered institutional expectations (Reimers 2020; Bourdieu 2001). What emerges is a view of professional dress code requirements, whether enshrined in policy or tacitly upheld, as conduits for everyday regulation that determine the material-discursive conditions through which gender can or cannot be performed. The term ‘c/overt’ is used within this assemblage to capture the simultaneous presence of covert (hidden, subtle, inaudible) and overt (visible, explicit, audible) forms of resistance, which also intersect with various social and environmental politics and conditions. This conceptual dynamic demonstrates that transgender and gender-diverse teachers’ practices often operate along a continuum of visibility, with acts of affirmation and subversion continuously entangled and interwoven.

The binder that Charlie brought to his interview provided valuable insights into how the c/overt negotiation of these everyday regulatory practices plays out and informs decision making around visibility, legitimacy and self-affirmation for transgender and gender-diverse teachers (Brown and Diale 2017). As mentioned in his vignette, for Charlie, the arrival of the binder in the post offered emancipatory possibility that would enable him to perform the role of teacher and affirm his gender identity. Equally, it brings to the fore the apparent urgency and necessity of this material scaffold in enabling gendered self-affirmation within the workplace. The binder, when understood to hold more-than-human capacities (Barad 2007, 2022), became entangled in processes of subversion and adherence that supported Charlie to partially “accept the codes of normalcy” (Wieringa 2014, p. 210) at work. He explained “it would be every day that was something that I had on. So that’s like a very close relationship we had”. Here the inseparability of the human and non-human is revealed in their gendered becomings. Charlie, his body and the binder intra-acting within the school setting, under the tacit demands of normative school policies and dress code requirements, support the realisation of self-empowerment (Garner 2014; Barad 2007, 2022).

Wieringa (2014, p. 210) argues that symbolic subversion can involve a “denial of one’s own needs,” as individuals may feel compelled to conform to dominant norms to navigate school spaces safely (Harris and Jones 2014). However, Charlie did not view his ability to pass as something negative. On the contrary, he described the binder as an object that afforded him a sense of freedom, “freedom of actually being able to change or distort the body in a way that I could appear how I wanted it to appear.” Instead of perceiving the binder as a concession to cisnormativity, Charlie framed it as a material agent with the capacity to covertly disrupt the gendered norms embedded in curriculum, stereotypes, and institutional practices. Being able to pass as a cisgender male and enact these disruptions gave him a heightened sense of self-empowerment and affirmation. As he clarified:

“I can get away with teaching the lessons

I teach because they see me as a straight cis

white man. So I can teach them the stuff about

gender. And the thing is as well, I am a role

model for it.”

This aligns with what Wells (2018, p. 1574) observes, in relation to their study of three transgender teachers, that “transgender teachers are allowed to transgress and cross over the gender binary only if they agree to also maintain it in their new gender roles”. Evidently, the binder’s agentive capacities operated as both a means of bodily transformation and as a strategic tool of pedagogical subversion. Charlie was able to navigate and quietly challenge dominant discourses from within, illustrating how material objects can operate as agents of compliance and resistance in the everyday mediation of gendered identity (Barad 2007, 2022; Nicolazzo 2023). At the same time, these objects embody the in/visible queer role modelling shown to support LGBTQ+ students in school settings (Posner 2024).

Being attentive to the materiality of Charlie’s binder, or how “matter matters” (Allen 2018, p. 38; Taylor 2013) provides further understandings of the enduring and habitual negotiations required for gendered becomings in the school workplace. The worn fabric and reduced elasticity point to its daily use and provide a material example of the embodied, ongoing, agentive labour involved in sustaining gender affirmation within school settings. In addition to being a means of bodily affirmation and presenting an appearance that aligned to binary understandings of permissible gender, the binder also functioned as a protective layer, providing Charlie with a form of safety in the face of possible transphobia from colleagues, parents, or pupils.

“I think if I was to come out in that school, particularly

in the area we are, it wouldn’t… it would be a lot. I think

it would be quite a lot. And the other thing is the kids

would also say stuff that their parents have said, and I

think it would be more hassle.”

His binder also gave him greater legitimacy when navigating the school environment with authority and the agency to speak confidently with parents and challenge cisnormative views from a position of assumed privilege. However, this legitimacy, unsurprisingly, came at a cost. As Wieringa (2014, p. 211) writes, “there is often a thin line between defiance and defeat” and this was the case for Charlie when a Year 6 pupil was struggling with their gender identity in school. Charlie was unable to share with them that he was a thriving transgender man, and someone who could offer solidarity and hope.

“I would love nothing more than just to talk to this

person and let them know that whether they’re trans

or not, how they’re feeling is okay and you can still

be something as well.”

Charlie’s symbolic subversion offers a clear example of how self-affirmation and erasure of self can function concurrently. Passing empowered Charlie to quietly disrupt entrenched institutional norms but was also a force for constraint and inhibited opportunities for Charlie to nurture relational visibility and essential support.

The c/overt material-discursive troubling of ‘contextually specific knowledge(s) that shape understandings of normative gender’ (Galarte 2014, p. 145) also formed part of Blue’s daily practice within their everyday work in school. Some participants mentioned or brought multiple objects, which further depicted or materially illustrated their experiences. Blue, one of these participants, brought an enamel rainbow question-mark pin badge to their interview to illuminate their journey toward becoming a teacher.

“I could wear this all the time that I was at school.

It could be on my jacket or on my bag or it could be

on my lanyard. And it was such a subtle little rainbow

that it meant I could still have a little part of me that

was out.”

This material example of pin-badge micro-visibility is reminiscent of the ‘hankie code’ historically used by gay men to communicate their sexual preferences and community to other men in plain sight, simultaneously subverting the surveillance of heteronormativity (Reilly and Saethre 2013). The rainbow badge affords the same sense of community and subversive protections (Calvard and Hardwick 2020; Lee et al. 2024); despite being a visible symbol of the LGBTQ+ community and, to some extent, commonplace in schools. It does not, however, follow that an individual would immediately be read as queer, transgender and gender-diverse. On the contrary, it may represent visible allyship or solidarity. Significantly, it is an object that could easily go unnoticed within a school setting. The agentive, wearable nature of the badge, and the way it can be positioned in locations of visibility and concealment, suggest it participates within the unfixed assemblages of classrooms, corridors, and the transgender and gender-diverse body to subvert cisheteronormative expectations—whether visible or invisible to external view. These material-discursive entanglements promote moments of choice in when and how to be visible and when and where to be discreet, ensuring that, as Blue suggests, there is always a ‘little part’ of queerness present for emergent self-affirmation and empowerment.

Blue also presents an alternative and slightly more overt political praxis of self-affirmation that publicly challenges normative understandings of professional dress codes within the workplace. They recognised that their SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) school, where ‘none of these norms seemed to matter’, provided an accepting space where they were able to rupture the sex-gender nexus’ and subvert ‘heteronormative norms’ (Wieringa 2014, p. 211). In their narrative account, they described how they would wear make-up every day, exemplifying how as a non-binary teacher, within the entangled school assemblage they were able to engage in what Anderson (2025) describes as “rejecting binary frameworks and embracing plurality” (p. 3) in order to dismantle the rigid partiality of gendered essentialism. Yet, despite this evident material disruption, it is notable that even within this perceived space of acceptance, Blue is tentative in how far they resist the normative codes, acknowledging that excessive dissidence would hold “enormous risks such as social isolation, economic hardship, or physical and psychological violence” (Wieringa 2014, p. 212).

“They’re used to that. It’s not major makeup, but,

you know, just the sort of normal workplace level

of slap, you know, just enough to not quite look as

rough as you feel.”

Like Blue, Oli is also a teacher who refused to wholly suppress or express their non-binary gender identity. However, unlike Blue, as an early career teacher working at a mainstream secondary school, they lacked the autonomy and affordances that accompany being an established and experienced member of staff. As such, any deviance from implicit and explicit dress code regulations carried heightened risk of backlash from school staff or parents. Consequently, Oli tried to achieve a balance in aesthetic visibility that would affirm their non-binary identity and also adhere to the limitations of the dress code policy to remain safe from harm. For example, Oli’s account of how they dressed as a teaching professional within their workplace offered valuable insights into the material and c/overt negotiations involved in navigating professional dress for self-empowerment and affirmation. Oli shared,

“One of the first things I did as a newly qualified teacher,

sort of a quiet act of gender nonconformity, was buying

a blue suit from the women’s section. It felt a bit sneaky

at the time, like I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to do it, but

it also felt really good. I wore it to school and no one

commented on it, which was kind of the point. It was

hidden, nothing that would get flagged or draw too much

attention, but for me it was really affirming. It let me feel

more like myself without having to say anything or explain.

Looking back, it was definitely one of those early steps

where I was still figuring things out as how to be a

nonbinary teacher but doing so in ways that were

tangible and meaningful to me.

Oli’s ‘quiet act of gender nonconformity’ exemplifies how nonbinary teachers can be (un)consciously compelled to situate themselves within the middle ground of Wieringa’s (2014) continuum of symbolic subversion. In Oli’s example, their refusal to dress in accordance with gendered clothing can be understood as a direct ‘reorientation of normality: to accept the legitimacy of one’s own embodied desires, and to eliminate the shame and guilt’ (Wieringa 2014, p. 527) of conforming to cisnormative expectations. The gendered blue suit held an affective ‘sneaky’ and affirming tension and demonstrated how objects intra-act with identity (Barad 2007) to enable particular forms of visibility and affirmation.

Through the analysis of Charlie, Blue, and Oli’s objects and assemblages, we can see how practices are “perpetually open to rearrangements, rearticulations, and other reworkings” (Barad 2007, p. 170). These entangled configurations determine the possible covertness or overtness of self-affirmation and empowerment permissible within the school setting, leaving transgender and gender-diverse teachers to be in a perpetual state of comparison to cisheteronormative standards in their quest for affirmation and safety.

3.4. Resistance and Possibility in Gendered Professionalism

While the previous assemblage explored the potentially more private and embodied material acts of gender affirmation like binders, makeup, badges and patterns which could be covered, concealed, or altered during these affirmative material enactments. This section centres the more visible and relational forms of resistance performed through dress. These acts simultaneously affirm identity and interrupt/reconfigure dominant school norms of professionalism and gendered embodiment (Hickey-Moody 2013; Iskander 2021). Where subtle strategies enabled internal coherence, the examples in this assemblage highlight pedagogical risk-taking, whereby teachers mobilise their identities materially to disrupt expectations, build relationships with students, and open-up space in the classroom for students to create new gendered possibilities (Hickey-Moody 2013; Riddle and Hickey 2024; Schumacher 2025a).

Although dress codes in the UK are typically framed to uphold and promote professional standards (Department for Education 2024; Raby 2012), they remain imbued with sexist, cisnormative, and classed logics (Happel 2013; Let Clothes Be Clothes 2021; Bragg et al. 2018). As Bragg and Ringrose (2023) argue, in relation to school uniforms, these codes function as technologies of regulation, determining who can belong, be read as competent, or remain unmarked (Garner 2014). In the case of transgender and gender-diverse teachers, dress becomes a site of negotiation and risk, where expectations of professionalism are often unevenly applied.

Take Oli, a non-binary teacher who wears patterned trousers, nail polish, and a pronoun badge to work. Despite adhering to official dress policies, Oli’s choices were often deemed “inappropriate”:

“If I wore what would generally be considered

male attire, but slightly outside the norm, it

was deemed inappropriate. If I wore

stereotypically female attire, it didn’t matter…”

Oli’s experience demonstrates that professionalism is never neutral; it is a cisnormative affective boundary, a field where some gender expressions are tolerated only if they remain familiar, aestheticised, and legible within binary norms (Ahmed 2004; Cumberbatch 2021). Notably, these affective judgments do not emerge in isolation, they unfold through intra-actions (Barad 2007) or mutual co-constitutions of bodies, clothing, institutional space, policy, and response (Taylor 2013). Although Oli’s patterned trousers were not explicitly transgressive, they became “too much” when read on a visibly queer and nonbinary body.

These moments of dress as disruption can also reflect what Schumacher (2025b) highlights as institutional tendencies to simplify or erase the complexity of transgender and gender-diverse identities. Dress codes, like other social systems, often rely on binary classifications that foreclose nuance and agency. When teachers like Oli embody ambiguity, they transgress school policy and disrupt institutional epistemologies that seek to fix gender in ways that are recognisable, regulated, and safe for others. Importantly, it is these disruptions that generate emergent pedagogical possibilities where gender is concerned. One example, from Oli’s narrative, is when a Year 7 student questioned their nail varnish and another student intervened to defend them. Oli reflected:

“I didn’t have to clarify the fact that

I’m not a boy and all that stuff. I had a lesson

to teach, but I really liked the interaction…

once that had been settled, the boy didn’t

raise any more fuss.”

This seemingly small moment illustrates a relational pedagogy of presence, where gendered materiality signals more than identity and creates openings for solidarity, peer advocacy, and pedagogical dialogue (A. Lee 2024). As Schumacher (2025b) describes in their reflexive autoethnographic account of teaching as a transgender and gender-diverse person, visibility through pronoun badges and gendered accessories, emerges as a deliberate practice of resistance resulting in an unfolding toward an ethic of care, especially for students navigating similar tensions.

Charlie, a transmasculine teacher most often read as a cisgender man, uses this perceived privilege strategically. His deliberate decision to wear nail varnish or brightly coloured trousers in the workplace unsettles conventional masculine expectations and opens up a space for students to explore different ways of expressing and ‘doing’ gender.’

Following this moment of unsettling gendered dress, boys in Charlie’s class wore nail varnish the following year. These quiet disruptions echo several researchers’ findings on authentic teacher leadership, where openness about gender identity enables trust, relationality, and pedagogical disruption (Brett et al. 2024; C. Lee 2022). Charlie’s material resistance is subtle, but it models alternative ways of being a teacher and a man, expanding the symbolic terrain of both.

For Blue, another non-binary participant, the experience of wearing a traditional suit jacket to a promotion interview prompted intense dysphoria, they shared, “It just felt like I was cross-dressing… it felt so alien, so wrong.” This moment catalysed a shift for Blue from performing professionalism through discomfort to embodying it through resistance and self-recognition. In response to this workplace interview, Blue created new possibilities in their presentation and shifted expectations by wearing more affirming clothing to school, trying it out there for the first time. Some of Blue’s choices went unnoticed; others were quietly accepted, signalling that the school setting offered a safer space to experiment materially before trying similar clothing elsewhere. For instance, Blue described wearing a skirt to school, an item that they had been nervous about wearing professionally due to potential negative reactions that might compromise their safety. Reflecting on this experience, they recalled, “I was panicking before… and I thought, no, do you know what, this is what I want to wear so I am going to wear this.” Following this, Blue wore the skirt to school and did not attract any negative response.

“I turned up in a skirt, and that was fine, I was

in the band…. nobody said a word.”

This experience of resistance and redefining cisheteronormative conceptualisations of gendered professionalism through material presentation at school, and feeling safe to do so, gave Blue the confidence and affirmation to continue resisting cisheteronormative notions of material presentation outside of school.

Blue’s resistance and potential to redefine gendered professionalism can also be evidenced in material disruptions beyond the example of the skirt. Their self-designed, non-binary tattoo acted as an embodied material disruption of cisnormative expectations and called into question notions of what it is to be a teaching “professional” (Swain 2017; Burkman 2018). The tattoo also troubled what Harris and Jones (2014) critique as the ideal of the ‘neutral teacher’, because it embodied social justice and positionality in their presentation, thereby dismantling policy assumptions that teachers can be apolitical and impartial (Department for Education 2025). For Blue, material neutrality and impartiality were not tangible options if they wished to experience recognition and reinforce their right to belong without compromise. And it is through teachers like Blue, who continually resist and redefine gendered professionalism, that spaces are created within schools to explore new possibilities for affirming and doing gender. For them, to embody and live their non-binary identity was non-negotiable. As they asserted, “you know, nothing you can do can take that away. That’s part of my skin; it’s in my body”. Below they describe what embodying this material symbol of their non-binary identity meant to them.

“I deliberately got it somewhere visible. It was

absolutely about just saying to myself, look, this

is my sort of certainty of who I am. It’s sort of

like a little commitment ceremony to myself.

You know, you can look down and know you’ve

got this. You know, when things are crap and

you’re being denied your existence and your

rights, you can just remember yourself that

you’re not the only one.”

Importantly, Blue’s desire to be overtly visible as a non-binary teacher within their school setting was contingent on the specific entanglements of their school context. The intra-action of the presence of LGBTQ+ representation within the school leadership team, the SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) school environment, the absence of a school uniform policy and Blue’s body collectively created a more affirming and affective atmosphere. These material-discursive elements coalesced to encourage a form of visibility and expression that had been untenable in Blue’s previous prescriptive institutional settings. Equally, this assemblage demonstrates how normative requirements for transgender and gender-diverse teachers to hold the binary line (Wells 2018) can be dismantled when the material-discursive conditions allow. As Barad reminds us:

“Bodies do not simply take their places in the

world. They are not simply situated in, or located

in, particular environments. Rather, ‘‘environments’’

and ‘‘bodies’’ are intra-actively co-constituted.”

(Barad 2007, p. 170)

The material-discursive acts described above span Wieringa’s (2014) sliding scale of subversion, ranging from subtle divergence to symbolic refusal. Painted nails, trousers, badges, and tattoos go beyond aesthetic decoration. They operate as complicit agents of intra-action, configuring meaning and policy. What makes these acts all the more powerful is their apparent mundanity: woven into the fabric of school life, they refuse erasure through a subtle visibility that neither demands attention nor retreats in shame (Bundock and Moore 2022; Brett et al. 2024; Fish et al. 2018; Horton and Kraftl 2009). Notably, these transgender and gender diverse teachers’ choices emerge within school environments saturated with the hidden curricula of cisnormativity and institutional conservatism (Donovan et al. 2023; Howard et al. 2018; Schumacher 2025a; van Leent and Spina 2023). Transgender and gender-diverse teachers navigate this terrain with pedagogical reflexivity, aware of the risks and motivated by the possibility that their non-cisgender embodiment might expand what is imaginable for their students. As Schumacher (2025b) alludes, acts such as these arise from vulnerability and hope, shaping an ethics of care which places student affirmation, community rapport, and educational transformation at the centre. In addition, work by Payne and Smith (2014) supports this claim, noting that normalising transgender and gender-diverse visibility within everyday staff dress can profoundly reshape student perceptions about transgender and gender-diverse people, especially when it becomes ordinary rather than exceptional. Therefore, dress as resistance and possibility is less about aesthetic preference or opposition to policy, and more about the remaking of professional space. Supporting this, Harris et al. (2021) suggest that queer, transgender and gender-diverse teachers often perform extra emotional and professional labour as they navigate institutional expectations and seek to remain visible. Despite this, as this section shows, this labour offers tangible rewards; it creates space for critical possibility, allowing professionalism, pedagogy, and authority to be reimagined.

Ultimately, the material and embodied acts of Charlie, Oli, and Blue explicitly challenge the assumption that professionalism is a fixed, depoliticised category. Instead, their pedagogies and practices demonstrate that professionalism is always already a gendered performance that can be resisted, expanded, and remade through material practices of courage, creativity, and care.

4. Conclusions

This paper has explored how transgender and gender-diverse teachers subvert and reconfigure school dress codes through everyday material acts that are, at times, both resistant and affirmative. Our analysis has highlighted the importance of re-examining dress code policies through a lens of gender inclusivity and material agency. Although schools often purport to use dress code policies to create a sense of belonging and community, these professional demands can actually limit gender inclusivity, as these teachers have shown. We argue that deliberate policy reform, attentive to how material practices (e.g., uniforms, dress expectations) shape and enable who feels legitimate as a teacher, can transform schools into more gender-affirming spaces where all students and teachers can experience self-affirmation. Theoretically, by drawing on feminist new materialism and symbolic subversion, we have shown that professional dress codes are not neutral, fixed, or apolitical; they are policies that are entangled with affect, power, and possibility. Our analysis of these assemblages highlighted the distributed agency of gendered resistance and extended these conceptions beyond individual transgression. Barad’s (2007) contribution of intra-action illuminates how these teachers’ choices emerge through ongoing negotiations across institutional assemblages, bodies, clothing, policies, spaces, and dominant cultural discourse (van Amsterdam et al. 2023; Zembylas 2014).

Charlie’s binder, Oli’s trousers, and Blue’s tattoo, along with their other objects of wonder, all illustrate how apparently ordinary objects can hold extraordinary significance. The objects enabled us to extend the reach of our analysis beyond an interpretation of the human-centred narrative and consider the ‘glow’ of matter (MacLure 2013b). In doing so, we revealed the affective and political stakes of self-presentation in schools. These teachers’ acts materialise forms of symbolic subversion (Wieringa 2014) that are often subtle and powerful pockets of resistance and possibility. Notably, whether covert or overt, they refuse erasure and offer a reconsideration of what constitutes the professional, pedagogical and political.

Within this paper, we wish to stress that these practices should be considered within the contexts within which they evolve, specifically schools that are steeped in the hidden curricula of cisnormativity and institutional conservatism (Donovan et al. 2023; Howard et al. 2018; van Leent and Spina 2023). Their micro-political acts challenge hegemonic ideals of partiality, respectability and competence that have consistently been shaped by the cisheteronormative demand for white, able-bodied, middle-class aesthetics (Owis 2024). Through their influence on school climates, these teachers demonstrate how the ‘phantasmatic force of “gender”’ (Butler 2024, p. 9) can begin to dispel and open space for more inclusive and expansive educational futures not just for gender diverse teachers but also for students, colleagues and others within their sphere of influence.

While our analysis was necessarily focussed and our participant sample drew on diverse school contexts, age groups, and UK regions, it does have limitations. We acknowledge that the experiences, understandings, challenges and effects of being a transgender and gender-diverse teacher are dependent on an individual’s positionality at the ‘intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and other social identifiers’ (Iskander 2021, p. 201). For example, within our findings, there was an absence of teachers of colour. As a result, within this paper, we cannot fully account for how race and gendered embodiment intra-act in the negotiation of professional dress and identity.

Therefore, future research could build on the commonalities we have presented here by centring transgender and gender-diverse teachers of colour and other under-represented groups to explore how racialised, gendered and classed expectations of professionalism are differently experienced and contested (Nicolazzo 2021). In this way, the participant sample of the current study is not a limitation of our participants’ accounts but a reflection of the broader systemic barriers that constrain who can participate and be heard. We also argue that future research should examine the implications of how wider school policies limit gender inclusivity and how transgender and gender diverse teachers might c/overtly resist these practices. Methodologically we would hope to build on the effectiveness of these participatory methods and further demonstrate how feminist new materialism can reveal new understandings of the experiences of transgender and gender-diverse teachers within the schools beyond the United Kingdom.

What the teachers in this study do offer are new and important insights into the complex and continual negotiations that transgender and gender-diverse teachers are compelled to contend with in order to claim self-affirmation and empowerment in schools. Their material-discursive practices disrupt dress codes, resist the tacit expectations of professionalism and open up sites of possibility for doing, understanding, and being gender/ered differently. These accounts demonstrate how “these perfectly ordinary” human and more-than-human school assemblages enable “strikingly unusual” gendered transformation to emerge within enduring systems of regulation and enforced conformity (Peim 2024, p. 16). We wish to conclude this paper by asserting that these usefully disruptive practices are only a starting point on the way to recognition, representation, and belonging.