1. Introduction

A language educator once said to me, “I treat everyone the same; their gender doesn’t matter! I just teach the language!” This is an arguably common, often well-intentioned approach to gender in language education. It is also, however, a manifestation of multiple, interconnected misunderstandings—ones that gloss over the interconnections among gender, language, and learning, and miss the social, relational nature of these phenomena. To help us understand this status quo and imagine alternatives, let us break down what is missed in utterances like this one.

Gender matters. The suggestion that gender does not matter in language education ignores the social turn in applied linguistics. This means that it ignores a major shift in conversations about how who we are, our positions in society, and our relationships to one another all influence the ways that we do language and the ways that others perceive our languaging (Pennycook, 2010). Take a moment to think about how gender shapes your interactions with people. Does gender ever influence the languaging choices you make? How so? How about the ways that you interpret the languaging choices made by others?

Were you able to think of some examples of how gender influences your enlanguaged interactions (i.e. that occur in and through language)? Was it challenging or did you quickly think of examples? Your responses to the reflection questions might relate to how gender inflects your positionalities. We can imagine that those of us who are made to notice our gender more often (because of being marginalized based on gender, engaging in coursework on gender, or other factors that have made gender more salient) will come up with examples more readily than those for whom gender and its relationship to language remain more subconscious.

Let us consider three utterances to help illustrate these relationships and think about sociopragmatics, or the use of language (in interaction, and as influenced by our perceived sociocultural norms). As you read these utterances, consider 1) how your interpretation might be influenced by who produced the utterance in terms of their identities and 2) their relationship to you. Also, consider whether and how 3) the context of this languaging matters. Finally, consider 4) the relationship between gender and language form; where is gender coming up in language and in what ways?

1. Hey, baby.
2. He is pretty.
3. Iel est belleau, gentil.le comme tout, et une personne super intelligente !

Gloss: They [singular] are beautiful [neologism combining beau and belle, which differentially gesture toward a person’s gender], nice as all get out [inclusive form that includes both traditional noun classes, separated by a period], and a super intelligent person! [Person is always noun class une, so the adjective in no way gestures toward a person’s gender.]

1. "Hey, baby” from the elderly Black woman I see every weekend at the grocery store is different from the same sentence uttered by a stranger in the produce section on a Saturday morning, whom I assume to be a man my age, or by the nonbinary barista to whom I just said hello. These are also different from a “Hey, baby” from a man I do not know in a dark alleyway, or from a woman in the same context. The same words, uttered in different contexts, by people of different genders, with whom I have different relationships, evoke very different meanings – meanings that are influenced by my own positionality (e.g., “Hey, baby” from an unknown man in a grocery store is something that I interpret as cruising (or flirting) based on how I am read and a “Hey, baby” from a nonbinary barista is likely a moment of care, but for you and your positionality, these interpretations might not hold).
2. "He is pretty." defies cisheteronormative assumptions because “he” tends to be understood as gesturing towards masculinity and “pretty” femininity. Who produced the utterance and who it references will both influence its likely interpretations. If the person uttering this phrase is learning to language in English, it will most likely be interpreted as a mistake in constructing “He is handsome” or “She is pretty” due to (cisheteronormative) assumptions about the referent’s gender (man or woman) and sexuality (heterosexual), whether or not it actually is. Which of these is assumed correct will also vary based on a reading of the gender and sexuality of the person who produced the utterance (i.e., who is the utterance producer assumed to find attractive?). Assumptions about the utterance producer and referent’s gender modalities may also enter consideration (being assumed cis may decrease the likelihood of considering trans linguacultures). If a mistake is not assumed, it may be interpreted as an insult to the gender of the referent (especially if read as a man) or as an indication of the referent’s queerness (For an extended discussion, consult Knisely, 2021, pp. 174-175).
3. If the first two utterances help us begin to understand the interconnections of language and gender, the third invites reflection on what happens when ways of doing gender cannot be neatly categorized into traditional binary systems, including the traditional binary noun classes that can be observed in numerous languages (e.g., Romance languages such as French, Spanish, or Italian, and Germanic languages such as German, although not only). Depending on the positionalities of the utterance producer and their interlocutor, these ways of languaging might be read as mistakes, recognized as trans linguistic practices, or go unnoticed (willfully or otherwise).

By examining the ways that our social positions and those of our interlocutors influence how we do language and how our languaging is interpreted in interaction, we can understand that our genders do matter, as do all the identities through which we are positioned in society.

Language is a social, relational act. This process of examining how we do gender and language together can also lay bare why we cannot “just teach the language” by helping us understand that there is no singular, pre-established, stable, decontextualized language to be taught. As the previous section demonstrated, the possible interpretations of any given utterance are bound up with the context in which that languaging happens. So too are the very shapes and pathways that our languaging can take, particularly as they relate to who we are in connection to whom we language with and how these relationships interact with our communicative ends and our prior enlanguaged experiences.

There is no singular, pre-established, stable, decontextualized language to be taught because language is not a thing. Language does not exist a priori – meaning, it does not exist before us or without us. It is not something we simply use as-is in interaction. Rather, language is always being reshaped in interaction. Language is an act that we do with others and, to the extent that each of us is engaged in doing language, we are all actively a part of this ongoing and continuous change. This is what drives the use of language-as-verb (e.g., terms like languaging and do language):

Languagers are not simply passive users of the pre-established, inherited systems foisted upon them, but agentive [i.e., active] participants in the continuous (re)creation of enlanguaged reality. By challenging antecedent [i.e., previously existing] enlanguagements [i.e., the patterned outcomes of communicative processes], by transgressing so-called rules of languaging, and by languaging new ideas and realities, they are opening up space for new ideational worlds. […] languagers proposing innovative forms, deploying novel structures, and challenging antecedent prescriptions and patterns are not merely challenging prior enlanguagements or adding to the systems they have inherited, but are redoing linguistic worlds – their own, of course, but also those of their fellow languagers (Knisely & Russell, 2024, p. 24).

Inclusion in harmful systems is neither equitable nor just. If we language differently from one another, it is largely because we create and take up varying identities, occupy different social locations, and have different relationships to one another and to various linguistic acts –all of this always changing across time and context. If we are not the same and we do not experience the world in the same way, treating “everyone the same” (i.e., equality) fails to honor the differences in what we need to be successful as languagers and learners (and not only). Equity is a concept that helps us understand that people need varying resources and opportunities to be able to language as they are and reach equal outcomes. It is a concept that substantially informs gender- just approaches to language education. What all of this implies is that, if we want to work toward languaging and language education that are more equitable and just, we –in our roles as languagers, scholar-educators, and students– have to do more than include everyone in the existing, harmful systems. We must participate in remaking these systems, with and alongside all people who are invested in and affected by them, so that they –and the processes, products, and perspectives bound up in them– are increasingly equitable and just for everyone.

To summarize:

1.1 Gender-Just Pedagogies

To move beyond the misunderstandings bound up in status quo approaches to gender and language, we must open ourselves up to trans ways of knowing, being, and languaging, and allow these to shape the ways we approach language teaching and learning (consult Knisely, 2023, and responses in the same issue).

The importance of this assertion can be understood in two principal, interconnected ways. First, it is a matter of equity and justice: if allowed to persist unchecked, “the processes and products of language education too often serve to reproduce and reformulate cisheteronormativities,” or the presentation of cisgender and heterosexual as the only valid ways of doing gender and sexuality (Knisely, 2023, p. 607; consult also Diaz, Mejía, & Villamizar, 2022). This undermines the liberatory potential of language education for everyone, while actively harming trans people most acutely and profoundly. This occurs directly, as trans people report experiencing linguistic, symbolic, and other forms of violence when interacting with cisnormative institutions, including language classrooms (Baros, 2021; Knisely & Russell, 2024, pp. 43-66; Provitola, 2019; Spiegelman, 2022). It also occurs indirectly as cisgender people fail to unscript these normativities in the ways that they language, think, and otherwise behave (Knisely & Paiz, 2021, pp. 26-27; Knisely, 2020, pp. 872-873; 2022b). Second, it is a matter of enriching our understandings of literacy and languaging: “teaching students how to engage fluidly, flexibly, and intersectionally in thinking and languaging about gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and other social positions is central to contemporary literacy, given their ubiquity as organizers of social life” (Knisely, 2022a, p. 148).

Research has demonstrated the potential of gender-just pedagogies to support these interconnected aims of equity, justice, literacy, and languaging. Specifically, gender-just pedagogies have proven potential as a tool for developing contemporary literacy, metalinguistic awareness, intersectional thinking, and linguistic, intercultural and symbolic competencies (Gallagher et al., 2024; Knisely 2022a, 2022b, 2022d, 2023; Knisely & Russell, 2024; Preseau et al., 2024).^[1] This ever-mounting evidence makes clear that engagement with trans linguacultures and trans people via a gender-just paradigm supports numerous, critically important aspects of language education. Given this, gender-just pedagogies are “an important tool for increasingly ethical, just, and viable language programs” (Knisely, 2022a, p. 158; Knisely, 2023, p. 611).

If gender-just pedagogies are plural, it is because there are many possible ways of moving toward gender justice in language education, many of which connect to other critical approaches (consider, e.g., the decolonial, crip, raciolinguistic, translanguaging chapters in this volume; Knisely & Russell, 2024, pp. 4-7, 251-255). In fact, most scholars who work in trans and queer applied linguistics refuse a singular approach, because dictating one way of teaching towards gender justice would “be overly reductive and recreate the very normativities that [it] seeks to redress;” instead, we tend to focus on “frameworks and tools-for-thought that practitioners can deploy in contextually sensitive ways to address the lived experiences and needs of their students" (Knisely & Paiz, 2021, pp. 24-25). Leaning into fluidity and flexibility in these ways is one manifestation of trans linguacultures in applied linguistics. While embracing multiplicity, there are two constants that characterize all gender-just pedagogies: 1) a relational and unwavering investment in people who flout cisheteronormative ways of being and 2) a corresponding divestment from “practices rooted in cisnormativity and cislingualism” (Knisely & Russell, 2024, p. 44).^[2]

In addition to these two constants, many pedagogues working toward gender justice share, in whole or in part, in the aims and strategies of one type of gender-just pedagogies: trans-affirming queer inquiry-based pedagogies (TAQIPBs, originally described in Knisely & Paiz, 2021). The core aims of TAQIBPs are to:

1. 1. unearth and question all forms of normativity [including, but not limited to, cisheteronormativities],
   2. raise awareness of LGBTQ+ [people, lives, and linguacultures],
   3. actively create and maintain space for marginalized perspectives,
   4. keenly attend to respecting individual agency and a right to self-definition,
   5. focus on fostering respectful engagement with disparate worldviews, and
   6. always leave room for fluidity, flexibility, and complexity (Knisely, 2022f, p. 166).

The strategies through which these aims are taken up are multiple, and may include:

1. 1. exploring with and alongside students in an effort to individualize learning, decenter the classroom, trouble students’ perceptions of expertise, and engage with locally relevant, real-world LGBTQ+ experiences and language;
   2. finding space throughout the curriculum, de-sensationalizing and creating value around LGBTQ+ discussions as a part of critical literacy, rather than [reifying their marginalization by] relegating queer and trans knowledges to isolated days, units, or courses;
   3. engaging in critical close reading and discussion, particularly as it can lay bare the roles of language, assumptions, and normativities in shaping perceptions of reality and constraining certain forms of being; and
   4. tying queer and trans content directly to learning goals to demonstrate the importance of gender and sexuality in languaging (Knisely & Russell, 2024, p. 45).

Visit https://www.krisknisely.com/resources-for-educators for supplementary resources, including infographics on TAQIBPs and starting ideas for their application in classroom contexts. Additional examples of how TAQIBPs can be applied to classroom language education can be found in Knisely (2022b, 2022e, 2022f, 2024a).