Gender identities beyond the biologically assigned categories of “male” and “female” have been documented across time, space, and culture, yet these identities are relegated to the margins by dominant paradigms spread through colonization (Keenan, 2022). Due to transphobia and gender binarism, non-binary individuals are subject to frequent miscategorization and misgendering, language-based forms of identity invalidation that cause psychological and emotional harm (Johnson et al., 2020). Given the stakes of language in the affirmation of trans* identities (Zimman, 2019), language teachers must take deliberate action to avoid inflicting harm in their classrooms.

This talk draws from a participatory action research project with 10 non-binary students in U.S. high schools in which students engaged in surveys, interviews, focus groups, journaling, and group activities in an online community related to learning French and Spanish at school. By exploring the participants’ situated experiences, this study investigates the affordances and constraints in each student’s language classroom, how the student was able to exercise agency, and the factors impacting their investment in language learning. Cross-case analysis points to the central power of the teacher, the personally-felt impact of language ideologies, and the attritional effects of student labor. I will conclude by offering recommendations for teachers on building language classrooms where all can learn and thrive.

Julia Donnelly Spiegelman is a critical applied linguist, French teacher, and anti-bias teacher educator. Her research and activism focus on the intersection of power, identity, and ideology in K-16 world language classrooms, seeking to document, understand, and oppose the workings of racism and transphobia within these contexts. Julia is a PhD candidate in applied linguistics at University of Massachusetts Boston. She has an MA in French from Middlebury College, where she was awarded the Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace. Julia’s work has been published in Applied Linguistics, The French Review, and L2 Journal. She is a faculty member at the Multicultural Teaching Institute, where she works with K–12 teachers to develop awareness of their own identities and engage anti-racist pedagogies in their classrooms.

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Lourdes Ortega (she/ella) is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her main area of research is in second language acquisition. She is best known for her award-winning meta-analysis of second-language instruction in 2000, her best-seller textbook Understanding Second Language Acquisition (2009, translated into Mandarin in 2016), and for championing a bilingual turn in SLA. She co-edited, with Annick De Houwer, The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingualism (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Lourdes is the general editor of Language Learning, and president-elect of the American Association for Applied Linguistics.

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