The Indian education system is far from queer friendly. Can the efforts of individual queer teachers counteract systemic oppression?
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By the time the summons from the principal came for Jane Kaushik (she/her), she had already heard the whispers from the students. It was late 2022, and it had only been a week since Jane joined Uma Devi Children’s Academy, a residential school, in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri district as a teacher. She had been living in Delhi when she got the job and decided to relocate for it.
At the time of her hiring, the principal of the school knew Jane was a transgender woman because of a difference in her older education certificates and her current ID proof. Jane said that the principal had asked her not to tell anyone about her gender identity, a condition Jane had rejected at other schools but was forced to accept in this one because she had been unemployed for two years and needed the work.
A student in Jane’s dorm ‘found out’ that Jane was trans, and the news spread like wildfire. She prepared herself for the worst as she made her way to the principal’s office. As she entered the room, she noticed that two male teachers sat beside the principal.
Jane told me that the principal asked her to write a resignation letter, and that when she tried to reason with her, the principal said that if the job really meant so much to her, she shouldn’t have “let it out.” The reference was to her gender identity—Jane said that she still thinks about the principal’s choice of phrasing.
Many institutions in India, educational institutions foremost among them, tend to view any deviation from the norm as an aberration to be punished. The political scientist Asim Ali recently wrote that “the Indian schooling system produces an exceptional, soul crushing conformity.” One of the ways in which this is accomplished, he argues, is by “inculcating in students an eternal suspicion of their own autonomy.” This sort of environment is particularly oppressive towards queer people, whose very existence defies societal norms.
How then do teachers who are queer navigate this flawed system? What does it mean for them to carry their queerness into these deeply unsafe spaces? How does their queerness inform their pedagogy? And how does their presence in the classroom influence the lives of students?
In search of answers to these questions, I spoke to six queer teachers from across the country. Three of them have only taught in private schools or colleges in cities. The others either currently teach in smaller towns and villages, or have done so in the past.
In my conversations, I found a common refrain: they all want to be the kind of teacher they wished they’d had as students.
Around a decade ago, when Prerna (he/she/they) was still a student in high school, they asked their teacher a question during a sexuality education class—what did it mean that they weren't interested in crushes and didn’t experience attraction? In response, the teacher told Prerna, “Sexual attraction and desire can be very liberating, there’s no need to feel shame around it,” adding that when they met the right person, “it would all make sense”.
For most teachers, and even some queer teachers like me, there’s nothing immediately untoward about that teacher’s fairly progressive and sex-positive response. For Prerna, however, it made coming to terms with their own queerness a lot more complicated as a young asexual person.
In the comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) sessions that they conduct and even in general classroom interactions at a private alternative school in Bengaluru, Prerna makes it a point to let children know what it was like for them to grow up without experiencing attraction. “I’ve found that at least two students in every classroom will say, ‘I feel the same’. I’m not sure if it’s [queerness] or if they’ve just internalised ‘this is not the age for crushes’, but it’s something I wish I had when I was a child.”
Going beyond CSE sessions, Prerna said they ask themselves how to destabilise heteronormativity “through everyday conversation and in every little practical moment.” As a masc-presenting non-binary person, they often go to school dressed in veshtis and shirts and finds that children almost always respond to their presentation with “enthusiastic curiosity that is very open to listening and understanding.” Another opportunity arises during PT/games periods. Sports are segregated in schools, and for Prerna, it’s crucial to show that “non-gendered joy in play is possible.” Instead of organizing separate games for boys and girls, which is still a norm in many schools, Prerna makes all children play together, whether it is football or volleyball. They also makes them play against each other. “The point isn't who wins or who is stronger but that they have fun together.”
Like Prerna, Kabir Maan (he/him) is a sexuality educator who works with government and private schools and engages with children in formal and informal learning spaces. In a recent art exhibit he set up for students at Delhi University, he guided young viewers through a map of his experience as a transgender man. The audience was confronted with elements that are part of his everyday life—layers of clothing, disposable stand-to-pee instruments, underwear with a pad stuck to it. Kabir uses each of these elements to tell a larger story—about trans ingenuity, dysphoria and fashion, harassment and complicated doctors’ appointments, and all the ways in which trans bodies are forced to fit into binaries.
While Prerna and Kabir’s approaches to education are likely to help queer students feel more comfortable in the classroom, non-queer students also stand to benefit immensely. Ultimately, learning how to think beyond society’s default rules regarding gender and sexuality can increase students’ capacity for critical thought and their appetite for freedom.
By the time the summons from the principal came for Jane Kaushik (she/her), she had already heard the whispers from the students. It was late 2022, and it had only been a week since Jane joined Uma Devi Children’s Academy, a residential school, in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri district as a teacher. She had been living in Delhi when she got the job and decided to relocate for it.
At the time of her hiring, the principal of the school knew Jane was a transgender woman because of a difference in her older education certificates and her current ID proof. Jane said that the principal had asked her not to tell anyone about her gender identity, a condition Jane had rejected at other schools but was forced to accept in this one because she had been unemployed for two years and needed the work.
A student in Jane’s dorm ‘found out’ that Jane was trans, and the news spread like wildfire. She prepared herself for the worst as she made her way to the principal’s office. As she entered the room, she noticed that two male teachers sat beside the principal.
Jane told me that the principal asked her to write a resignation letter, and that when she tried to reason with her, the principal said that if the job really meant so much to her, she shouldn’t have “let it out.” The reference was to her gender identity—Jane said that she still thinks about the principal’s choice of phrasing.
Many institutions in India, educational institutions foremost among them, tend to view any deviation from the norm as an aberration to be punished. The political scientist Asim Ali recently wrote that “the Indian schooling system produces an exceptional, soul crushing conformity.” One of the ways in which this is accomplished, he argues, is by “inculcating in students an eternal suspicion of their own autonomy.” This sort of environment is particularly oppressive towards queer people, whose very existence defies societal norms.
How then do teachers who are queer navigate this flawed system? What does it mean for them to carry their queerness into these deeply unsafe spaces? How does their queerness inform their pedagogy? And how does their presence in the classroom influence the lives of students?
In search of answers to these questions, I spoke to six queer teachers from across the country. Three of them have only taught in private schools or colleges in cities. The others either currently teach in smaller towns and villages, or have done so in the past.
In my conversations, I found a common refrain: they all want to be the kind of teacher they wished they’d had as students.
Around a decade ago, when Prerna (he/she/they) was still a student in high school, they asked their teacher a question during a sexuality education class—what did it mean that they weren't interested in crushes and didn’t experience attraction? In response, the teacher told Prerna, “Sexual attraction and desire can be very liberating, there’s no need to feel shame around it,” adding that when they met the right person, “it would all make sense”.
For most teachers, and even some queer teachers like me, there’s nothing immediately untoward about that teacher’s fairly progressive and sex-positive response. For Prerna, however, it made coming to terms with their own queerness a lot more complicated as a young asexual person.
In the comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) sessions that they conduct and even in general classroom interactions at a private alternative school in Bengaluru, Prerna makes it a point to let children know what it was like for them to grow up without experiencing attraction. “I’ve found that at least two students in every classroom will say, ‘I feel the same’. I’m not sure if it’s [queerness] or if they’ve just internalised ‘this is not the age for crushes’, but it’s something I wish I had when I was a child.”
Going beyond CSE sessions, Prerna said they ask themselves how to destabilise heteronormativity “through everyday conversation and in every little practical moment.” As a masc-presenting non-binary person, they often go to school dressed in veshtis and shirts and finds that children almost always respond to their presentation with “enthusiastic curiosity that is very open to listening and understanding.” Another opportunity arises during PT/games periods. Sports are segregated in schools, and for Prerna, it’s crucial to show that “non-gendered joy in play is possible.” Instead of organizing separate games for boys and girls, which is still a norm in many schools, Prerna makes all children play together, whether it is football or volleyball. They also makes them play against each other. “The point isn't who wins or who is stronger but that they have fun together.”
Like Prerna, Kabir Maan (he/him) is a sexuality educator who works with government and private schools and engages with children in formal and informal learning spaces. In a recent art exhibit he set up for students at Delhi University, he guided young viewers through a map of his experience as a transgender man. The audience was confronted with elements that are part of his everyday life—layers of clothing, disposable stand-to-pee instruments, underwear with a pad stuck to it. Kabir uses each of these elements to tell a larger story—about trans ingenuity, dysphoria and fashion, harassment and complicated doctors’ appointments, and all the ways in which trans bodies are forced to fit into binaries.
While Prerna and Kabir’s approaches to education are likely to help queer students feel more comfortable in the classroom, non-queer students also stand to benefit immensely. Ultimately, learning how to think beyond society’s default rules regarding gender and sexuality can increase students’ capacity for critical thought and their appetite for freedom.
Three years ago, Krishna*(they/he), a trans non-binary art educator, joined an educational organisation in a small town. Since then, they, along with a colleague, have been setting up a Pride Month display for children in the library run by the organisation, whose name Krishna prefers not to reveal to protect their identity. They have painted bookshelves in rainbow colours and in the colours of the trans flag and stacked them with queer-themed books for children to read. However, as they did so, they noticed a conspicuous absence of some types of stories in the library.
“All of the picture books in the library [which are queer] are about either homosexual cis people or trans femme children/people. There are books about girls wanting to ride motorcycles, or having facial hair, but there are no books about trans masculine people or about [being] non-binary,” they said. Krishna decided to do some research of their own and made a list of books that represented experiences more familiar to their own experience with gender, and is waiting for the library to buy these books.
As an art educator, Krishna views their work as an important tool that helps them build an environment in which all children learn to believe that their way of perceiving and existing in the world is valid. This is especially important, they said, because the children they teach are mostly from low-income families and marginalised communities.
Krishna’s facilitation involves bookmaking, narrative work, and story writing—and a lot of the prompts they use in these sessions are related to the self. They call this their “non-binary approach to art education.”
“It’s important to design spaces so that each person can bring their own individuality, perception, perspective, and lifeworld into whatever they do,” they said. “There is no one way to perceive things, experience things, or express things. Even if there is a single prompt or a common theme, the way each child processes that is completely different, and to build that environment of acceptance and interpretation in my classroom is very influenced by me being non-binary.”
For Krishna, it is also important to resist the idea that people can only express themselves in words. “I work with children for whom certain kinds of language acquisition is a struggle, and their own languages are not the mainstream. If queerness or difference of any kind is an unnamed thing, that’s okay. Language around queerness is so new…only some children who have access to English and the internet have access to that language, [but] that doesn’t mean [those who don’t] shouldn’t have access to their connection with their self, their way of being different.”
In an older strain of education philosophy, children were thought of as blank slates, or tabula rasa, waiting to be fed and filled with knowledge and meaning. While this notion has long been set aside in theory, many schools and teachers continue to build their classes and their relationships with children around it. Krishna has witnessed that attitude around them too and seeks to challenge it every day.
“Children are not encouraged to talk about themselves. They are not treated as full people,” Krishna lamented. “My focus is to let them spend time with whatever’s inside them, to help them connect to their queerness, if that exists, or their neurodivergence, or [to whatever makes them] feel different, in the hope that over time they’ll build a connection with themselves [so that] if they discover queerness, there is no discomfort there. This is at the core of how my queerness interacts with what I do.”
Receiving an education that is sensitive to—and respectful of—queerness is a rare privilege in India. It is far likelier that a student ends up in an educational setting where their queerness becomes a burden—in many cases, even the reason for them dropping out of education altogether.
In a study conducted in Tamil Nadu by UNESCO and Sahodaran, a Chennai-based NGO that is run by and for the LGBTQIA+ community, 241 of the 371 participants surveyed from gender and sexual minorities reported that they felt unsafe in schools. With 43 percent of participants reporting sexual bullying in primary school and 60 percent reporting physical bullying in middle and high school, it is no wonder that these young people felt unsafe.
Of the 18 percent of those who dared to report being bullied to school authorities, the action was taken on their complaints in just about half of those cases. Devastatingly, 33.2 percent said that bullying was an important factor in their discontinuing school.
Radz (they/them) is a teacher in an international school in Chennai and a parent educator. When they became aware of a student who was being bullied viciously for being queer, they confronted the bully, a boy in the same class as the queer student, but nothing changed. Radz pressed on and set up a meeting with the parents of the bully, hoping that it would translate to adults at home holding the bully accountable as well. The parents showed up to the meeting and listened impatiently to what Radz had to say about their son. When Radz had relayed everything, the parents asked with great urgency, “But how is he [their child] doing in his piano lessons at school?”
By the end of the conversation, Radz realised they couldn’t expect any support from the parents. Radz focused instead on protecting the queer student in whatever way they could from the bullying.
Radz told me that it is vital to involve parents in sexuality education in schools.“It may not be smooth sailing, but we need parents on board if this is going to work,” they said. “Teachers can help children organise seminars or art festivals or open houses around queer concepts to involve parents. I know people will create a ruckus, but I know I don’t want another Arvey.”
In 2022, a class 10 student of Delhi Public School, Faridabad, Arvey Malhotra, died by suicide after years of complaining about the bullying and harassment doled out to him by classmates because of his queerness. Aarti Malhotra, his mother, who was an art teacher in the same school, has since been active on social media in advocating for LGBTQIA+ children and is still fighting a court case that implicates students, teachers, and the principal of the school. Among other things, Aarti has petitioned the Delhi High Court to make gender sensitisation training mandatory in all schools in order to safeguard queer children.
In 2021, the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) released the Inclusion of Transgender Children in School Education, a manual for making schools safer and more welcoming for gender non-conforming and transgender children. The manual was taken down from the NCERT website a few days after its publication because of backlash from right-wing and parent groups, as well as from the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR). The NCPCR has its own guide for educators and schools to prevent bullying, but the recommendations are neither mandatory nor is there a section for preventing bullying of queer children.
In the absence of a systematic approach to deal with queerness as a concept or queer students as individuals, most of the burden of protecting queer students ends up falling on individual queer teachers.
“It’s important not to assume and push students one way or another. Even if they come out to you, it’s important not to give them solutions,” said Nadika (she/her), who teaches at St. Joseph University in Bengaluru. She pointed out that students entering college are probably encountering some freedoms for the first time, and just starting to think about who they are and what they want. “If a student tells me they are trans, I’ll say, ‘That’s cool, what have you thought about it? How do you want to do things?’, rather than ‘do this’ or ‘do that’,” she added.
It’s possible that these students first began asking these questions about themselves in their early teens, but not knowing where to go, they may have coped with or responded to those questions in ways that harmed their mental health, Nadika explained. Which is why it is important, in her view, to allow students to think of themselves as people who are capable of helping themselves.
Being queer themselves, Nadika and Radz are uniquely positioned to respond to queer students’ questions and concerns. “It’s important to ease the tension that exists in queer kids, and cis people can’t always do that, they may not have the right words and analogies,” said Radz.
However, the idea that queer teachers alone know how to show up for queer children can have harmful consequences for both teachers and students. Prerna believes it can become an isolating and closeting experience for a student to be expected to seek out only queer adults, adding that she doesn’t want to be “a flag bearer or some kind of agent of queerness” either.
Radz believes that one part of the solution lies in sensitising non-queer teachers to respond to the needs of queer students. Over the past year, the Tamil Nadu government has been holding public consultations for a state LGBTQIA+ policy, and in the light of this development, they have created lesson plans for teachers to introduce queerness in their classrooms, focusing on neurodivergent-friendly and age-appropriate pedagogical strategies and techniques. However, they insist that any effort to introduce queer concepts in schools has to be a multi-stakeholder effort. There is no point in creating a policy about queer sensitisation without looking closely at teacher trainers and training curriculum as well. Teachers should examine their own biases, and in this country, biases are not limited to queerness, but also operate on a complicated hierarchy of caste, religion, gender, and class.
Additionally, schools need to create frameworks that support the queer teachers that they do hire—not just because of what they have to offer to queer children, but because their queerness could make them good educators in unique ways. It isn’t enough to just hire them, but to ensure that they feel safe and supported enough to stay in schools.
In December 2022, the same month that Jane had been coerced into resigning from the school in Uttar Pradesh, the National Commission for Women (NCW) had taken cognisance of the discrimination and issued a notice to the Chief Secretary of the Uttar Pradesh government, asking that an inquiry be conducted into the incident. The inquiry led nowhere as the school claimed that Jane was fired for incompetence and went on to sue Jane for Rs.1 crore in a defamation suit.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the last time Jane was fired from a job because of her gender identity. In July 2023, she got another teaching job at JP Modi school in Jamnagar, Gujarat. She said she was fired the day after she arrived in the city when the school management learned that she was a transgender woman. In response to her writ petition to the Supreme Court, a bench comprising then Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud and two others issued a notice in January 2024 to the Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat state governments and the Centre, and the hearings are ongoing as of December 2024.
As Jane pointed out to me, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, already prohibits discrimination against trans people, but she has now been fired from two private schools explicitly because she is a transgender woman, and has also been fighting a defamation suit for speaking plainly about why she was fired. The absence of supportive and inclusive guidelines around hiring and supporting queer teachers creates a hostile environment for these teachers. When queerbeat reached out to the administration of the two schools to check why Jane was fired, the management from Uma Devi Children’s Academy in UP responded that they cannot comment on the issue because the matter is in court. The authorities of JP Modi School in Gujarat did not respond.
Krishna has been asking their organisation to conduct sensitisation sessions for their colleagues since before they joined, but it has still not happened. “If you are the first and only queer or trans employee, it’s an intense amount of work for you,” Krishna said.
Prerna recently joined a private school in Bengaluru and told me how pleasantly surprised he was when he first found a clause in the school handbook that said, “we’re open to students of all sexualities and gender expressions.” Prerna believes that this has the potential to signal to queer students that they don’t need to specifically seek out a queer teacher, and to queer teachers that they will be accepted in the staff room, which can be a relief.
Nadika believes that queer teachers should form associations and unions, and rally around larger issues rather than fighting personal and individual battles. “If you form a circle and you’re helping one student, then you’re doing something better than what we had as kids. When I was growing up, I didn’t know I could transition. If a queer student realises that they can get some support from me, then that’s a lot more useful than me fighting, for example, for my right to cut my hair when I want to. I think our fight has to be at the larger, structural level. Our fight should be policy, it should be governance, it should be better standards of education and healthcare, and access to education for people who are denied it.”
*name changed to protect their identity
Writer
Srividya Tadepalli (she/her) is a queer writer and educator based in Chennai.
Illustrator
Jose (she/they) is a non-binary illustrator from Kerala whose work highlights personal stories marked by gender, body experiences, and their South Indian heritage. While not lost in their sketchbook, they can be found devouring all things camp and horror.
Editors
Sohini (she/her) is an editor based in Bengaluru
Visvak (they/he) is a writer and editor, mostly of narrative nonfiction.
Producer
Ankur Paliwal (he/him) is an independent journalist, and founder and managing editor of queerbeat.
