Abstract
Queering and transing social work education is an intersectional, relational, and anti-colonial framework. It aligns with the goals of preparing social work students for practice in a politicized landscape, supporting queer and trans faculty advocacy and resistance efforts, and sustaining culturally responsive, anti-racist, anti-carceral, and universally designed pedagogy. Aligned with critical pedagogies, queering and transing social work education fosters critical consciousness and structural competence among all those engaged in learning and teaching. One of the ways we can work to build these abilities in our students and colleagues includes disrupting cisgender/heterosexual assumptions about queer and trans experiences through exploring the ways that human behavior/development theories, evidence-based interventions, and social work institutions serve to reinforce problematic, and at times harmful, assumptions about how gender and sexuality are embodied. Challenging the idea of a universal experience of those we serve opens the door to understanding how White supremacy, ableism, and cisheteropatriarchy work together to exclude and erase those whose lives do not fit this norm. In this article, we interrogate the idea that social work practice is neutral and explore how we can learn from and share insights about the intersectional advocacy, organizing, and coalition building that have preceded and coexisted with our discipline. We describe queer and trans social work education methodologies (e.g., power mapping, arts-based methodologies) alongside praxis, including infusing explicit and implicit curricula, shifting social work institutional cultures, including our practicum placements, and enhancing accountability and transparency.