LGB teachers and the (com)promised conditions of legislative change

The personal/professional boundary poses particular difficulties for LGB teachers because of the pervasive presumption of heterosexuality. Furthermore, the teaching profession’s concern with the care of children combines with reductive ideas about sexuality and gender identity to pose specific vulnerabilities for LGB teachers. In many contexts worldwide, legislative structures such as Civil Partnership and Marriage Equality are being introduced and this is changing the terms of recognition for LGB teachers. At the same time, deficiencies and ambiguities persist in employment legislation, often through religious exemptions that pose specific threats to LGB teachers. For many LGB teachers who enter into a legal structure such as marriage, these legislative gaps suddenly become more threatening. This paper makes a new and timely contribution by capturing how, across a seven-year time period in Ireland, LGB teachers have experienced three legislative moments – ‘Civil Partnership’, ‘Marriage Equality’ and the amendment of religious exemption 37.1 of the Employment Equality Act. Building from an analysis of three qualitative studies (2012, 2015 and 2018), this paper attends to some of the compromised conditions of legislative change and argues for closer attention to the micro-political texture of gender and sexuality in education contexts.