In this article, Jen Gilbert, Jessica Fields, Laura Mamo, and Nancy Lesko explore the Beyond Bullying Project, a multimedia, storytelling project that invited students, teachers, and community members in three US high schools to enter a private booth and share stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) sexuality and gender. While recent policy making and educational research have focused on links between LGBTQ sexuality and gender, bullying, and other risks to educational and social achievement, Beyond Bullying aimed to identify the ordinary stories of LGBTQ sexuality and gender that circulate in schools and that an interventionist framing may obscure. After offering an overview of the method in Beyond Bullying, this article connects narratives of LGBTQ desire, family, and school life to the intimate possibilities—who students and teachers are, who they want to be, and the social worlds they want to build—available to them in schools.

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As we write this introduction, trans issues in education are never far from the headlines. In the USA, the Trump administration has revoked a number of policies meant to protect trans youth from discrimination in school; in Australia, debates about the Safe Schools Coalition, an LGBTQ resource for schools, have led to the cancellation of this programme at a national level because of media-fuelled trans and homophobia; and in school districts around the world, trans students and their allies are fighting for access to equal educational opportunities, including the right to access bathrooms (toilets) and changing room facilities, play on sports teams, and use their preferred pronouns. These conflicts and campaigns are happening, in part, because an increasing number of young people are coming out as trans and are transitioning in adolescence (Rider et al. 2018). In the midst of these changes, trans youth are going to school, growing up, making and losing friends, falling in and out of love, experimenting with and claiming multiple identities, and negotiating and challenging social norms. In response, teachers, administrators, and school authorities are being called upon to develop and implement policies, practices, and curricula that can support the social, emotional, and educational development of trans students. But as many of the articles in this special issue of Sex Education document, not only do schools sometimes fail to live up to the promise to educate all students, they often actively discriminate against trans students, sacrificing their best interests to concerns from conservative parents and politicians. Fights over allowing trans students access to appropriate toilets and changing room facilities in schools are the most obvious case of schools' failure to support trans students. This special issue takes up questions about trans youth and education in these turbulent times. We are not the first to examine these concerns. Indeed, we are living at a moment when there has been a recent rise of emergent scholars, many trans or genderqueer themselves, who are putting these issues at the centre of educational research focused on equity (c.f.

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Sociologists Jessica Fields and Laura Mamo, along with education researchers, Jen Gilbert and Nancy Lesko, report on their high school storytelling project, Beyond Bullying, that invited teachers, students and community members to record stories of LGBTQ sexuality that moved beyond tales of depression, bullying and suicide towards ordinary narratives of love, loss, friendship and family.