'Who are you calling a problem?': addressing transphobia and homophobia through school policy

This article offers a detailed analysis of two school board-level policies in British Columbia, Canada that address the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and transgender, Two Spirit (LGBQ and TT) youth to demonstrate how the language of the policy holds meaning and re/produces particular knowledges. Rather than offer an analysis that sees 'at-risk' youth or LGBQ and TT issues 'as a problem to be solved', this article proposes reading of the policies and the youth who are the subjects of these policies as complex and exceeding the identities that the policy constructs for them. Drawing upon Bacchi, Foucault and Butler, this article frames an analysis of the value and limits of policy geared toward LGBQ and TT as problematization, where identities are explored as contradictory and produced through the manner in which the policies are constituted. The article suggests ways in which queer theory offers a questioning of normativities that is beneficial to policy analysis.