We Refuse to Disappear
Resistance Amid Anti-Trans Education Policy

We Refuse to Disappear: Resistance Amid Anti-Trans Education Policy (Harvard Education Press), offers the first comprehensive account of how the current wave of anti-trans legislation is reshaping classrooms across the United States.

Grounded in my long-standing scholarship on a Pedagogy of Refusal, the book positions educators as ethical protectors who sustain student safety and affirmation within increasingly constrained legal environments. With publication scheduled just ahead of the November midterms, the book enters a national moment in which education policy, civil rights, and electoral politics converge with particular urgency.

Each chapter centers one statute, translates it into accessible language, and pairs it with layered vignettes drawn from field experience across elementary, middle, high school, and postsecondary settings. These chapters move beyond diagnosis to delineate how refusal is enacted, sustained, and developed across educational contexts, examining both the de jure and de facto effects of the law.

Rather than stopping at critique, the book articulates viable modes of resistance within legally constrained classrooms, showing how educators identify the narrow spaces that remain and act within them to preserve student dignity. Each chapter concludes with a developmental analysis of refusal across grade bands.

The book also includes a curated toolkit of more than one thousand resources, including reporting, Substacks, open-access curricula, books, documentaries, podcasts, litigation trackers, and advocacy organizations.

We Refuse to Disappear speaks directly to the political and educational moment we are living in. It offers clarity about how these laws function, what they mean in practice, and how refusal continues to operate as an ethical and pedagogical stance despite them.

I would welcome the opportunity to discuss this work with any of your audiences at this critical juncture. More information about my background, teaching philosophy, and publications are available on this website.

Contact: For press-related inquiries, contact Anna Urrea at an*********@***il.com.