Context note
The world is changing. This article was written in the early months of 2025 and was accepted for publication on 2 May 2025; this context note was written on 22 October 2025. This timeline overlaps with the changing relationships between LGBTQ+ identities, education and the law in the UK, following the Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers (16 April 2025) and the subsequent Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) guidance, issued 25 April 2025, which concern, respectively, the definition of the words ‘sex’, ‘woman’, and ‘man’ in the Equality Act 2010, and the potential effects of this redefinition on public life in the UK, including on the provision of services to trans people. In July 2025, the Department for Education issued new statutory guidance (due to be introduced from 1 September 2026, as an update to the guidance discussed in this article), stating that: “schools should be mindful that beyond the facts and the law about biological sex and gender reassignment there is significant debate, and they should be careful not to endorse any particular view or teach it as fact. For example, they should not teach as fact that all people have a gender identity. […] Schools should be mindful to avoid any suggestion that social transition is a simple solution to feelings of distress or discomfort”.Footnote 1 Following extensive public and legal criticism, the EHRC’s interim guidance was removed from the EHRC website on 15 October 2025, ahead of a High Court challenge, spearheaded by the Good Law Project, due to begin 12 November 2025.
In light of this swiftly-changing landscape, I have chosen not to rewrite the content of this article in line with ongoing developments – although I include footnotes that indicate recent changes – for three reasons: (1) to record the state of the world when the article was accepted and the socio-legal framework into which QTP was born; (2) because the current rate of change is faster than academic publishing can keep pace with; and (3) in the hope for a return to a better world (insofar as the halcyon days of early 2025 were, in fact, good for LGBTQ+ people).
Main body
In 2019, the then-government of the UK issued The Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education and Health Education (England) Regulations 2019, made under sections 34 and 35 of the Children and Social Work Act 2017. These regulations made relationships education compulsory for all pupils receiving primary education, and relationships and sex education (RSE) compulsory for all pupils receiving secondary education. The then-government issued, in relation to these regulations, statutory guidance about how RSE ought to be taught to UK school students, both as part of personal, social, health, and economic (PSHE) education and in the broader curriculum. Crucially, the guidance included a brief discussion of how RSE should include lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer+ (LGBTQ+) topics:Footnote 2
In teaching Relationships Education and RSE, schools should ensure that the needs of all pupils are appropriately met, and that all pupils understand the importance of equality and respect. […]
Schools should ensure that all of their teaching is sensitive and age appropriate in approach and content. At the point at which schools consider it appropriate to teach their pupils about LGBT, they should ensure that this content is fully integrated into their programmes of study for this area of the curriculum rather than delivered as a stand-alone unit or lesson. Schools are free to determine how they do this, and we expect all pupils to have been taught LGBT content at a timely point as part of this area of the curriculum.
Queering the Past(s) (QTP) was founded in 2019, in part as a response to these regulations, with generous support from the UK Classical Association and the US Society for Classical Studies.Footnote 3 QTP is a non-profit collective of scholars and schoolteachers in the UK and US who create educational resources, aimed at using the ancient Mediterranean (Greece, Rome, and beyond) to supplement the LGBTQ+ aspect of RSE for schoolchildren in the UK classroom across a range of topics, including English, History, Classics, and PSHE. QTP is designed so that academic scholars who specialise in gender and sexuality in Classical Antiquity work closely with schoolteachers and education experts to produce materials that both reflect the latest developments in research and remain suitable for and accessible to schoolchildren.
In this article, I trace out some of the issues facing the use of Classical material to convey LGBTQ+ education and outline some of the ways in which the resources provided by QTP may be used to solve these issues. I, and the other members of QTP, are all too aware that UK schoolteachers (in comparison with their US colleagues) have fairly limited autonomy with regard to what they can teach, especially at KS4 and KS5, where there is a real focus on passing standardised assessments such as the GCSE and A-Level. Therefore, the second half of this article will address how existing and forthcoming QTP resources can be used to supplement various parts of the KS4 and KS5 curriculum.
Throughout, I am particularly concerned with how QTP resources can, in line with government guidance, be used to integrate LGBTQ+ themes fully into school curricula, rather than providing an opportunity for a one-off lesson on (e.g.) Achilles and Patroclus. In short, whilst LGBT History Month assemblies in February and Pride Month assemblies in June are extremely good developments in schools (and not something of which this writer could have dreamed when at school in the UK), it is important for students to see all aspects of their education – from LGBTQ+ studies to the histories and realities of race and women’s narratives – as parts of a fully incorporated whole rather than as ‘add-ons’ that may seem, perhaps, optional.
Although the Government statutory guidance (2019; above) specifies that LGBTQ+ topics should be fully integrated into the curriculum, it is notable that they only comprise a very small part of the training modules offered by the Government that aim to support that guidance.Footnote 4 We thus encounter our first problem: teachers are expected to teach LGBTQ+ material in an integrated fashion, but are not really given a huge amount of training and support on how to do so effectively.Footnote 5 This is made even more complicated in light of the devastating after-effects of Section 28, a part of the Local Government Act 1988 that essentially prohibited UK schoolteachers from discussing LGBTQ+ topics for 15 years between 1988 and 2003.Footnote 6 As a UK schoolteacher said in a testimonial to QTP, the availability of teaching resources on LGBTQ+ issues is “particularly useful for those who are too young to have taught during section 28”, who may well be unfamiliar with the material conditions that have led to fewer resources for LGBTQ+ studies in schools. Furthermore, although from a pedagogical perspective our focus might rightly be on the risks to students, we should not forget how devastatingly Section 28 affected schoolteachers themselves. Those who trained during the time of the legislation’s enforcement are still (as of data collected in 2019) far less likely to be ‘out’ compared with those who trained after Section 28’s repeal in 2003,Footnote 7 and are also more likely to see their identities of ‘teacher’ and ‘LGBTQ+ person’ as incompatible.Footnote 8 In light of this, it is important to set the 2019 statutory guidance as not just a corrective to the history of LGBTQ+ education in the UK, but also a potential vehicle for real change for both students and their teachers.
Indeed, as Section 28 taught us, there are risks in omitting LGBTQ+ topics from education. Students, when presented with LGBT+ figures or themes from history without sufficient explanation of the relevant queerness of gender or sexuality, inevitably default to reading them as straight. Crucially, this is not simply unfortunate but represents a form of inaccurate instruction; omission is a sort of misinformation (or, if we want to be polemical, disinformation), as long as heterosexual and cisgender are the assumed default identities.
The ancient Mediterranean provides a fertile environment for educating students about LGBTQ+ themes; these themes are abundant and are already well understood and researched by professional Classicists. However, it is harder for non-specialist teachers to have access to the full gamut of queer potentiality evidenced by the ancient world. Greek and Roman myths, Classical civilisation, and ancient history are all widely taught in UK schools, often as part of the English curriculum, or for those schools that offer such subjects, in the Latin, Greek, or Classical Civilisation classroom.Footnote 9 Most English teachers are not professionally-trained Classicists, nor should they have to be.Footnote 10 Furthermore, most Classics teachers are not specialists in LGBTQ+ aspects of antiquity. Therefore, there is a certain pressure on producers of teaching materials to include a broad diversity of types of people, so that students are not left with the false impression that there was a single (read: heterosexual) way of being in antiquity. The Cambridge Latin Course offers two recent examples of how to do this successfully:Footnote 11
In Book 1, a love poem from a Pompeian wall which is thought to be from one woman to another is included in the cultural material. In Book 2, a girl writes a poem in the style of Sappho. When we discuss marriage and households in the culture sections, we are careful not to imply that the only available model was a man and a woman joined in a legal marriage.
Despite this promising precedent from CLC, textbooks and resources for Classical subjects remain poor at including LGBTQ+ themes,Footnote 12 which follows a notorious broader trend in teaching materials beyond Classical subjects.Footnote 13 Market pressures and the size of our discipline (amongst other things) mean that it is difficult to produce new materials that might be more inclusive: “our books do not get updated very often. While we have recently seen a surge in the publication of new or revised secondary/high school Latin textbooks, this is not typical”.Footnote 14 Thus, our textbooks tend to represent the beliefs and attitudes of past generations, which can be difficult obstacles for even the most well-intentioned teachers.
Because of this, it may be harder for teachers to locate reliable resources around LGBTQ+ topics, and indeed, to know how reliable those resources are. Caroline Bristow, Director of the Cambridge Schools Classics Project, wrote to me per litteras about the difficulties involved in marketing Classics textbooks to the broadest possible audience, whilst trying to preserve an inclusive and accurate view of the ancient world:
When you have a small market for books you are loath to lose any of that market, therefore authors and publishers may feel they need to take a ‘safe’ approach to ensure their book can be sold globally without issue. It is important to note that any concession given to a localised anti-LGBTQ+ stance may not be due to a lack of courage or financial/sales pressure though, it can be a far more complex judgement call; if a community bans your book because of their views on LGBTQ+ rights, any good your book may have done by having other progressive or inclusive messaging is nullified. We risk the only books being available in such areas being those with no concern for such matters at all.
Since QTP’s resources were – and continue to be – produced by teams of subject-area experts and professional educators (and without the constraints of traditional press publishing), they serve as reliable and useful ways to access LGBTQ+ topics from the ancient Mediterranean that are specifically tailored to schoolteachers’ needs. As a case study, let us explore the example of an ancient queer figure who has become difficult to research for schoolteachers and students alike, especially in recent years, and thus for whom QTP’s resources provide a significant entry point: Elagabalus, emperor of Rome from 218 to 222 CE.Footnote 15
Elagabalus was recently rocketed to being a household name when, in November 2023, Craig Simpson wrote an article for the Telegraph, entitled ‘Roman emperor was trans, says museum’.Footnote 16 Simpson reports on North Hertfordshire Museum’s decision to refer to Elagabalus by she/her/hers pronouns in their exhibits in light of accounts from the ancient world which claim (among other things) that the emperor preferred to be called κυρία (‘lady’), instead of κύριος (‘lord’).Footnote 17 This article, the latest in an ongoing and concerted stream of media outputs designed to delegitimise transness (both ancient and modern), prompted a huge reaction (its digital version is followed by, at time of writing, 2,785 comments from Telegraph readers). For those who knew about Elagabalus, the Telegraph article was frustrating: Elagabalus’ transness has long been recognised in academic and queer circles, even if a range of approaches have been taken when it comes to labelling the precise ways in which they were queer and/or trans. However, Simpson’s highlighting of Elagabalus may have had unintended positive repercussions; non-specialists had now, perhaps, been made aware of the emperor, and could embark on their own research into the ‘accuracy’ of North Hertfordshire Museum’s decision. We might even imagine an incipient slew of germinating school lessons on Elagabalus (or, even, talks for LGBTQ + History Month in February 2024, just a few weeks after Simpson’s article was published).
However, anyone seeking to deliver such a lesson would be confronted by difficulty in finding accurate information on Elagabalus. Let us journey through the Google results for ‘Elagabalus’.Footnote 18 Their Wikipedia page is a minefield of differing perspectives that has been made even more complicated by the controversies following November 2023. The next site, their entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, makes no reference to matters gendered or sexual, aside from a coded allusion to “eccentric behaviour”.Footnote 19 Following this, one encounters a few blogs and a number of news articles relating to Simpson’s exposé in 2023.Footnote 20 In short, for the time-strapped individual trying to put together a lesson (vel sim.) on Elagabalus, the outlook is challenging.
My example of Elagabalus is not entirely serendipitous; indeed, a UK-based user of QTP resources wrote to us, saying: “The existence of the QTP materials meant that I could quickly browse their topics and find good quality information about a figure I knew very little about: Elagabalus”.
How, then, do QTP materials help teachers and their students learn more about LGBTQ+ themes? Rather than present the contemporary, culture-war-fuelled debate around Elagabalus’ gender, as I have just done, the QTP article on them opens simply:
A common misconception is that trans and genderqueer people are a modern or new phenomenon. To the contrary, these identities and experiences are well-documented in the ancient Mediterranean. In fact, one genderqueer person was even the Emperor of Rome!
The article goes on to discuss the descriptor ‘genderqueer’ and QTP’s choice to use they/them/theirs pronouns for Elagabalus, before embarking on a narrative history of their life. At every turn, the resource asks questions of its users such as ‘How many of these stories can we believe? How are they connected? And how are they still relevant now?’ to prompt students to think not only about the nature of Elagabalus’ gender, but also about how we would come to know about it. Simply put, it asks students to act as historians and critical thinkers (see below). Particularly useful in this regard is the section entitled ‘How Do We Know? A Closer Look at Cassius Dio and Herodian’, which provides students with translated extracts from the named historians and asks them to perform source analysis, thinking critically about bias in historical records.
What, then, can QTP’s Elagabalus chapter do for teachers and their students? On perhaps the most surface level, it can help to introduce them to a figure from history who is little-known and even-less-well understood. This on its own is a worthy goal, and one that ticks the boxes of the 2019 Government guidance. It also helps students to understand more about the history of transness in all its multifaceted glory – something with which young people today are far more acquainted than (for instance) I was when at school, but which lags far behind where it could be, given the distressing statistics on the bullying that trans school students experience, and the impact that it has on the mental health of trans children in the UK.Footnote 21 It may be part of a solution to the (widely held) misapprehension that transness is a recent phenomenon, and thus may support ongoing efforts that seek to give legitimacy to contemporary transness through comparisons with its past manifestations.Footnote 22
Still further, QTP’s resource develops students’ skills in source analysis and critical thinking by making them consider why and how we know what we know about a figure such as Elagabalus.Footnote 23 In this, it brings skills typically associated with the history classroom (i.e. investigative thinking and working with evidence) to bear on other materials, a conceptually demanding challenge for students that benefits them on multiple levels.Footnote 24 That is to say, this topic can span several parts of a student’s education – it supports history curricula and PSHE in the same breath – whilst also helping to correct commonly held beliefs about transness’ modernity.
In short, QTP is at least one tool in the arsenal of teachers hoping to meet governmental mandates around LGBTQ+ education, whilst trying to do so in an informed, sensitive, and pedagogically sound fashion.Footnote 25 I highlight Elagabalus in this article precisely because of the scale and hostility of many online (and print media) discussions of them, and indeed, about transness generally. I want to close by quoting the words of one UK-based user of QTP:
In our current media climate, where trans lives are under constant scrutiny and where rights are being eroded, it is vital that educators counter misinformation about the history of gender and sexuality. Our lives and experiences are not a new or ‘trendy’ phenomenon: queer people have always and will always exist and Queering the Past(s)’ focus on ancient stories helps to make this point most powerfully
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my colleagues from the executive committee of QTP, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Cypris Roalsvig and Serena Witzke, for their comradeship and feedback on this piece. I would also like to thank Caroline Bristow for her support and written statements. I am grateful to two the reviewers for the journal for their feedback, and especially to JCT’s new editor, Susan Deacy, for going above and beyond in getting this piece published. Finally, I thank Eben Gutteridge for his feedback.
Open access
