LGBTI history lessons won’t turn your children gay, folks
WHEN I was a teenager, you took a great personal risk challenging me about anything.
My father, to his credit, would often pull me up when he felt I was overstepping the mark. One thing he consistently challenged was my use of the word “gay” as a synonym for anything I felt was deserving of mockery and ridicule.
To me, everything was “gay”. This wasn’t something I learned at home but that I picked up in school.
It was just the way people spoke – especially boys. Strangely, other than this “banter”, I do not recall one discussion in school about what “gay” actually meant.
Thankfully, that is all about to change.
The Time for Inclusive Education Campaign (TIE) was founded in 2014 with a single aim – to combat homophobia, biphobia and transphobia in schools with LGBT-inclusive education. Liam Stevenson and Jordan Daly have since reached more than 20,000 young people with LGBT awareness assemblies.
After four years of campaigning, Education Secretary John Swinney announced last week that the Scottish Government would accept each of the TIE Campaign’s recommendations, meaning LGBTI-inclusive education will be embedded in the school curriculum by 2021.
So, what does this mean for you and, more importantly, your kids?
Well, what it doesn’t mean is that your kids will become gay as a result of taking part in these classes.
Sexual expression is not something most people can be talked in and out of. It is usually a fixed point in a person’s developmental trajectory.
In fact, this notion that it’s simply a matter of personal choice is rooted in the same culture of ignorance that led to me using the word “gay” as a put-down, while believing it was not homophobic.
LGBTI-inclusive education also means that young people will be taught the history of the struggle for LGBT rights – just like they are already taught the history of civil, women’s and working class rights.
I suspect it will also make room for discussions about what constitutes homophobia but from the perspective of those who must live with it every day rather than those who would make jokes about it – and get defensive when challenged.
As always, people have questions and anxieties about things like this. In a culture of easy outrage and hyper-sensitivity, this is, for some, just the latest example of something or other “gone mad”.
That society will descend into some moral abyss if the topic of sexual expression is broached in a classroom. But we must resist those initial impulses and see this in historical context.
Among us, right now, walks a generation of people who were physically assaulted by teachers in school, under the guise of corporal punishment.
Kids were belted in the classroom. It was believed by many that this was the best way of instilling discipline and respect for authority. You only have to speak to those who were belted to realise it was usually a terrifying and humiliating experience.
We must try to think about LGBTI-inclusive education in the same way.
Yes, we can become defensive when challenged on our attitudes and behaviour and not every query about these issues is rooted in prejudice or ignorance.
Nonetheless, we must trust what people in the LGBTI community are telling us. And what they are saying is that no child should spend the most important years of their lives feeling ashamed in a classroom, just for being who they really are.