As a teenager, I spent four, excruciatingly long years sitting on a chewed up plastic chair learning about… the cattle industry. Yes, a riveting subject - I was an expert on the 1870 grasshopper plague, and well versed on the 1873 Timber Culture Act. Unfortunately, since leaving school I haven’t as of yet found the opportunity to put my knowledge of Joseph McCoy and his cow town to good use - but I’ll keep you updated. 

What I did have, however, was the opportunity to constantly explain to my fellow classmates (some receptive, others not) my identity, the intricacies of my sexuality, and the offensiveness of some of their choices of language. I was bombarded with this opportunity. Over, and over, and over again. I was not an educator. I was fourteen.  

Scientists have discovered that the teenage brain is vulnerable, dynamic, and highly receptive to positive feedback. Jay Giedd, a child psychologist, proclaimed that the teenage years are a time for “enormous opportunity” due to how impressionable and moldable the teenage brain is. I am not attempting to start a priority war with the school curriculum, because I believe that there is space within education for all passions, interests, and necessities for learning. But let me be clear when I insist that LGBT+ education falls firmly into the “necessity” category.

LGBT+ sex education seems to be the conversation on the tip of everyone’s tongues right now. My confusion lies in why it is being construed as a gray area. It baffles me that heteronormative sex education is, without a doubt, treated as non-negotiable content - yet LGBT+ sex education is classed as inappropriate. Do young, queer people not have the same right to safe, consensual, informed sex? Or should we toss them to the pack of wolves, commonly known as an “internet education”, and hope for the best. It is a failure of safeguarding, and an extension of endangerment to deny kids a fulfilled and inclusive sex education. 

This problem is an invasive virus. It has seeped into all classrooms. We study about the onslaught of the 1800s, and yet never once learn about the Stonewall Riots. We awkwardly thumb our way through a dog eared edition of Of Mice And Men, yet the majority of students are unable to pick out Oscar Wilde or Virgina Woolf in a lineup. We are told that bullying is taking someone’s lunch money, not bashing their identity. The system is… outdated. 

Most kids aren’t inherently homophobic, transphobic, or offensive. You don’t blame a baby for staring because, well, the baby has never been taught it is rude to stare. If the government cracked down on a thorough and inclusive redo of LGBT+ content, a culture shift would begin to happen in the way students talk to each other - like dominos cascading into each other. An offensive individual is more often than not, an ignorant individual. And an educated individual cannot be an ignorant individual. Knowledge is one of the most powerful instruments of peace. 

When I was a teenager, I was very vocal on my social media platforms about LGBT+ content. Sex education, art, politics, law, culture, history. No, I wasn’t immune to the stifled laughs and jeering comments from my classmates. But something surprising happened. 

At first it was just a few messages in my inbox. Replying to a story I had put up about Section 28, or commenting on a post about the fetishisation of lesbians. Curious questions, ideas, thoughts, and remarks. In the beginning, it would just be my friends, or friends of my friends. But then it started to spread like an outbreak. I had people from all age groups at my school messaging me - younger than me, older than me. Some of them were the kids who were ignored in school, pushed to the sidelines. Some of them were theater kids. Some of them were debate club goers. Some of them shied away in the math’s classrooms at lunch. But then something even more curious began to happen. The popular kids, the jocks, the football team, the pretty girls - the mean girls who had tormented me only a few years prior. They started to cautiously tiptoe their way into my messages. Expressing hidden feelings about their own identity, awkwardly asking about mine. They were curious about what language to use, what it meant when you felt this way or that way, why had that thing happened at this point in history. Most of them would have been mortified if I had told anyone that they had confided in me. But I wasn’t a town crier, so I didn’t. 

It got to the point where I would put on my Instagram story a question box feature, where my classmates could anonymously ask questions about LGBT+ content, and I would answer on my account. The response was huge. 

It should be noted that this whole phenomena should not have occurred in the first place. I should have been studying for my GCSEs, not explaining the complexities of the asexual spectrum to my classmates. The responsibility should never have been weighed on my shoulders, and looking back - I was heavily ill-equipped to be educating on such complicated and layered concepts. But my point is, everyone wanted to learn. It didn’t matter their sexuality, their social ranking, their friend-group, or their hobbies. From jocks to mathletes, they all had questions - but believed they were the only ones with questions. And the majority of them responded incredibly well to my answers. They were receptive, informed, open-minded, and most importantly - kind. All it took was a conversation. We need to have these conversations. The kids aren’t the ones who are abstaining from these conversations. 

Opening the door to these topics isn’t just a preventative method for the benefit of heterosexual or cisgender kids. A report done by Stonewall in 2017 found that 45% of LGBT+ pupils (64% of transgender pupils) are bullied for being LGBT+. Half of LGBT+ pupils hear homophobic slurs being used frequently in their schools. Only 2 in 5 LGBT+ pupils say that their school actively works against transphobic bullying. Only 1 in 5 LGBT+ pupils are taught about same sex, safe sexual education. More than 4 in 5 young transgender people have self harmed, as have 3 in 5 lesbian, gay, and bisexual pupils. To educate about LGBT+ content is suicide and self harm prevention. 

In Prime Minister's Question Time, March 2023, Conservative MP Miriam Cates claimed that the RSE curriculum was “age inappropriate, extreme, sexualising, and inaccurate”. She claimed that children were learning “graphic lessons on oral sex, how to choke your partner safely, and 72 genders”, branding the issue as a “safeguarding scandal”. Her solution? That sex education should be focused on teaching children “safely taught biological facts”, discrediting the “disproportionately dominant” LGBT+ content. I imagine Cates would also take issue with World Sexual Health Day being focused on consent and pleasure for the last two years - both non-biological. School is not a “grab a grade and graduate” scheme, and it should not be left stationary, frozen in a prehistoric culture of sex, using the puritan era as a heavily misdirected blueprint. 

It’s not all doom and gloom. We are seeing huge steps being taken in terms of LGBT+ content in schools. But it feels like one step forward, two steps back these days. It’s worrying because - Section 28 isn’t as archaic as you may think, being in place for 15 years and only being removed in 2003. We must rewrite the history books, not repeat them. 

My generation will be the next politicians, lawyers, scientists, doctors, artists, writers, and civilians of the world. We are at the mercy of what we are taught, and it will shape the kinds of people our planet will be governed by. If we want to see a world of love, acceptance, community, and peace, then it all starts in the classroom. Hatred is not born, it is taught. Love is not dead, it is hidden. Our brains are like clay when we’re in schools - and it is the adults creating the curriculum who are molding that clay. The change has to start now, here, with us. For the children of today, and the children of tomorrow. And, of course, for the children inside LGBT+ adults, who wonder what their youth might have looked like had they and their friends been taught about the LGBT+ community. For my adolescence, sexuality and gender was shrouded in secrecy and mystery, shoved under the rug. It is time to address the elephant in the classroom.