Harry’s Story
Content warning: homophobia, transphobia, sexual references
I’m a straight, cisgender guy, which means I’ve never had to endure any kind of homophobia or transphobia myself. However, I have witnessed it directed either generally or at other people on a number of occasions, especially in my time at private Catholic primary and high schools.
In year 5, my school would separate boys and girls for sex education lessons on a number of occasions. Being a Catholic school, the content of these lessons would be very conservative, the students being regularly told that sex was only for reproduction, and that the Catholic church didn’t endorse using contraception. And when students would innocently ask about any other types of sex than the Catholic norm, they were instantly shut down with responses like “then you’d get a very dirty [male body part]”. Absolutely no recognition was made whatsoever even that LGBTQ+ people existed.
My younger brother, who attended the same school, had a similar experience. He came home one day, after I had graduated primary school, and reported that, while in a sports lesson run by the assistant principal (the same person who delivered my sex ed lessons), the students were split up into boys and girls. My brother apparently made a joking comment to a friend, saying “well where do the nonbinary people go?”, and the assistant principal overheard him and loudly responded that “those people are mentally ill.”
I’ve had similar experiences at my Catholic high school as well. On our year 10 retreat, intended as a kind of personal and faith development camp, we were made to listen to two young presenters speak to us about consent and respect- which would have been great if that was all they spoke about. However, after a while they began dropping subtle Bible and Christian references into their talk, and eventually it turned into a lecture about Christian purity culture, abstinence, etc. At one point, they said explicitly “God defines marriage as between a man and a woman.” That night, our after-dinner activity was being taught a number of dances, including one partner dance where they very explicitly banned pairs of the same sex.
And all this isn’t even to mention the amount of casual bigotry I hear thrown around regularly. Being called gay by my bullies in year 3, even before I knew what that meant or why it was meant to be negative; my friends dropping homophobic slurs and outright hatred just for laughs; and during a school holiday program, starting to become more friendly with another boy I had disliked to begin with, only to hear from a close friend at the program that he had said the most disgusting and horrific thing to them about their late partner.
Like I said, I could go my entire life without being affected personally by anti-LGBTQ+ hatred. But when some of the closest people in my life have already faced the most awful things before even turning 18, I can’t just let it happen.
