Questioning

I’ve been feeling for a while that our LGBTQ+ group at school has become, if not stale, then at least a little chewy round the edges (forgive the poor metaphor, it’s been a long week).  I’m a little concerned that my suggestion to the kids, just after Trump’s re-election, that we try to inject a little activism into the group has scared off a lot of the regular customers and that actually all they really wanted was a place to hang out and compare pin badges.

Anyway, looking to rejuvenate things a little, I signed up to Just Like Us, a charity that supports teachers in their running of pride groups.  Having signed up, I then added ‘looking through their resources’ to my to-do list and, with the to-do list forever growing, kept putting off actually doing so.  Then, at the start of January, a padded envelope appeared in my inbox with some handbooks, a few posters and a handful of stickers and (huzzah) pin badges, all in aid of Allies Week, an event to promote allyship to the LGBTQ+ community in schools. 

I put out some notices to attract students to come and help prepare for Allies Week and ended up with a few extra kids who I’d not seen at the group before, full of enthusiasm and more than ready to deck the school and themselves out with stripy flags.  We put our heads together, came up with a few ideas, and then this week we put everything into motion.

At one point it felt like one of those jobs that you decide to do in a moment of inspiration and then realise that what you’ve actually done is just give yourself a shit-ton of extra work, but the support of the staff and pupils at my school made everything well worth it.  We set out our stall on one of the lunchtimes, asking passing students if they wanted to make an allies pledge, and soon found ourselves slightly overwhelmed and wishing we’d used more tables.  It was a really diverse mix of kids who turned up, including some who I never would have guessed in a trillion years.  I really hope that some of the shyer LGBTQ+ kids feeling nervous about coming out were there and watching all of the support our school community showed.

My personal highpoint came during a formtime session where we discussed what it meant to be an ally, and we mentioned how LGBTQ+ people could be allies to each other.  One of the kids asked how, and I gave the example that I was gay but was an ally to the trans community.  I’ve written before about how sometimes when I say “I’m gay” the word catches in my throat, like I feel awkward admitting it.  I realised that, this time, I felt proud saying it in a way I hadn’t before: I genuinely think that knowing that the staff and the students were all behind me really helped.  (I still tripped up several times over “LGBTQ+”, mind you, I really need to practice saying that out loud…)

I’ve realised, too, how lucky I am to be in a school that is so supportive.  I read online about experiences of other teachers running Allies weeks and feeling deflated by the immature responses of students, and feeling like they were on their own among their staff bodies.  At the same time, some of my American teacher friends have been sharing stories of how they’ve had to comfort scared trans kids, seen an uptick in anti-LGBTQ+ bullying, and are preparing to break incoming laws meant to force them to misgender their kids.  I do feel like I’ve done something meaningful with Allies Week this week, but I have to recognise that mine is a far easier fight right now.  The real allyship needed will be that with embattled colleagues around the world, forced to confront bigotry right there in their hometowns and classrooms.