Teaching Children LGBT People Exist

A lot of people have been talking about the subject of whether or not it’s ethical to teach primary school children about LGBT people and as this is a subject I feel rather passionately about, I decided I’d write a little bit about the subject myself.

For a while, I had believed that the general public was of the opinion that it was perfectly fine to be LGBT – not at all ‘wrong’ or ‘sinful’ as people once foolishly believed, but this ongoing discussion has alerted me to the fact that this is not the case. Ignorance and homophobia/transphobia are the only two logical reasons someone would oppose this.

LGBT people obviously have different perspectives and experiences in life when compared to non-LGBT people, so in order to help children grow to become more conscientious of others and not make their lives difficult, it is important for them to be aware that LGBT people exist. Without this knowledge, they will grow to be ignorant and potentially hold homophobic attitudes of their own.

But, of course, the biggest reason to teach children about LGBT people is that they might be LGBT themselves. By preventing them from having this education, they are essentially condemning LGBT children to confusion and unhappiness. It is 100% homophobic & transphobic, because it is the non-hertrosexual and transgender students who will suffer most from not having it.

And what’s the only argument against this? The biggest one seems to be that it’s the right of the parents to tell their children about these things – and I do actually agree about that. The problem is, that these same people are then saying they don’t want their children to know – so if they’re not going to do it, they’re highlighting exactly why its important for schools to do so. These things will always be better coming from the parents, but if the parents are unwilling or too ignorant of the subject, the schools step in.

To clarify – this isn’t about sex: this is literally just teaching children about the existence of LGBT people. There is nothing harmful about this. When I was in primary school, they showed us how to put condoms onto bananas and tampons into cups of water. What a waste of an hour that was. A class about the LGBT community would have been far more useful.

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