Legacies

The legacy of Section 28…? I think people died because of Section 28. I think people died of AIDS because of Section 28. I think people died because they put themselves in unsafe situations or died by suicide as the result of Section 28.

I think Section 28 taught us that people in power are going to use their power against us. Certainly, it taught me that I’m not safe in the classroom. That anyone with any power over me will attempt to use that. That schools aren’t safe places. It’s made it really hard for me to send my children to school, because school is a place where adults are abusive to you. And it’s an environment where they are empowered to be abusive to you and that you have no defence over that. And that’s a really, really tricky thing when you’ve got your own children and you have to send them to school because apparently they’re supposed to be educated.

It has made me more determined to bring up my kids in a different way. They do have an unalienable right to be gay, and an unalienable right to be trans, and they know it. And then, societally, some of my friends, they do a lot of LGBT youth work. And I think part of the reason is just because we can. And it’s like, right, ok, we’re going to try and make this less bad. And we know how to make it less bad because we know what it looks like when it’s bad. And the way that you make it less bad is that you send some people into schools, and you talk to the young people, and you tell them that queer people exist. You tell them that queer people have always existed. You tell them that it’s fine. And you listen to them. And you empower the adults to do the same thing. 

The legacy is probably in people of my generation, where we’re still having mental health problems because of not being able to be ourselves all our lives. I think there is, sadly, a reality that once you’ve had legislation in place, even if it’s removed, there’s a chance that it can come back. I mean, look to America at the moment. And we’re, in many ways, the UK is a mirror of what happens over there, just on a delay. So I think if anything, at the moment, the legacy is to remind people to be on their guard, that things don’t slide back, and that can happen, sadly.

The biggest effect was me not being able to actually figure out that I’m transgender. That lack of information meant that I was unable to put my experiences into any context, and give me an understanding that what I needed was actually possible, what my life could have been.

That childhood that I experienced instead was pretty awful. I had quite extreme gender dysphoria between 10 and 11, with the onset of puberty. I almost took my life at that age. And part of that was because I did not understand what was going on with me. I was horrified at what was going on with me. I thought I was broken, I thought I was, well, all horrible, horrible things. And if I had been told that it was a thing that you could do and be, and there was a possibility, then that would have saved me an awful lot of pain. And that’s the biggest impact that, I would say, that lack of information had.

So, there’s two forms of legacy, I think. One of which is a kind of bully’s playbook, if you like, a kind of bigot’s and bully’s playbook, which is: how do you, while legislating something that looks quite vague – I mean, that takes advantage of its vagueness, and its breadth. So there was no definition of what promotion meant. The Tories would never define it. There were no – I think there was maybe one prosecution that attempted to be brought or some kind of legal action that was attempted to be bought under Section 28. But nonetheless it did the job. It did the job in terms of scaring people and squashing debate and making it really hard for schools to be inclusive and for them to be worried about what was in their libraries and so on.

And that is a lesson that has been well learnt, and not just with us but in the US, in terms of – that you don’t actually have to get to the stage of prosecutions and can just frighten people in a very broad kind of way and try and sort of leverage particular points of vulnerability in all sorts of contexts.

So on the one hand, there’s a kind of a playbook, which is being looked at. On the other hand, there’s a legacy of social movement. We are in a position where the, whatever it’s called, social attitude surveys are very, very different than they were, which the movement around Section 28 was part of. I mean it’s much more complicated than that, there’s all sorts of things going on. But that is part of the story.

So there’s a kind of double legacy. There’s a legacy of the legislation and its project, and there’s a legacy of the opposition to it.  

And I just feel like we haven’t really progressed past that, and that is the legacy of Section 28, because they changed curriculum. You know, I’ve worked with English teachers who don’t know that Wilfred Owen, who was a war poet, so quite a famous World War I poet, very sad sort of circumstance, which he died the day before peace was declared, you know, the day before the Armistice Day in the First World War. But they don’t know that he was gay, in a relationship with Siegfried Sassoon, who was also a poet. And they’re English teachers. Because they weren’t taught that they can’t teach that to other people.

So the knock-on effect is a sort of continuous line of like invisibility and disappearance, and the less you talk about it the less anyone can raise it. And now, yes, I know that there are some people who have done tremendous work in sort of trying to address it. So there’s an organisation called School’s Out, who began in, I think, I mean they started in 2003, immediately, they were all ready to go, so headed by a woman called Sue Sanders, and they had a, they had curriculum lesson plans, stuff like that, ready to go, so that when, because we were anticipating that it was being taken out of law, so when, the government promised that it would, so we trusted that that would be done. And so when it came to be removed from law, Section 28, they were ready to go with all these curriculum pieces about artists and painters and scientists and, you know, books and literature and things like that that had LGBT content.

But there is still a hangover which says, you know, teachers have said to me even, you know, in the last, I’m going to say probably five or six years, it’s faded out a bit but I remember delivering some training to teachers, so this would’ve been about 2015 or something like that, and one of the teachers said, or one of the student teachers said, I was talking about like how to talk about LGBT stuff with the young people, and they said ‘I didn’t think we were allowed to do that. I didn’t think that we were allowed to talk about LGBT stuff with kids’.

And I was like ‘what? Why would you think that? Where would that come from?’ And they were like ‘no, I’m sure there’s some kind of law or, you know, guidance or something that says you’re not allowed to talk about LGBT stuff with kids’. And I was like ‘well there was’. But, you know, so the echoes of it and the kind of lasting effect of that go on and on and on, and that’s where the damage comes. So what I see a lot of is parents who will say, where their child, you know, is exploring their gender or sexual orientation or whatever that might be, they’ll say things like ‘well there was none of this in my day’, and, you know?

And these are people who are sort of forty, you know, thirty, forty years old, you know, some older, fifty years old, who obviously went to school at a time when, either before 1988 when there was no education about LGBT stuff, or after when there was deliberately no education. And so these people are now having children who are, have access to the internet, have access to TV and film where there is LGB and T representation like there has never been before, and they’re saying ‘well, you know, I don’t know where this has come from. There wasn’t any’.

When I started working at the school I worked at, and actually I’d been to that school as well, I started, I wanted to started the LGBT+ group, and I got an email from my now colleague, and I remember emailing him and saying, ‘I know there’s some things I’m not allowed to talk about, right, to do with LGBT+ness? And I was, I didn’t know any, I didn’t know anything. I was completely oblivious to any of the history, anything at all. I just knew that I wanted to support people in a way that I hadn’t been supported when I was at school.

And he emailed back and he was like, ‘yeah, that was Section 28 and it ended in 2003’. So this was around, I think this was 2019, so I was like ‘oh right’. So then I obviously started researching that, and it kind of just blew everything wide open. But I think, so I was born in 1989, the law had already been in for a while, parents I don’t think would’ve talked about it, and especially sort of when you’re getting into school. I can’t, like, I don’t know, sometimes with laws it just settles in doesn’t it, and that’s just the rule and that’s how it is, and everyone follows that rule?