Section 28 today

You wonder under Section 28 how many queer students didn’t make it, or no one knew that they were gay and, you know, decided that enough was enough. There’s so many questions, and the fallout from something like this just isn’t known, I think, because no attention was paid to it. Yeah, it kind of makes me really angry. And then also really worried because of the actions that are being taken in Florida, for example, right now and in America. And again, the kind of erasure of any queer content within school spaces, which can seem isolatory in terms of how it’s occurring right now, but you know, those ideas spread. And the worry is that we could go back to something like this again.

I know that I was speaking at a conference at Exeter recently and one of my colleagues asked: Why is it – why do you have to bring this type of message up in terms of looking at introducing queer artworks and queer kind of voices into school spaces? Isn’t it kind of a political issue that shouldn’t be part of the school? And the fact that someone can still ask that question, it’s a little bit worrying. Because to me the answer is that indoctrination is already happening every single day under the kind of guise of normality and heterosexuality. So maybe the legacy of Section 28 and what it did, even though I didn’t really know what it was, is that I’ve dedicated a lot of my adult life now to finding ways of injecting queerness back into the school and making queerness perceivable in a very positive and enlightening way. 

Being visible just generally in the community is good, too. I’m active both in the trans community and in things like – there’s an Exeter based LGBT choir, for instance. So I sing in that, that’s great fun, great community. And one of the nice things about that is that the choir is full of – you know, a good third of the choir are lesbians in their late 50s and 60s, who are all absolutely incredible trans allies and have been amazing and have been wonderful. And anyone who ever says that trans women are a problem for lesbians, I’m just thinking, you don’t know any of them, do you? Cause I sing in the choir and we go to the pub afterwards and we talk nonsense and talk rubbish and they’re really supportive and they’re lovely. And I just think connecting with people in the real world is so important. Because all of that anti-trans nasty guff that’s out there just doesn’t hold up to any real life experience at all, so that’s important too. 

Sometimes I wake up and I feel like I’m turning on the radio in 1987 and I’m angry, because I think I’m writing a history book, but what the hell? History is happening today. And the stuff that happened, what, like just over a month and a half ago, with the sex education, gender education points, that the now removed Tory government were talking to us about, and that was coming out on the radio, I just, I like was so angry.

I felt alive and angry, and it felt like an echo, the loudest echo I’d ever heard, and it has done for years. And I, in the work that I’ve done around, in like the LGBT charity sector, support sector, the parallels between trans kids, and trans people, and what happened to homosexual people in the eighties, they’re too strong to not be able to like stand them side by side and actually like remove the identity, and they’re interchangeable.

And it’s just horrific to watch kids especially being like used as political footballs, and just baffling, because Section 28, it literally killed people. Like people are no longer here because of that piece of legislation, and then the fact that they’re trying to bring something in like that again, and people say it’s not that many, you know, it’s a small percentage of the community, it’s not that many people, it’s the minorities.

Yes, but that minority has the highest like risk of mental health, of suicide. These people are at-risk, and they need protecting. They don’t need prosecuting. And I just think it’s horrific. So no, I don’t think much has changed, when you look at what the government and people in positions of power are trying to do to constrict something that they’re afraid of.

I mean something like Heartstoppers, that would’ve been amazing as a teenager. I mean you could tell that my husband and I have trauma because we were watching Heartstoppers and we kept on waiting for like something bad to happen with the main two characters. Because we were like ‘oh this isn’t, like oh something’s going to happen, something’s going to happen’. And it always like ends on a positive, and it was so lovely, just to have that kind of, I mean and maybe it’s not always a hundred per cent like that even today, and it might be a bit of a rosy idealised view. But it’s so amazing to have those narratives where there’s that queer joy I suppose. I love, oh it’s amazing.

I am really interested and concerned about what, about the PSHE consultation that’s happening. Yeah. And what’s happening now with trans, and how that mirrors or reflects what happened with Section 28, yeah. These policies you about gender fluidity kind of change the subject and talk about biological sex only’., it’s just ridiculous. They have a phone in their pocket that gives them access to a hundred million different ideas about gender fluidity. Like if you’re not going to talk to them about it, as their trusted guide, a teacher, mentor, they’re going to go and follow some Instagram influencer about it.

It’s just appalling, absolutely, really disgraceful. Yeah. I feel quite passionate about that. So that I guess is the massive difference between, I don’t know what we’d call it, PSHE trans now and Section 28. Section 28, the world was quite small, so we didn’t have contact with anybody. I had a phone box at the end of my street if I wanted to, I did have a phone in the house, you had to dial someone up, dadadadada, and then ‘hello, can I speak to?’ and then they’d go and get them, and you’re like um. Or the phone box at the end of the street if you wanted a private call.

And there was no internet. If you wanted something, to find out something, you went to the library and you looked in an encyclopaedia or a book, and you had to go and ask the librarian. You know, it was, information, access to information was very small, so our worlds were quite small. And now we have access to everything that has ever been written within a fraction of a second. And to say ‘no, I’m not going to talk to you about gender fluidity because it doesn’t exist because there’s only biological sex’ is just completely narrow-minded, and really, it’s not of this time is it?

It’s not of this year. It’s of something fifty years ago. And I think it comes from fear. Fear of something different, fear of, yeah, maybe just fear of the unknown, fear of loss of control.