‘We Have a Lot to Celebrate. We Have a Lot to Fight’: My Experience of Being LGBTQ+ and a Teacher

By Holly Wouldnot

As a non-binary early career teacher, I've noticed a few things.

First is the treatment from the Senior Leadership Team – the big decision makers, the people that decide who matters and what opportunities you get within the school. We (and by we, I mean anyone that isn't white, cisgender, British and middle-aged) either don't exist to them or are a great representation of their faux diversity and openness to the modern world. Sometimes you can oscillate between the two in one day, ushered out and displayed in front of Ofsted, but then tucked back away when it’s time to give honest opinions about the school.

Second is the treatment from other teaching staff. For the most part, teachers are left-wing, understanding, and exhausted. They don't judge me and they don't care that much about anything that isn't marking or wine related. However, there are those few (mostly balding gammons) that are all too happy to notice you. They'll constantly ridicule, mock and jibe.

Finally, there are the kids. They parrot their parents or guardians until the day they graduate. Unfortunately, working in rural Kent, that means they mostly parrot hatred. For now, I don't want to focus on the students. They are trying their best to survive in a chaotic world that they hardly understand.

As an English teacher, I often consider myself a storyteller that is limited to retelling the stories of dead white men. I wrote to Heroica to tell my story; hopefully I'll be able to do that with their help. I am going to focus on the everyday life of gender-queer or questioning people in schools.

To do so, I want to focus on a recent exchange…

‘Hey, have you heard what they're changing the name of Manchester United to?’ one says. I'm holding the gate open as my year 11s file out, expecting a normal exchange of banter about the 7-0 loss, or some nonsense about the buyout of the club. ‘No mate, what are they gonna call it?’ The other asks. The reply: ‘Themchester United. I hear they're renaming Mandalorian too.’

I hardly know what to do, feeling their eyes on me. I continue to hold the gate and my tongue, only glancing their way quick enough to make note of who is talking. Two Heads of Department. Both male. Both middle-aged. Both as white as snow. How unoriginal.

This unoriginality is what makes my everyday life miserable. It's hard enough to have to be a full time teacher in the current educational crisis the UK is facing; having to fight to be respected as an equal every day doesn't make it any easier.

I've argued with them before, but not this time. I know it's exactly what they want. They know I hear them, and they want me to bite, so I won’t. I left my old school – an all-boys comprehensive – because of people like this. Leaving didn’t fix the problem, though. People like this are everywhere, and it’s not just me they’re attacking.

The Head of Department on the left has had two formal complaints made against him this year. The first was waved away as there was no one to corroborate the story that he had used homophonic language when describing a student. The second was far worse.

I wasn't present for this (having only joined the school in January), but I've been informed by several staff members that he bullied a female member of his department to the point that they had to take an ‘at-home wellness sabbatical’. When this was raised to the Senior Leadership Team, his department defended him, saying that the female member of staff was inept. There was no help offered to the victim: no guidance, no support. Her peers defended her abuser and entrenched his position as an untouchable bigot.

According to the British Social Attitudes Survey, in the early 1980s a staggering 75% of the population of Britain believed that homosexuality was ‘always or mostly wrong’. This infamously led to the enforcement of Section 28 (a nice little Thatcherite addendum to the Local Government Act, introduced in 1988) and the banning of ‘promoting’ homosexuality in schools.

Section 28 meant that you were not allowed to teach and be openly gay. If I were teaching twenty years ago, the pride flag on my desk would have meant I was breaking the law. I am lucky enough to teach at a time where I am allowed to be openly LGBTQ+ and honestly, we have come a long way from the days of Section 28. But for every one of us standing proudly in a job we see as worth the abuse, there are far more of those that want us removed – not just from the jobs, but from public life.

We can teach students of all ages to be more understanding, but while there are men like him in charge of whole departments, change cannot happen swiftly enough. As I sit at my desk, in front of the classroom I call home, we approach the 20th anniversary of the annulment of Section 28.

We have a lot to celebrate. We have a lot to fight.