Non-Normative Gender and Sexual Identities in Schools: - Schools Out

AM: …gay teachers as well who are resistant. I mean just within my small group of
friends who are teachers, there seems to be so much disagreement amongst them about
the disclosure of their own sexual identity.
SS: Um.
AM: I have to say I haven’t got any experience of various gender identities, it is just
sexual identities. Um some of them sort of say you know it’s no-body else’s business, its
my private life. All that kind of rhetoric.
SS: Yeah, yeah.
AM: And then some of them, I’ve recently found out um a friend of a friend who I’ve
met a couple of times and I saw her recently and she’s explicitly lying, she’s having a
civil partnership in the summer and her children, her kids at school think she’s marrying a
man.
SS: Whaaaaaaaaat!
AM: And it’s just, she’s create this whole other world and I was going mad at her in the
pub, I was like, what are you doing and I just I just think if I cant get my gay friends to
understand the importance of this issue…
SS: {um, um}
AM: …you know we are banging out heads against a brick wall a bit, so is that
something…
SS: {well I do think she does understand it because that’s why she’s created this massive
[//]
AM {um}
SS: …um lie.
AM: Yeah.
SS: Because she does know how powerful it is and she is scared.
AM: Yeah.
SS: And it’s how do we then deal with people scariness. And you know, some schools it
will be an issue and she will receive a lot of crap and other schools it wont be.
AM: Yeah.
SS: But I guess you know (sigh), particularly with Paul’s death so close to me at the
moment, I’m thinking you know he was out and proud back in the seventies…