LGBTQIA+ in the UK: How Bloggers can advocate through our Education system

"The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn." Gloria Steinem

Hallo Leute/SJWs/LGBTQIA Bloggers/Vloggers!

So, in my last blog post I talked generically about the need for LGBTQIA bloggers to get involved with improving their own visibility within the world's education systems in schools, colleges, universities and other educational establishments. I'd now like to focus in particular on how UK based bloggers can do this within their local communities.  Maybe this will help those in other countries to search out for their own content and blog about it; after all collective "Knowledge is Power"!


Why does it matter?
Here's a few UK education stats for you to consider:
Primary School:

• In Stonewall's landmark study into the state of LGBT issues in UK schools, The Teachers Report (2014), 50% of primary school teachers said that "boys who behave or act like girls" and 1/3 of boys who hate sports are bullied on a regular basis.
• 70% of primary school teachers heard children say "that's so gay" or "you're so gay" at school and 1/3 heard children making specifically homophobic remarks, including "dyke", "poof" and "faggot". This language had not been used by those teachers interviewed so pointed to casual homophobia being dominant within the children's individual familial environment.

Secondary School: 

The sassy forever classy not a Coward!

• Teachers Report: Polling by Stonewall found that 90% of UK secondary school teachers stated that students in their own classes believed they were victims of bullying and harassment based on their sexual identity. There was no mention of what percentage of the bullies and harassers were religious or atheist BTW!
• The highly important Metro Youth Chances Survey (2014) which surveyed 956 trans young people found that 75% of them had experienced some level of name calling, and 28% had been subjected to physical attacks. (Again no mention of religious vs atheist numbers!)
• The Metro Survey also highlighted the fact that trans students are more likely to miss lessons on a regular basis to avoid discrimination in the classroom.
• Disturbingly, the Metro Survey findings showed that 27% of its trans respondents have attempted suicide.
• Finally, 55% of LGB students surveyed stated that they are taught absolutely nothing about LGB issues whilst at secondary school, so it is no wonder many lack awareness of our strong queer English literary canon and history. If some of my UK blog readers were to ask what such a canon would consist of and which authors, playwrights and poets are currently being ignored from the UK English Literature curriculum, let me say they include authors, playwrights and poets as diverse as Aphra Behn, Iris Murdoch, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Richard Barnfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Ronald Firbank, Lord Byron, E M Forster and Noël Coward!  LGBTQIA UK students should all be proud of and celebrate their canon and history without fear of reprisals from homophobic or transphobic teachers, teaching assistants and/or students.

So which organisations can we, the general public approach if we want to make a genuine difference?

Stonewall

I'm sure any LGBTQIA UK blogger of repute will have heard of Stonewall. For years the charity has intensively campaigned for LGBTQIA rights in the UK and beyond. Part of their remit is to raise awareness of LGBT bullying in schools and to provide practical advice and guidance for teachers to address the high levels of bullying head on without fear of reprisals from homophobic, transphobic or biphobic individuals.

It's crazy to think that 80% of secondary school teachers and 86% of primary school teachers have received no specific training on LGBT issues and how to tackle the bullying that can appear to be endemic to them in their schools. PGCE courses have to include LGBTQIA bullying awareness as part of their degree programme; it'd take barely a week to address and can be tackled through the inclusion and safeguarding prism that all student teachers have to learn to make it relevant. There's no point tagging it in willy nilly because student teachers may be less likely to take notice of just how widespread homophobic, biphobic and transphobic HBT bullying is as exposed by the stats provided at the start of my blog!

One such example of study material that could be used is shown below:

Family Diversity from http://www.familleslgbt.org/

Stonewall has decided to address the challenge of raising LGBT awareness by designing specific courses under the catchy Train the Trainer programme. CJWs may say that we in the LGBTQIA community have no right to advocate for increased awareness of  issues in primary schools because children "would find it confusing" to hear about there being more than 2 gender identities or that they "wouldn't understand" the reasons why Mummy would rather marry another "Mummy" rather than their biological "Daddy". How patronising is that kind of argument? The traditional nuclear family ideal that was being espoused aggressively in the 1950's after the liberation experienced by women post WWI is dead and buried. More children are living in single parent LGBT families. We have to prepare children for living in the real world and not wrap them up with unnecessary cotton wool. We have to prepare all children, regardless of their familial, cultural and social differences to live in a modern, diverse, inclusive Britain.

Now Stonewall have been brilliant at addressing LGBT concerns in schools. I don't believe they've fully addressed the Queer or Asexual  aspects of the LGBTQIA term adequately enough. More rolemodels need to come forward to design training programmes to help secondary school students in particular to understand that being asexual or choosing to act differently from the homogenitive norm is OK. Students need to know that having no sexual desire in your teenage years doesn't make you a freak of nature and that wanting to avoid generic labels to describe your penchant for dog over human friendship can be admirable as opposed to a sign of cowardice. Not everyone will agree with me on these QA elements and will claim that we ought to be thankful for the gains we have achieved on the LGBT front. Well I say "boo" to those geese; as mentioned in an earlier blog post, I am for all intents and purposes against having anal sex myself and yet I love men. The two things are NOT inconsistent. I'm just a queer mindfuck of an individual and I LOVE IT! I want students to know they can live my kind of life if they want to! That's why I want to go into secondary schools in my local area and talk about queer theory more in the future!

BTW a great resource for anyone who questions the existence of queer identity: USE THE GENDERBREAD FORCE!!

 Schools Out UK:

Another place LGBTQIA bloggers can look for help and guidance is the Schools Out UK website http://www.schools-out.org.uk/. This amazing organisation originally started as The Gay Teachers Organisation in 1974 and has worked tirelessly to make schools, colleges and other educational institutions safe spaces for LGBTQIA students and staff to learn and socialise, without risk of physical and emotional harm. Schools Out UK is a grassroots campaign, meaning that its members are predominately teachers, teaching assistants, headteachers who are on the front line, directly trying to influence the views of their students by engaging in the LGBTQIA rights debate in a sentient, appropriate manner.

Even the Schools Out UK website recognises the need for all schools to "be inclusive and recognise the needs and rights of all characteristics as recognised under the EA 2010" and the need to "make LGBT people more visible" within the educational environment. LGBTQIA bloggers could help by attending primary and secondary school PSHME or RE classes and explaining their viewpoint to the students and allowing these students to ask the questions they need to ask in turn. As David Burns notes, "aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism."

Faith School Problem:

I contend that homophobic, transphobic and biphobic views exist in many faith schools across the UK and in some schools these views are allowed to develop and fester unchallenged. A few faith schools have been exposed for actively encouraging these views to develop by using their religious texts as a propaganda tool to justify hate in all its putrid forms. The Park View School case in Birmingham during Operation Trojan Horse exposed mass radicalisation campaigns and highlighted just how engrained HBT discriminatory rhetoric was within a predominately Muslim community .

The current Conservative government in the wake of Operation Trojan Horse has tried to address them by creating a set of Fundamental British Values and have tried to force faith schools to follow them since November 2014 using Ofsted's criteria framework.

According to Ofsted, these values are:

• democracy;
• respect for the rule of law;
• individual liberty;
• mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs and for those without any faith (something Ms Katie Hopkins is willing to overlook in America but accepts will be the case here in the UK)

As long as faith schools exist in their current form, it shall be very difficult to get them to adhere to all these basic principles especially if they are privately funded and rebranded as free schools. Hateful rhetoric may continue to be spurted out by self-radicalised teachers despite the extra requirements which bind free schools to show respect for the protected characteristics indicated in the EA 2010, including respecting those individuals going through the "gender reassignment process". As the Citizenship Foundation have pointed out in their November 2014 caveat: "Values won't be assumed because schools demand they are, particularly if they're very different from those at home. They have to be arrived at through mutual exploration and understanding."   (from http://www.doingsmsc.org.uk/british-values/)

The issue of faith schools refusing to accept the need to cover viewpoints that originate from outside their own religious doctrine is not just a Muslim issue. I believe it is the same in some Catholic and Protestant faith schools, even if the language used may not be deemed as inflammatory or can be "accepted" because of the false notion that CJWs use that Christians "never" act on their hatred for lifestyles they don't agree with (mainly due to their own orthodox Christian ideology.)

Well put (despite the mistake) Mx Anon!

Tell that to someone like me, a member of the LGBTQIA community, a Christian Lutheran who was oral raped by a white stranger wearing a gold crucifix necklace! There's always the possibility this rapist WAS a Christian, and he certainly intended to do me harm to punish me for wanting to express my gender identity the way I wanted to express it. So why would that attack be accepted whereas a rape by a Muslim man would be widely condemned? It just goes to show the shocking levels of double standards that exist predominately on the political conservative right in the UK in June 2016.

LGBTQIA bloggers need to have the confidence to approach faith schools off their own bat and to show the students and teachers who attend them that they have the freedom to choose who they love, how they act and what they wear in UK society if they choose it for themselves. Bloggers may get an automatic refusal or they might get an icy cold civil welcome but if you manage to help challenge the ideology espoused in such a classroom just by attending and perhaps even inspire one or two to question that ideology, even if only internally, then you will have made a wonderful difference to the lives of all individuals in this country.

The Politics of Grief: On the Orlando LGBTQIAphobic attack: What should bloggers do next?

"I would rather be a rebel than a slave" Emmeline Pankhurst

In many ways the atrocity committed in Orlando has made the LGBTQIA community and our allies realise just how far we need to go to spread awareness and to try and educate those who wish to cause us actual bodily and emotional harm both domestically and abroad. It would be naïve to automatically contend that we can change the mindset of all members of a creed or belief community that has an engrained negative attitude towards homosexuality. The mahoosive outpouring of condolences, prayers and a plethora of Love hashtags on Twitter is certainly welcome, and I endorse emphatically any attempt for LGBTQIA members to improve their own self confidence by showing others how they are enjoying life and trying to live an authentic existence; something I've advocated throughout my life having been a follower of Sartrean existentialism. As the great man Jean Paul Sartre himself once said, "Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."

However these sorts of actions generally appeal to "the converted"; it is not enough for us to take defiant selfies, light candles, and play "It's Raining Men" on repeat and expect everything to be alright for us a few months down the line! These actions are meaningless if they do not try and help change the mindset of the haters, whatever their creed, religion or individual prejudices. It's like saying that Hitler would have stopped his personal vendetta, the Holocaust just because he saw a range of lovely portraits of Viennese socialites, and a bunch of cringeworthily upbeat comments and likes from the top Jewish businessmen of the day in his In tray.

That does not mean we can't convince those communities to abstain from attacking the LGBTQIA in any sustained, prejudicial and discriminatory way. We bloggers and particularly LGBTQIA bloggers have to help challenge all examples of ideology frameworks that are behind such attacks.

Here's a few suggestions as to how we can do it:

• We can do make sure we inform our followers about hate crimes, using statistics and cases to make it easier for them to connote instances that have happened to instances that may be happening in their own life situations. Contacting local law firms or the police is a good starting point on this and it's something I shall be doing myself as I continue to find out more about hate crime in my local area in Lincolnshire, England.
• We can also promote awareness of the LGBTQIA lifestyle in religious communities and emphasise what makes us similar as well as what makes us different from their “mainstream” society. Gay clubs and bars should not be places to be feared; indeed it may be a great idea to try and get religious leaders to enter a gay club to see how normal a building it looks! It may be quite a different matter to get them to attend an event but if I'm a great believer in the old "don't ask don't get" maxim; if you don't ask, you'll never know how positive a response might be!
• We can and indeed need to assist in promoting equal rights and opportunity principles in the education system, to let all children know that it is their (God given) right to be an individual. We need more than gay, lesbian and bi teachers in the classroom; we need LGBTQIA issues to be taught in  national curricula around the world. I never knew that there were lesbian and gay people who helped the miners in their struggle to stop the closure of coal pits in the 1980s until I saw the film "Pride". It was a very empowering experience and one area of LGBTQIA history that should definitely be taught at secondary school level in the UK, whether it be in History lessons or PSHME lessons or even RE lessons. Bloggers can help create materials that can be used in local classrooms to help teachers to engage and inform students without patronising or denigrating their initial beliefs. The experience would be rewarding for all parties concerned believe me!
• Finally we need to help everyone realise that they don't have to blindly follow a theological doctrine or creed without questioning its validity. It doesn't matter what age they are, what sexuality or gender, nationality or ethnicity; they need to know that they have the choice to follow a peaceful, constructive creed or doctrine over those that call for wars and genocides that apparently serve to appease their “deities” but only end up in ludicrous, useless self-sacrifice that benefits no-one.

Christian hermeneutics shows us that we can interpret Biblical verses differently and it's the same with any established religion. No religion should be immune from intensive, methodical interrogation and scrutiny. It also has to be the case with any creed or belief or way of life, including my own. That's why I believe it is essential that I understand exactly which verses are being used to empower those who wish to cause harm to the LGTQIA community, feminists, Jedisexuals, whoever come to think of it! That's why I was so interested in Religious Studies at school and studied it with such fervor, and then went on to study Philosophy at the University of York. I even studied an atheist and agnostic module which challenged my Lutheran Protestant beliefs and made me think how to make sense of those who have no belief in a divine entity. I learnt that words are more powerful weapons than guns or nuclear bombs can ever be when it comes to challenging and defeating ideologies. That's why we must continue to fight with rhetorical dexterity and sheer might, even if it may seem futile and makes us furious at the best of times.

It's easy to find analyses or even quotations online that help haters to rationalise their bile and to indoctrinate others to help their cause. There's no excuse for CJWs to say they can't deal with reading these articles in a rational and methodical way. They should be pleased to find the loopholes needed to defeat the hate narratives used by ISIS and other hate organisations on Twitter and Facebook.

 

In fact here's an example of such an article that needs to be read in earnest which deals with the varying attitudes to homosexuality in Islam :

http://www.missionislam.com/knowledge/homosexuality.htm

If CJWs are in doubt as to how to interpret such articles, there's no reason why they can't go to their local mosque and ask for the Imam's advice, or if they feel too inhibited to do this in person, reach out to the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who use social media to communicate every day, many of them in a peaceful and law abiding manner. If they can't be bothered to do this, it shows a whole new level of moronic stupidity but then if CJWs are advocating for every LGBTQIA person to carry a gun for their own protection so they can be justified to use it at will whenever they feel threatened, that really is a whole new level of stupid!

I still don't understand why the USA has such a fascination with guns and probably never will. If I was Hillary Clinton I'd just advocate to scrap the Second Amendment; in the UK we don't have a constitution so it'd be relatively easy to achieve this result. All I hope is that it won't be long before other senior politicians will follow Hillary's line on banning assault weapons!

 

A Final Thought:

 

Hateful attitudes don't just exist within one particular faith, and it is wrong to demonise a whole religious group for the actions of one individual, even if most of them share his general distaste for the LGBTQIA way of life. If you don't know what I mean by that, take a look at the Book of Mormon. Shooting bullets through thin air won't destroy the think bubbles associated with ideology. A person may die but their ideology will live on. Unless you're prepared to exterminate a whole populous. Then that makes you no better than that hypocrite Hitler who thought he could do the very same thing and get away with it. "The pen is mightier than the sword" after all?

The Politics of Grief: On the Orlando LGBTQIAphobic attack: The Shooter

Voltaire: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Hello dear readers. I hope that you have the courage to read these two blogposts, and to comment on them as is your will. It is only my opinion but my word is not divine or natural law and I'm not being nominated for Think Policeman 2016 :)

On the shooter (he who shall not be named):

The deliberate targeted mass shooting and murder of 49 innocent LGBTQIA individuals at Pulse nightclub in Orlando on Sunday 12th June 2016 shocked the world and indeed shocked me to my core. First and foremost its perfectly OK to acknowledge that it was a homophobic hate crime committed by a depraved wife beater who was self obsessed with the hyper-masculine image he wanted to portray externally to all those he apparently “cared about” whether they wanted to perceive that image or not. To quote Twiggy's lines to Eddie Monsoon in Ab Fab: “You're your own moon; you moon yourself”.

It appears that this terrorist's views were already considered extreme in September 2001, at the time of the Twin Tower attacks and that he continued to espouse hatred for Western society values, strong women or whatever else that could provoke him to anger right up until his death. It was important to him that he died. I contend that he really did believe that he'd be remembered for all time in Heaven as a martyr for taking a stand against those he thought his religion disagreed with and had no right to exist within his vision of a utopian society. In Islam this act is known as istishhad where the martyr or shahid is said to die with “honour and dignity”. Most Muslims would not agree his act merits shahid but still that was what the murderer had in his mind at the time of his death.
 

I think we can all agree that it clear this depraved gunslinger was going to murder those who he believed embodied part of the spirit of Western freedom and democracy on that night; but it wasn't OAPs, schoolchildren or shoppers down the local mall picking up their dry cleaning for the week that were going to be his intended target. Past ISIS inspired terrorist attacks targeted these groups and so must have seemed quite unoriginal to him. He wanted to make a statement. His own visual epitaph. This he did by murdering members of the LGBTQIA community. The very fact he used a gay dating app to bait guys, to get an thorough understanding of  the local gay scene and then drove 90 miles from his home on that day to carry out the act just shows how engrained his hatred for the community really was. Either that or he had bisexual feelings which he was unable to understand and only felt he could repress by carrying out the most heinous act possible by invading the private space of the LGBTQIA community. If you're not safe in a space dedicated to allowing people to be fully accepted for being themselves, where are you safe? Timbuktu?

 

This murderer's display of behavior really tallies with my reading of Hotchkiss's “seven deadly sins of narcissist” analysis, established in Why Is It All About You?: The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism (2003).

This is why:

• He seemed to be entirely shameless in his attacks; in fact he was laughing as he fired shots all around the bar;
• He thought himself to be the perfect follower of Allah even though he was nowhere near such a level (the Prophet Muhammad is considered the perfect one in Sunni and Shi’ite Islam);
• He was extremely arrogant;
• He believed he was automatically entitled to act however he wanted regardless of the eventual consequences and willingly knew he would endanger life;
• He deliberately exploited the feelings of others, including his wife, regardless of their mental or physical state. 
• I.e. he was the very definition of a narcissist!

No matter what his psychological profile was, it is important to find out how he became radicalised to such an extent in the first place. The details so far are quite sketchy. What we do know was that he was born in New York so he WAS a domestic, home grown terrorist, even if he did go off and complete his PhD in mass murder from the school of Jihadi John admirers in Saudi Arabia for 2 years as has been alleged. I maintain that it was the ISIS cause and mass online social media propaganda that spurred him finally into action. His father appeared on camera to be decent, hard working individuals who may hold prejudices towards the LGBTQIA community but there's no evidence to suggest that they would ever act on them. Indeed the father appears to have apologised to Afghanistan for his son's actions, stating that it is for "Allah to judge the actions of homosexuals and not human beings." Reminds me of quite a few conservative Biblical verses in the same vein- e.g. the famous "God will judge those outside" passage written by Paul in 1 Corinthians 5:9- 13 that Trump and ultra conservative Republicans are very fond of quoting! (More on this in the next blog post).

My main question is why didn't the Imams, friends or family intervene sooner? Why did they allow him to stew in his own juices for so long? If it was clear that he'd been abusing his wife, and had made distasteful comments towards a disabled person surely a sensible Imam would have questioned his reasoning behind his actions and reminded him of his duty as a law abiding Muslim in the US?
It seems irrational to me that anyone would aid and abet such a clearly mentally depraved individual by sheer inaction or sham ignorance! Maybe he was able to hide his true nature far too well in the first place! Maybe his father loved him too much to denounce his behaviour, which happens in many instances involving hardened criminals.
Time will tell.