Interrogating the orientation toward anti-homophobic/transphobic bullying procedures in primary schools

All children of primary school age are processing societal messages about gender and sexuality diversity in their everyday lives. Indeed, in early childhood, most children’s relationships to gender and sexuality are fluid and many children of primary school age are identifying as LGBTQ+. Yet, despite these lived experiences of gender and sexuality diversity, there are very often deep silences around this topic in primary schools. Amid these silences, gender and sexuality norms are continuously produced and policed in multifaceted ways by primary school communities with discourses of “childhood innocence” and “age appropriateness” playing a significant part in restricting how primary schools approach gender and sexuality diversity. Such concepts reproduce uncertainty, confusion, and reluctance about when and how LGBTQ+ lives ought to become visible in primary schools. They also fuel and mobilize moral panics about “promoting” LGBTQ+ lives or the notion that a child might be somehow “recruited” to identify as LGBTQ+.