The need to normalise queer in the classroom

The Hindu

8 hours ago

I wear a mask. Not like the crime-fighting vigilante Batman but like a self-conscious child at a fancy dress competition, trying to fit in. The mask becomes stark in June, Pride Month, which also marks the beginning of the school academic year. Over weekends, I plunge into community mobilisation and conversations on sexuality. On weekdays, I find myself fumbling when an adolescent girl student remarks, 'I am attracted to my friend who is also a girl.' Around 10% of India's population belongs to the LGBTQ+ community. It has been seven years since Section 377 was read down, decriminalising homosexuality. Yet conversations around gender and sexuality remain absent — or worse, are actively silenced — in schools.
While students experience binary collapse at an early age, many teachers remain in denial. In Karnataka, for example, one teacher argued that girls must be protected from salingakama a derogatory Kannada word for homosexuality. Such attitudes reflect not only ignorance but also harm, perpetuating shame and silence around queer existence. Heteronormativity is embedded in folk pedagogies, leading to its normalisation within the school environment, making sexuality a taboo topic.
Adolescence is a formative phase where identity-building begins. While there are many popular songs that celebrate teen crushes as a mark of growing up, doesn't the queer teenager deserve the same innocent joy of their first crush on a film star, a teacher, or a neighbourhood friend? For many queer individuals, these simple yet significant moments of development are lost. I remember sitting silently while my classmates discussed boys they liked. I couldn't relate to them and thought something was wrong with me. There was no one to tell me otherwise. Only after I left school and graduated did I begin to understand that I was attracted to the same gender. By then, many milestones of adolescence had passed, unnoticed, unspoken, and unlived.
Studies show that helping adolescents develop a healthy relationship with attraction, love, and sex is essential to their emotional and psychological well-being. Denying queer children the space to explore their identities does not preserve innocence, it perpetuates ignorance, loneliness, and shame. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 constitutes a 'Gender Inclusion Fund'' to make sure that transgender students get equitable education. Though the policy acknowledges and seeks to address structural barriers that transgender children face within the schooling system, other queer identities have been ignored.
However, policy does not automatically translate into inclusion in practice: 28% of transgender students reported harassment in school. While a total of 61,214 transgender children are enrolled in schools (Unified District Information System for Education 2019-20), this demographic is also likely to have the highest 'out-of-school' children. How can the lived experiences of queer people inform our curriculum and make it inclusive? Inclusive education is more than just access; it means being seen, respected, and supported. Educators, school leaders, and peers must be equipped with the knowledge and sensitivity to understand and respect transgender identities essential to building affirming safe spaces in schools.
Schools are not merely spaces for academic learning, but crucial grounds where identities take shape, friendships form, and young people begin to understand the world. Integrating LGBTQ+ inclusive content into curriculum is not just introducing children to something foreign but recognising the reality they already live in. They observe trans persons at traffic signals and encounter same-sex couples in social media that often reject traditional notions of love and attraction. Yet, these lived realities find no reflection in textbooks or school environments.
Including queer stories, histories, and movements does not require closed-door sex-ed sessions where boys and girls are separated. This awkward separation is only in a physical sense, as we rarely consider that there might be a trans-child among them. We need what I call 'courageous conversations'. Schools are precisely where such conversations should begin because they are where a child's future is shaped or stifled.
If we truly want our schools to be inclusive, safe and nurturing, we must begin by reflecting the world as diverse, complex and full of possibility. Queer children exist. They deserve representation, respect, and room to grow like everyone else. Just make them feel normal. Everything else will follow.
The writer is Programme Associate, IT for Change, Bengaluru.