Over the past few weeks, proselytising and campaigning about the role of the Safe Schools Coalition has reached fever pitch.

While the program faces continuing malicious attacks from the right, many Australians have been thrust into a discussion that invokes the idea of “the gay agenda”, sexuality recruitment and indoctrination about sexuality and gender.

While social and psychological research wholeheartedly dismisses these claims, the voices that propagate them continue on without recognition of the broader aims and outcomes that the program legitimately addresses.

The Safe Schools Coalition doesn’t only supports students who are diverse in gender identity or sexuality. It supports everyone within the school environment, including teachers, principals and straight/cisgender students. Specifically, the …show more content…
This is additionally problematic as students often frame gender or sexuality-based aggression as joking or not serious (like other forms of bullying are).

They may also suggest that the victim deserved the violence. Each of these attitudes fosters a culture of non-reporting, further facilitating aggression of this kind.

In my research, teachers suggested that the students who were at risk of gender-based or homophobic bullying had exceptional strengths that protected them from emotional or psychological damage from such incidents.

Teachers often failed to recognise that homophobic language, or epithets like “slut” and “poof”, could be harmful to students. When moments of homophobia or gendered aggression occurred, they often dismissed it as not serious or as an inevitable product of adolescent relationships.

Each of these positions is equally concerning as they allow bullying that relates to gender and sexuality to go unchecked in school environments, communicating to students that these actions have no institutional