Meet Nae
I’ve been thinking a lot about Nae lately because I’ve been reading up on Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay Bill’. That’s the one that bans teachers in primary schools from openly discussing sexuality and gender identity with their students - leaving instead to the parents.
Nae was one of the youngest activists involved in Love in Full Colour.
When we first met, it was over tall glasses of iced chocolates in a Doncaster Shoppingtown café, and Nae was still in high school. What Nae said back in 2012 about the insidious nature of invisibility and erasure has really stayed with me. It’s easy to call out homophobia and transphobia when it’s explicitly expressed – a locker room slur here, a punch there. But it’s much harder to point to the stuff that’s not there – every time a teacher doesn’t respond to homophobic bullying. Every time a queer history is not included in the curriculum. Every time a queer story does not make it onto TV or onto the shelves of the school library.
“Teachers would just kind of pretend that there weren’t any gay kids at the school.”
“Even when you look at the sex ed program, there are no same sex issues covered in sex ed whatsoever. It just got to the point where I was feeling like the school was deliberately erasing me instead of just trying to ignore me.”
That ignorance and erasure manifested in different, damaging ways.
There were the times when Nae was getting harassed via threatening notes left in their school locker and abusive text messages sent at night - and the year level coordinator’s response was: ‘I don’t think we can do anything about it.’
“It’s probably more that the school felt that the most politically correct way to deal with things was to turn a blind eye to it… but it ended up having the effect where it was actually really negative. Towards straight kids, it sends a message that being gay or trans is something bad and it’s OK to pick on those people because no one’s going to try and stop you.”
Equally flawed rationale found its way into the classroom as well. Nae recalled a Legal Studies class where a debate about marriage equality descended into a sanctioned platform for some students to rant about how “abnormal”, “unnatural” and “weird” homosexuality was.
When Nae tried to call their classmates out on their opinions, the teacher defended them on the grounds that every viewpoint is valid. “These comments don’t seem like a big deal but they’re kind of where all the homophobia is rooted from. And it does feel like a big deal when you’re the one that they’re talking about.”
For Nae, more diverse and inclusive media could make “a huge difference” when it comes to educating the general public.
“Most people have never met anyone else who’s openly trans so they feel obliged to try to understand my identity by prying into it, and they don’t understand that that’s actually insensitive in itself.”
Of course, more rich, representative stories could also powerfully affirm and validate trans people themselves.
“Every couple, every movie, it’s always a straight couple and it gets to a point where you look at that stuff and you think – where’s my representation? Am I not part of what’s going on around me at all? And you can internalise those kinds of messages really strongly and it can just turn into a self-loathing that you don’t even completely understand where it came from any more.”
Back then, in 2012, Nae cited the character of ‘Adam’ in the TV show Degrassi as an example of how media can get it right.
“It was an amazing feeling to be able to watch a show and just not have to search for it, because it was just given to me, the whole character was someone I can connect with… They look at what transphobia is doing to him as a character, but they also show how he can overcome that and not many shows do that.”
In the next few months, I’ll be sitting down with Nae for another interview, 10 years on from that one. Among (many) other things, I want to ask about what they think has improved when it comes to queer representation in schools and media, and what changes we still need to fight for.
I can’t wait.
