Keywords:
homophobia, advocacy
homophobia, advocacy
Transcript
Tara: How is life at school for a queer family - at your school?
Catherine: Well, you know, without the queer factor she’s doing really well. She’s in the gifted program excelling, and in so many ways like socially and academically, um, but, uh, unfortunately as queer parents we definitely had experienced many, um, moments where we’ve been discriminated against because – like even before we became a family is that my daughter was told by her friend that because she’s Christian she can no longer be her friend and they - she just stormed off with her parents. And so, that was right in the bus, like right as she was exiting the bus, so it was definitely part of, you know, school life, it wasn’t something that was outside of school. So that happened, then it started to snowball because Arden heard people saying gay as a word to describe something that was silly or whatever, um, and, uh, she spoke up and she said “my mom is gay and that’s not right” and she inadvertently outed herself and then the next thing you know is that the kids are cornering her, telling her that because her mom’s a lesbian that her mom –“your mom is high”. Okay, so... I’m like, “I’m not high, not right now” but, uh, yah, it was really ridiculous, and so the funny thing is that I ended up – it was an ongoing thing because of the fact that she’d outed herself that they kept on making comments like that. Uh, so at that time she was at Elizabeth Simcoe Junior Public School.
Tara: How is life at school for a queer family - at your school?
Catherine: Well, you know, without the queer factor she’s doing really well. She’s in the gifted program excelling, and in so many ways like socially and academically, um, but, uh, unfortunately as queer parents we definitely had experienced many, um, moments where we’ve been discriminated against because – like even before we became a family is that my daughter was told by her friend that because she’s Christian she can no longer be her friend and they - she just stormed off with her parents. And so, that was right in the bus, like right as she was exiting the bus, so it was definitely part of, you know, school life, it wasn’t something that was outside of school. So that happened, then it started to snowball because Arden heard people saying gay as a word to describe something that was silly or whatever, um, and, uh, she spoke up and she said “my mom is gay and that’s not right” and she inadvertently outed herself and then the next thing you know is that the kids are cornering her, telling her that because her mom’s a lesbian that her mom –“your mom is high”. Okay, so... I’m like, “I’m not high, not right now” but, uh, yah, it was really ridiculous, and so the funny thing is that I ended up – it was an ongoing thing because of the fact that she’d outed herself that they kept on making comments like that. Uh, so at that time she was at Elizabeth Simcoe Junior Public School.