How assumptions about sexuality are hurting our kids: Opinion

I'm going to ask you to do something important: I'm going to ask you to set aside any unfavourable notion you have about LGBTQ people while you read this.

I'm asking this because the topic at hand is so very important, beyond any deeply-held belief. It's about the well-being of children.

A couple of years ago, someone I know asked if we could meet to talk. When we met, she told me her pre-teen son had confided in her that he was gay.

A month later, the mother of a boy in his early teens, asked if we could meet. Turns out she wanted to talk to me about her son whom she thought might be gay.

Neither woman knew that the other had contacted me about this, and neither had a negative reaction to the possibility of their sons' sexuality. Their true commonality, however, was that they both wanted to make sure they were doing their best to parent their children. I was unprepared for these conversations, because as someone without children, I'd never really considered what it would take to make a 21st-century gay child healthy, supported and safe.

What made me qualified to comment, however, is that I knew what it took to mess up a gay child in the 20th century. It wasn't my parents who had done that to me it was our culture in general.

• What I Wish My Parents Had Said When I Came Out As Gay

• Taking Your LGBT Child To Their First Pride

'My father would kill me'

The moment that proved to me the importance of this topic occurred sometime later, however. I was at an event attended by a boy who I knew.

Knowing I was a safe person to talk with, he sat down next to me at a table and said, nonchalantly, "I'm gay. My father would kill me if I told him."

My heart stopped. What could I say? How had the conversations mentioned above prepared me for this? I felt like I needed to protect this kid, make him know that he was fine. I felt a sense of urgency, the need to take care of his every need in a matter of minutes, seconds maybe. He'd sought out an adult with whom he felt comfortable, because he felt home wasn't a place where he could be himself it wasn't a place where he felt safe.

To gay children, the worry of rejection and in some cases being beaten or even killed is a very real threat. I told him that if he didn't feel safe, then he should not tell his father, at least not right now. I told him that if he ever needed to talk, he should get in touch with me. I told him he was a great kid. I told him he was going to be just fine.

To this day, I wonder if I did enough in that moment. I just wasn't prepared. As a result of these incidents, I want to make sure that everyone who reads this is prepared not just parents, but every one of us who interacts with children.

Here's what experience has shown me: especially during puberty we're in the process of growing and changing. As much as it might make us uncomfortable to acknowledge that children have a sexual identity, it's a part of that process. And that identity may change over time. Whatever the case, there are two key things we can do to create a healthy environment.

Change your perspective

The first is the hardest, and the most obvious.

If you're anti-LGBTQ, the challenge is to change your perspective:firstbecause you love your child, and secondthrough understanding. If experience as a minority has taught me anything, it's that typically we only relate to issues that affect us directly. They are the issues we understand and have a stake in. Issues outside our experience are frequently ones we tend to brush aside or get angry about.

Step outside of yourself and work to leave your assumptions in the past. Knocking the gay out of your child or making the home environment unpleasant isn't going to make your child straight but it could make him suicidal.

The second thing we can do is to neutralize and normalize that means to stop making assumptions about a child's sexuality.

Get rid of narrow language and harmful expectations. Understand how we react to seeing same-sex couples interact, in media and real life; is our reaction positive or negative? What signals are we sending with our reactions?

For example, neutralize language so that you don't make assumptions about the gender of whomever your child may be attracted to, now or in the future. By neutralizing, we're not sending the message that there's only one way to exist we're letting a child know that sexuality across the spectrum is just fine.

Here's an example.When I was a child, we had a family friend who used to joke with me by asking, "You have a wife yet?" Sounds pretty harmless, right? Yet it always left me humiliated and feeling like I was going to be found out. I don't fault the person who joked with me, why would I? It was the way I'd been taught to think about being gay that was to blame.

It would have made all the difference in the world to me if he'd asked, "You married yet?" Get the difference? This small incident was reinforced by so much anti-gay normality alive in the world around me that its stature became overwhelming for me. The very act of not assuming the gender of the person I would fall in love with would have shifted this.

Assumptions can kill

The easiest way that we can make the change is to rephrase our speech so it's not so focused on gender.

This is not politically-correct culture run amok, this is about safeguarding the future of our kids.

Studies have shown forcing LGBTQ children into a box where they don't fit increases the risk of suicide, addiction, emotional disorders and dysfunction. I can also confirm this.

Notassumingthere's only one type of person and allowing the possibility of difference to exist, both at home or outside of it, can make all the difference and it might just save someone's life.

To deny that child their identity is to show them they don't deserve a place in this world.

In short, expectations and assumptions can kill. With such straightforward steps we can take to help, no one wants to have that on their conscience.

This column is part of CBC's Opinion section. For more information about this section, please read this editor's blog and our FAQ.

More from CBC P.E.I.