It’s been many years since I’ve stepped foot in a Catholic school in Ontario, but I remember the feeling distinctly. Walking through the doors of my Toronto Catholic high school most mornings, dread sat in my stomach like an anchor. Waiting for classes to start, I’d pace the mostly empty halls trying to shake off the anxiety. I was a teenager, I was queer, and I didn’t feel safe.
Sure, there was bullying from my peers because of my identity, but those feelings of fear mainly stemmed from the institution itself. Catholic schools, I grew up learning, were not places where queer or trans people could thrive. It was best not to say anything at all.
The first — and only — reference to queerness I heard in a classroom came in Grade 7, when I was 12. It was tucked away in the corner of a page in my Fully Alivetextbook, which served as a religious health compendium and is remembered not-so-fondly by many former Catholic students thanks to its lacklustre sex-ed chapter. The authors suggested that same-sex attraction was likely a temporary part of puberty, a phase that wanes once your adolescent hormones settle and is never to be thought of again. (The publisher discontinued Fully Alivein January 2023 after accusations of homophobia and transphobia.)
When I came out as queer at 14, I was certain this was not a phase. But there was nowhere to safely convey that feeling or to find other people who felt the same way. Representation wasn’t just non-existent; the very idea that it could ever exist was preposterous.
Had I seen a single example of someone else like me back then, I wouldn’t have felt so alone.
Fifteen years later, queer representation in Ontario Catholic schools is still lacking. Last month, a leaked memo from the Waterloo Catholic District School Board stated that schools within the district would be restricting access to books with LGBTQ2S+ themes from a diverse reading program. Four children’s books, all of which contain LGBTQ2S+ characters, would instead be filed away in school libraries under “professional”; children looking to borrow the books would be required to have a teacher provide “Catholic context” for the stories.
The titles, the WCDSB told the Toronto Star in November, were aimed at children from kindergarten to Grade 6. But the board’s family-life curriculum (which offers education around sexuality, typically through those aforementioned Fully Alive textbooks) only begins in Grade 7. The restrictions, a WCDSB spokesperson told the Star, help “to avoid any students reading subject matter that maybe is not intended for them.”
It’s a move reminiscent of other restrictive actions made by Catholic boards across the province when it comes to LGBTQ2S+ students and their identities. For years, the Toronto Catholic District School Board resisted flying Pride flags in June at its schools; only in 2021 did trustees agree to hoist the flags every Pride Month. The York Catholic District School Board, meanwhile, voted against flying rainbow flags at its schools earlier this year, and in May, a Niagara Catholic District School Board trustee compared the Pride flag to a Nazi flag.
It’s a similar tale with safe spaces in Catholic schools. In 2011, the year I graduated high school, students at a Mississauga Catholic school were told they’d face disciplinary action if they continued to advocate for a gay-straight alliance — a kind of support group that several Catholic trustees claimed was antithetical to Catholic teachings. That incident sparked then-premier Kathleen Wynne’s tabling of what became the Accepting Schools Act. Only once gay-straight alliances and similar groups were protected by legislation did Catholic schools bend. Still, in 2012, Archbishop Cardinal Thomas Collins said the groups were “not helpful.”
Watching Catholic school boards make the same mistakes throughout the years has been a painful reminder of just how unsafe their schools are for LGBTQ2S+ youth. It’s in part why so many education activists in Ontario have called for the province to defund Catholic schools. Ontario and Alberta remain the only two Canadian provinces that publicly fund Catholic schools, thanks to grandfathered, archaic sections of the Constitution.
If Catholic trustees and educators want to make a case for the survival of their publicly funded boards, they aren’t doing a great job. The safety and protection of LGBTQ2S+ youth has to be more than just a momentary consideration when a student asks to start a safe-space group or when a rainbow flag is hoisted in June. Queer and trans students must be not just tolerated but celebrated, an essential part of school communities across this province.
Consider it a New Year’s resolution: Make all publicly funded schools — regardless of their religious affiliations — safe spaces for LGBTQ2S+ youth to thrive. Let them see themselves every day, in books and at flag raisings and among their peers at Pride events. It’s a small request for grand, life-affirming opportunities.
It’s hard for me to imagine what my teenhood would have looked like had my teachers read me books with queer characters as a child. Perhaps I would have walked the halls of my school a little less anxious, a little more proud. At the very least, I would have known that my school was a safe place to be myself — and that could have made all the difference.
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