Unsafe Subjects: The Constitution of Young

LGBTQ Political Subjects in the Safe Scho ol

Controversy
BARBARA BAIRD & ROBERT REYNOLDS

This article addresses the emergence of children and young people as simultaneously
sexual/gender non-normative and political subjects during the 2016 Safe Schools
controversy. What appeared as a striking departure from previous controversies around
non-normative sexuality was the appearance of young lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender
and queer or questioning (LGBTQ) people speaking for themselves as political subjects. We
are particularly interested in the young transgender subject and the political registers
through which these and other young people represented themselves and made claims on
citizenship. While they might be historically new political subjects, their vocabulary of
harm, vulnerability and safety, and frequent recourse to health discourse, had a somewhat
longer history.

During the first quarter of 2016, public debate in Australia was roiled by the Safe
Schools controversy. As we shall see, Safe Schools had begun as a health education
project in Victoria in 2010, providing resources for teachers to combat homopho-
bia and transphobia in schools. A series of three research reports (Writing Them-
selves In) published in 1998, 2005, and 2010, by health sociologists at the
Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS), had revealed
disturbing levels of abuse suffered by young same-sex attracted people and, in
the later studies, young gender non-conforming people.1 The 2010 report high-
lighted the prevalence of homophobic and transphobic abuse taking place in
schools, and found a direct link between abuse and poor wellbeing outcomes
for same-sex attracted and gender non-conforming young people.2 Safe Schools

We acknowledge the research assistance of Lucy Hackworth and discussions with Michelle Arrow
and Leigh Boucher.
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
This research was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP170100502).

1
Lynne Hillier et al., Writing Themselves In: A National Report on the Sexuality, Health and Well-Being of
Same-Sex Attracted Young People (Melbourne: Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and
Society, 1998); Lynne Hillier et al., Writing Themselves In Again: Six Years On (Melbourne: Australian
Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, 2005); Lynne Hillier et al., Writing Themselves In 3 (Mel-
bourne: Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, 2010).
2
Roz Ward, ‘“I Just Want to Be Myself”: How We Can Challenge Homophobia, Transphobia, and
Racism in Australian Schools’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 38, no. 4 (2017): 472.

402
 Baird and Reynolds: Unsafe Subjects 403

was an attempt to address this issue and originally it garnered bipartisan support in
Canberra. This bipartisanship dissolved with the onset in early 2016 of a concerted
campaign to discredit Safe Schools spearheaded by the Australian newspaper,
federal government right-wingers, and the Australian Christian Lobby. Over a
twelve-month period, the Australian’s reporting on Safe Schools surpassed
90,000 words, almost all of them critical.3
Most academic analysis of the controversy has focused on parsing this anti-
Safe Schools rhetoric.4 In contrast, our interest lies in the historical significance
of the subject positions, language and discourses deployed by same-sex attracted
and gender non-conforming (hereafter LGBTQ) young people as they defended
the Safe Schools program during the 2016 controversy.5 A series of demon-
strations and public rallies were organised in all capital cities to defend the
program, receiving mainstream media coverage. Reaching a peak during
March–May 2016, these public demonstrations included short speeches from
LGBTQ young people testifying to the importance of the program. Testimonials
were posted on various social media outlets. The young people defending Safe
Schools were politically savvy and well informed, not only about the politics of
Safe Schools, but also about the broader national and international contexts.
We suggest that this sustained presence of young people speaking as sexual
and gender non-conforming subjects in the context of a political controversy con-
cerning children, gender and sexuality was a historically new development. In the
main body of this article, after situating our study in the historiography of the post-
1960s emergence of (adult) queer political subjects and outlining the antecedents
and trajectory of the Safe Schools program and controversy, we will offer two
observations. First, among the diverse voices of young supporters of Safe
Schools we note the emergence and heightened visibility of transgender youth
as political subjects during the controversy. Second, we trace the quick recourse

3
Benjamin Law, Moral Panic 101: Equality, Acceptance and the Safe Schools Scandal (Melbourne: Black
Inc., 2017), 40.
4
See for example: Clarissa Carden, ‘“Fiddling with Young Kiddies’ Minds”: Reporting on the Safe
Schools Coalition in Australia’, Continuum 33, no. 3 (2019): 297–309; Scott McKinnon, Gordon
Wait and Andrew Gorman-Murray, ‘The Safe Schools Program and Young People’s Sexed and
Gendered Geographies’, Australian Geographer 48, no. 2 (2017): 145–52; Mary Lou Rasmussen
and Deana Leahy, ‘Young People, Publics, and Counterpublics in School-Based Education on
Gender and Sexuality: An Australian Story’, in Youth Sexualities: Public Feelings and Contemporary
Cultural Politics, ed. Susan Talburt (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2018), 61–81; Barrie Shannon and
Stephen J. Smith, ‘Dogma before Diversity: The Contradictory Rhetoric of Controversy and Diver-
sity in the Politicisation of Australian Queer Affirming Learning Materials’, Sex Education 17, no. 3
(2017): 242–55; Jay Daniel Thompson, ‘The Country of Sexualised Children: Whiteness, Inno-
cence, and the “Sexualisation of Childhood”’, Journal of Australian Studies 42, no. 3 (2018): 285–
96; Jay Daniel Thompson, ‘Haunting Sex: Capitalism as Spectre in the Australian Anti-“Sexualisa-
tion of Children” Rhetoric’, Continuum 32, no. 66 (2018): 698–708; Jay Daniel Thompson, ‘Pred-
atory Schools and Student Non-Lives: A Discourse Analysis of the Safe Schools Coalition
Australian Controversy’, Sex Education 19, no. 1 (2019): 41–53.
5
Various acronyms describe this group, letters and symbols proliferate, they are contested. We
choose ‘LGBTQ’, finding no evidence of intersex (‘I’) voices in the Safe Schools controversy,
and use this term interchangeably with ‘queer’. We include all non-normative gender identities
under the ‘T’.
404 Australian Historical Studies, 52, 2021

by LGBTQ students to an existing language of queer vulnerability and harm to

health as they passionately spoke up for Safe Schools. We use the public testimo-
nials spoken by young queer subjects at the Safe School rallies and demonstrations
and posted to social media accounts as the primary archive for this article, along
with commentary by young LGBTQ subjects in mainstream, national media
defending Safe Schools. We attend to their identity statements and to the language
and discourses used to represent themselves and the issues.
Avowedly political LGBTQ subjects first emerged in Australia in the early
1970s within a broadly defined gay liberation movement which spanned reformist
and radical wings. In the following decades, historians have turned their attention
to tracing this development of post-1960s lesbian and gay activism. In their 1988
social history of Australia, Staining the Wattle, editors Verity Burgmann and Jenny
Lee solicited chapters on contemporary lesbian and gay history to buttress their
argument that ‘we can only understand Australian history by analysing the
lives of the oppressed’.6 In her 1993 book, Power and Protest, Burgmann further
contextualised the ‘homosexual liberation movement’ in a broader Australian
history of social movements for change.7 Garry Wotherspoon’s City of the Plain
embedded the emergence of gay political activism in a subcultural and urban
history of gay Sydney.8 Clive Moore performed a similar feat, with a greater
emphasis on regional history, in his history of gay and lesbian culture in Queens-
land.9 Graham Willett’s Living Out Loud remains the standard social and political
history of Australian gay – and to a lesser extent lesbian – activism with a strong
narrative dose of progress.10 Into the 2000s, Reynolds deployed a mix of post-
structuralist and psychoanalytic thought to analyse the emergence of gay and
lesbian political subjectivities in Australia.11 Less concerned with political
actors, Steven Angelides traced the discursive presence and erasure of bisexual-
ity.12 Rebecca Jennings’ finely crafted history of lesbian Sydney utilised feminist
cultural history to locate 1970s lesbian political subjects within a longer historical
dynamic of lesbian concealment and visibility.13 More specifically, Baird has
tracked two iterations of the lesbian mother as a political subject position.14
Very recently, a new generation of queer scholars have made unfavourable

6
Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee, eds, Staining the Wattle: A People’s History of Australia since 1788
(Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1988), xii.
7
Verity Burgmann, Power and Protest: Movements for Change in Australian Society (Sydney: Allen &
Unwin, 1993).
8
Garry Wotherspoon, City of the Plain (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1991).
9
Clive Moore, Sunshine and Rainbows: The Development of Gay and Lesbian Culture in Queensland (Bris-
bane: Queensland University Press, 2001).
10
Graham Willett, Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia (Sydney: Allen &
Unwin, 2000).
11
Robert Reynolds, From Camp to Queer: Remaking the Australian Homosexual (Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press, 2002).
12
Steven Angelides, A History of Bisexuality (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001).
13
Rebecca Jennings, Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History (Melbourne: Monash University Press,
2015).
14
Barbara Baird, ‘An Australian History of Lesbian Mothers: Two Points of Emergence’, Women’s
History Review 21, no. 5 (2012): 849–65.
 Baird and Reynolds: Unsafe Subjects 405

comparisons between contemporary, assimilationist lesbian and gay politics and a

history of gay liberation radicalism.15
A historiography of transgender politics in Australia is in its infancy, but a
skeletal history of politics, discourse and claims to citizenship since the early
1970s can be pieced together. In 2006 Jesse Hooley gave a reflexive account of
the influence of the Transgender Lobby Coalition, which rejected medical defi-
nitions of transgender, and the more conventional Transsexual Action Group
on the passing of legislation to protect transgender people from discrimination
in New South Wales (NSW) in 1996.16 They relate a history of individuals,
groups, institutional affiliations, contested ideas and political influence in NSW
through the 1990s. The impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the transgender
community and association with HIV and Human Rights organisations were
key formative elements. Noah Riseman’s more recent account identifies incipi-
ent transgender political subjectivity and activism in the mid-1970s. By the
mid-1990s a national transgender activism was evident in submissions to the
Senate inquiry into the Sexuality Discrimination Bill, proposed by Australian
Democrats Senator Sid Spindler in November 1995, which, if passed, would
have been the first federal legislation to give protection to transgender people.
Riseman focuses on the assimilationist appeal to respectability in many and
notes a fear-mongering focus on transgender in conservative attempts to under-
mine the bill as a whole.17 While the 1997 report of the inquiry affirmed trans-
gender lives, the bill did not pass, but activism continued through the 2000s,
achieving anti-discrimination legislation which protects transgender people in
most states.18 Engagement with health research during this period was
another site of transgender activism, as was individual and collective claims to
citizenship in relation to official and identity documents.19

Safe Scho ols and its antecedents

In the wake of the women’s and gay liberation movement, Australian attitudes
to sex education in the 1970s and 1980s were relatively liberal. In alignment
with 1970s progressive views, sex education became part of the school curricu-
lum in most states at this time.20 This progressive atmosphere, however, was

15
Amy Thomas, Hannah McCann and Geraldine Fela, ‘“In This House We Believe in Fairness and
Kindness”: Post-Liberation Politics in Australia’s Same-Sex Marriage Postal Survey’, Sexualities
23, no. 4 (2020): 475–96.
16
Jesse Hooley, ‘Normalising Transgender and Policing Transgression: Anti-Discrimination Law
Reform Ten Years On’, Australian Feminist Law Journal 25, no. 1 (2006): 79–98.
17
Noah Riseman, ‘Transgender Inclusion and Australia’s Failed Sexuality Discrimination Bill’, Austra-
lian Journal of Politics and History 62, no. 2 (2019): 259–77.
18
Ibid., 277.
19
Murray Couch et al., ‘Transgender People and the Amendment of Formal Documentation: Matters
of Recognition and Citizenship’, Health Sociology Review 17, no. 3 (2008): 280–9; see also Riseman,
267.
20
Sally Gibson, ‘“The Language of the Right”: Sex Education Debates in South Australia’, Sex Edu-
cation 7, no. 3 (2007): 241.
406 Australian Historical Studies, 52, 2021

punctured regularly when the bounds of liberal tolerance were breached,

especially regarding homosexuality. For example, The Little Red School Book (pub-
lished in Denmark in 1969) prompted debate in the British parliament and in
Australia. This Danish booklet written by two schoolteachers and published in
English in 1971, ‘dispensed frank and non-moralising information and advice
for young people on matters of sex, homosexuality, alcohol, drugs, and the
school system’.21 Unsurprisingly, given the staunch conservatism of the
Country-Liberal Coalition, the Queensland government banned the booklet in
1972.22
Nor did liberal tolerance extend to the efforts of gay groups to educate young
people. In Victoria in 1978, the Melbourne Gay Teachers and Students Group,
partly inspired by the Danish publication, wrote and printed 10,000 copies of a
booklet for adolescents titled Young, Gay and Proud. It gave explicit sexual instruc-
tion about gay and lesbian sex. The publication was widely denounced in a cam-
paign led by a ‘loose coalition of Christian groups, including the infamous
Festival of Light’.23 The booklet was promptly prohibited from school libraries.
Debate about Young, Gay and Proud ran alongside broader discussion in Vic-
toria about the decriminalisation of homosexuality. A similar convergence
occurred in New South Wales in 1981 when the Sydney activist Gay Teachers
and Students Association (GAYTAS) received funding from the federal govern-
ment for the development of secondary school resources on homosexuality.24
In the face of conservative outrage, GAYTAS ceased work on the kit. The 1980
decriminalisation bill in Victoria included a preamble that disavowed the desir-
ability of homosexuality, and bills in NSW in 1984, in Western Australia in
1989, and in Queensland in 1990 included higher ages of consent for homosex-
ual activity.25 As Boucher and Reynolds have noted, the pattern of bills decrimi-
nalising homosexuality in Australian states in the 1980s and 1990s was another
moment in the regulation of homosexuality rather than the simple product of
liberal enlightenment.26 This re-regulation of homosexuality snuffed out gay lib-
erationist inspired efforts to provide frank school education on homosexuality.
McKinnon persuasively argues that even as adult homosexuality was decrimina-
lised in the 1980s, ‘the space of the school was maintained as a form of closet’.27

21
Steven Angelides, The Fear of Child Sexuality: Young People, Sex and Agency (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2019), 87.
22
Ross Fitzgerald, ‘Censorship in Queensland 1954–83’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 30,
no. 3 (1984): 250.
23
Steven Angelides, ‘“The Continuing Homosexual Offensive”: Sex, Education, Gay Rights, and
Homosexual Recruitment’, in Homophobia: An Australian History, ed. Shirleene Robinson
(Sydney: Federation Press, 2008), 179.
24
Scott McKinnon, ‘Maintaining the School Closet: The Changing Regulation of Homosexuality and
the Contested Space of the School in New South Wales, 1978–84’, Australian Geographer 49, no. 1
(2018): 191–2.
25
Willett, 94–6, 164, 228–31, 155, 223–4, 237.
26
Leigh Boucher and Robert Reynolds, ‘Decriminalisation, Apology and Expungement: Sexual Citi-
zenship and the Problem of Public Sex in Victoria’, Australian Historical Studies 49, no. 4 (2018):
457–74.
27
McKinnon, 185.
 Baird and Reynolds: Unsafe Subjects 407

In the twenty-first century the growth of normalising representations of

homosexuality and female sexual agency in popular media and the growth of
new online media platforms where young people create their own sexual rep-
resentations have increasingly been the objects of moral panic about children
and sexuality. The discursive ring-fencing of schools and young people from
homosexuality was evident in the rhetoric of the Howard federal government
(1996–2007) and coincided with the rising prominence of a politically active con-
servative Christianity.28 This constituency forged a muscular opposition to sex
education in schools, often inspired and resourced by counterparts in the USA,
particularly if the education encompassed homosexuality.29 In 2004, when the
long-running children’s television program Playschool included a brief segment
where a small girl narrated her trip to the zoo with her two lesbian mothers,
the Prime Minister led expressions of outrage, declaring the segment inappropri-
ate for young children.30
For the purposes of this article, the point to emphasise is that the voices of
young people, especially those identifying as LGBTQ, have thus far been rela-
tively absent in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century debates about
sexuality and young people. As McKinnon observes of the early 1980s debates
in NSW, young LGBTQ people’s concerns appeared only when ‘gay teachers
quoted the experience of students as evidence of homophobia in schools’.31
The Safe Schools controversy was markedly different. Both in the content of
Safe Schools resources and most notably in the public campaign to defend the
program, the voices of young, politicised LGBTQ subjects demanded attention.
Safe Schools began in Victoria in 2010 with the establishment of Safe Schools
Coalition Victoria (SSCV). Writer Benjamin Law has meticulously traced the
history of the Safe Schools controversy. He suggests the ‘specific origins’ of
Safe Schools lay in conversations between teacher Jen Sainsbury – who had
received a Churchill Fellowship to examine school responses to homophobia
in the UK, the Netherlands and the US – and researchers Anne Mitchell and
Roz Ward from La Trobe University’s Australian Research Centre in Sex,
Health and Society (ARCSHS).32 Sainsbury, Mitchell and Ward pitched the
idea of training seminars to help teachers address homophobia and transphobia
in schools to the Victorian government in 2010. In the final weeks of the Brumby
Labor government, SSCV was funded A$100,000 for a pilot program to work
initially with six schools.33 A year later, the Liberal Baillieu government quad-
rupled the funding.34 This bipartisanship was facilitated by growing national

28
Marion Maddox, God under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics (Sydney:
Allen & Unwin, 2005).
29
Gibson, 243–4.
30
Kerry H. Robinson, ‘In the Name of “Childhood Innocence”: A Discursive Exploration of the Moral
Panic Associated with Childhood and Sexuality’, Cultural Studies Review 14, no. 2 (2008): 113–29.
31
McKinnon, 188.
32
Ibid., 11.
33
Ibid., 470.
34
Law, 15.
408 Australian Historical Studies, 52, 2021

and international expert consensus that homophobia in schools was an issue

educators needed to address.35 By 2015, the Australian Health and Physical Edu-
cation (F-10) curriculum document explicitly declared the need to cater for
same-sex attracted and gender non-conforming students.36 As explained
below, there had been a qualitative shift in the rationale for interventions into
and resources for schools. In the 1970s, gay liberationist efforts at sex education
emphasised young people’s right to sexual pleasure and agency. In the twenty-
first century, queer inclusive education was increasingly predicated on the need
to protect young LGBTQ people from the harm of homophobia and transphobia.
The bipartisanship demonstrated in Victoria was repeated in 2014 when Safe
Schools was rolled out nationally with funding from the conservative Abbott
government. Extending the work of SSCV, Safe Schools Coalition Australia
(SSCA) aimed to provide schools with the knowledge and resources to ‘create
safer and more inclusive educational environments for same sex attracted, inter-
sex and gender diverse students, staff and families’.37 By early 2016, 515 schools
had joined SSCA.38 Membership was voluntary and simply required the school
to commit ‘to becoming safer and more inclusive for same sex attracted, intersex
and gender diverse students, staff and families’.39 It was for the school to deter-
mine how these objectives were to be achieved, although SSCA offered free staff
training, resources and consultancy. These resources included four official
guides, three official posters, and a collection of booklets created by young
queer people which were available on request for secondary school libraries
and student support centres.40
Bipartisan support for Safe Schools collapsed spectacularly in 2016, coinci-
dent with the beginning of the bitter final stage of the national debate about mar-
riage equality.41 The trigger was a front-page story in the Australian in February,
critical of the just-released All of Us.42 This was a Safe Schools digital resource that
teachers could use in classrooms to facilitate discussion on sexuality and gender
identity. Based around the stories of seven LGBTQ young people, it was put
together by a team of creatives and educators who had followed the directives

35
Thompson, ‘Predatory Schools and Student Non-Lives’, 42.
36
Shannon and Smith, 244.
37
Joel Radcliffe, Roz Ward and Micah Scott, Safe Schools Do Better: Supporting Sexual Diversity, Intersex
and Gender Diversity in Schools (Melbourne: Safe Schools Coalition Australia, 2013), 2, https://
studentwellbeinghub.edu.au/educators/resources/safe-schools-do-better/ (accessed 14 October
2020).
38
William Louden, Review of Appropriateness and Efficacy of the Safe Schools Coalition Australian Program
Resources (Canberra: Australian Government, Department of Education, 2016), 2.
39
Roz Ward, Joel Radcliffe and Micah Scott, Guide to Kick Starting Your Safe School (Melbourne: Safe
Schools Coalition Australia, 2015), https://studentwellbeinghub.edu.au/media/9546/guide-for-
kicking-starting-safe-schools_2015.pdf (accessed 14 October 2020).
40
Louden, 2.
41
Barbara Baird, ‘Twenty-First Century LGBTI Activism in Australia: The Limits of Equality’, Austra-
lian Historical Studies 49, no. 4 (2018): 484.
42
Law, 21; Safe Schools Coalition Australia, All of Us: Understanding Gender Diversity, Sexual Diversity
and Intersex Topics for Years 7 and 8 (2016), https://studentwellbeinghub.edu.au/media/9299/all-
of-us-online-version-may-2016-v3.pdf (accessed 14 October 2020).
 Baird and Reynolds: Unsafe Subjects 409

of the Australian National Curriculum to provide inclusive education relevant to

the lived experiences of students, including ‘students who may be same-sex
attracted, gender diverse or intersex’.43 To appease the right wing of his party,
the new Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, tasked his Education Minister,
Simon Birmingham, to look into All of Us and other SSCA resources.44 A
review headed by Emeritus Professor of Education William Louden reported in
March 2016 that the four official guides of the Safe Schools program were con-
sistent with the aims of the program and were appropriate for use in schools.
Specifically, Louden deemed All of Us ‘suitable, robust, age-appropriate, edu-
cationally sound and aligned with the Australian Curriculum’.45 Notwithstand-
ing this endorsement, the federal government insisted that schools gain parental
consent for students’ participation in Safe Schools activities. This instruction
prompted the Victorian government to take over the funding of the Safe
Schools program in Victoria on the grounds that LGBTQ students might not be
comfortable seeking parental consent. Finally, the Education Minister declined
to renew federal funding for Safe Schools beyond 2017.
In the remainder of this article, we turn to the voices of LGBTQ young people
speaking in defence of Safe Schools.

Enter the young transgender political subject

Among the young people who came out to support Safe Schools, a new political
identity emerged. Transgender young people are clearly visible across all
materials produced by SSCV and SSCA, and they are also clearly evident as
speaking subjects in the activist social media posts, texts, videos and speeches
at political rallies that defended Safe Schools in early 2016. Some mainstream
media reports also included comments from young transgender people.46
For example, Erik Ly, whose story appears in one of the Safe Schools
resources, spoke at a rally in Melbourne on 10 March.47 He begins ‘Hi, my
name is Erik and I use he pronouns’. He adds that he is pansexual and panro-
mantic. He describes himself as without parental support and so if participation
in All of Us lessons had required parental consent he would have missed out. He
concludes ‘I would like to thank Safe Schools from the bottom of my heart for

43
Law, 19.
44
Karen Middleton, ‘What Happened to Safe Schools’, Saturday Paper, 26 March 2016, www.
thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2016/03/26/what-happened-the-safe-schools-program/
14589108003049 (accessed 5 April 2019).
45
Louden, 2.
46
See for example Henrietta Cook, ‘Transgender Students: The Struggle to Fit in at School’, The Age,
17 September 2015, www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/transgender-students-the-struggle-
to-fit-in-at-school-20150917-gjojgg.html (accessed 5 March 2019); Allison Worrall, ‘“I Needed
Safe Schools”: Hundreds Rally in Melbourne to Support LGBTI Student Program’, The Age, 11
March 2016, www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/i-needed-safe-schools-hundreds-rally-in-
melbourne-to-support-lgbti-student-program-20160310-gng2mk.html (accessed 24 April 2019).
47
Erik Ly, ‘I Need Safe Schools’, at the Hands Off Safe Schools Public Rally, Melbourne, 10 March
2016, www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1658281024434492 (accessed 14 October 2020).
410 Australian Historical Studies, 52, 2021

saving my life. Without you being amazing and wonderful, I wouldn’t be here
today’.48 A thirteen-year-old transgender boy who spoke (anonymously) at
the same Melbourne rally was quoted in The Age. Safe Schools ‘helped me to
discover that I am no different from my peers … I transitioned because I had
always felt like a boy, and really transitioning was just changing what everyone
called me’, he said. ‘When I was in grade four, Safe Schools helped me because
they talked to the teachers and gave Mum suggestions about how to handle any
uncertain parents’.49 At the rally held on the steps of Parliament House in
Adelaide on 23 March 2016, Melissa Murray spoke with her ten-year-old trans-
gender son Noah by her side. Noah transitioned with SSCA support at his school.
His experience of transition had been ‘bully free’ thanks to the Safe Schools
program. Noah then takes the microphone, wearing a ‘I need Safe Schools’ t-
shirt, but hands it back to his mother to stand beside her as she reads his
speech. ‘Hi he’s [I’m] Noah, and he’s [I’m] transgender … We need to save
Safe Schools because schools need to be safe … the anti-bullying [generic
program] does nothing like that … We need Safe Schools and especially I need
Safe Schools’.50
At the Melbourne rally, these young transgender people spoke from newly
available subject positions in overtly political contexts. Several overlapping
paths through which ‘young trans’ identities have become intelligible in Austra-
lian contexts can be discerned in the lead up to the Safe Schools controversy.
Pearce, Steinberg and Moon note the claim in 2014 by American magazine
Time that a ‘transgender tipping point’ has arrived. They are critical of this
claim’s erasure of the complexities of transgender history but also acknowledge
that the representation of transgender in mainstream popular media ‘has become
a major constituent of the Western cultural imaginary’.51
In Australia in November 2014, the ABC’s prestigious current affairs
program Four Corners documented a similar moment for young transgender
people.52 The report was built around interviews with two transgender girls
and an adult transgender man. A paediatrician at the Royal Children’s Hospital
in Melbourne described the huge increase in transgender children being referred
to the hospital, ‘from one in 2003 to a hundred new referrals just this year’. The
doctor commented that ‘What’s changed is that people are feeling safe to come
forward because of social change, but they are also becoming aware that we
have treatments that can help them’.53 The documentary was sympathetic but
unsurprisingly it reproduced conventional narratives about transgender – the

48
Ibid.
49
Worrall.
50
Save Safe Schools Rally, Adelaide, 23 March 2016, www.facebook.com/unisarainbowclub/
videos/1096866877133682/ (accessed 4 May 2019).
51
Ruth Pearce, Deborah Lynn Steinberg and Igi Moon, ‘Introduction: The Emergence of “Trans”’,
Sexualities 22, no. 1–2 (2019): 6.
52
Janine Cohen, ‘Being Me’, Four Corners, 17 November 2014, www.abc.net.au/4corners/being-me/
5899244 (accessed 15 May 2019).
53
Ibid.
 Baird and Reynolds: Unsafe Subjects 411

wrong body, the essentialism of truly being yourself, the vulnerability of trans-
gender kids especially to suicide, the centrality of medical treatment and
medical authority.54 The expanding vocabularies of gender non-conformity
and the identification of transphobia were absent. Despite Isabelle Langley’s
description of how, at the age of nine or ten, she had ‘started looking up
things … on the internet … and I found some videos too about some other chil-
dren feeling that way’ there was only the briefest reference in the program to
transgender community, and none to activism, support networks, or transgender
or queer counterpublics.55 The program did however tell of Isabelle’s own coura-
geous activism at her school.56 The Four Corners program bears the flaws evident
in the Time declaration – including an absence of reference to a ‘reactionary back-
lash’.57 But, like other popular culture and mainstream media, it brought trans-
gender children’s identity into visibility.
The Four Corners program also foregrounded medical authority. Significant
legal changes in Australia in the last decade and a half have paved the way for
young transgender people’s regulated access to health care. Distinctions are
made between different stages of treatment, and the age of the young person,
but a complex legal framework allows transgender young people with parental
support to undertake relevant treatment. Accessing treatment for young trans-
gender people without parental support is not so easy.58
Young people’s interactions with the practice of social science in Australia
have also been central in growing the availability and intelligibility of transgen-
der identities. Responses to the three Writing Themselves In surveys (mentioned
above) illustrate the increasing demand for identities outside the two conven-
tional gender categories. In the first survey, to which 750 young people
responded, there were only two sex/gender categories and reference to transgen-
der was infrequent.59 In the second survey two extra sex/gender categories
(‘transgender m-f’ and ‘transgender f-m’) were added. Of 1,749 young respon-
dents, nine identified as transgender (0.5 per cent of the total), only two
f-m.60 In the third survey, undertaken in 2009–10, two more new categories
were added: ‘gender queer’ and ‘other’. The term ‘transphobia’ appeared for
the first time. Of 3,134 participants, 91 (3 per cent) identified under the aggre-
gate grouping ‘gender questioning’ (another new term); 18 were ‘m-f’, 21
‘f-m’, 43 ‘gender queer’ and 9 ‘other’.61
There is a mutually constitutive relationship, then, between the discourses
and institutional locations that produce language and categorisation – medicine,

54
J.R. Latham, ‘Axiomatic: Constituting “Transexuality” and Trans Sexualities in Medicine’, Sexua-
lities 22, no. 1–2 (2019): 13–30.
55
Four Corners, 17 November 2014.
56
Ibid.
57
Pearce et al., 6.
58
Inner City Legal Centre, Transgender Children and Medical Treatment: The Law, www.iclc.org.au/fact-
sheets/, undated (accessed 15 May 2019).
59
Hillier et al., Writing Themselves In.
60
Hillier et al., Writing Themselves In Again.
61
Hillier et al., Writing Themselves In 3.
412 Australian Historical Studies, 52, 2021

law, mainstream media, social sciences – and the subjects who demand access to
them, and are enabled by them. The findings of Writing Themselves In 3 note emer-
ging forms of activism among young LGBTQ people. Subsequent studies have
found that young transgender people are particularly active online, creating
their own representations and critically reading those created about them.62
So, the soil had been well-tilled for the public debut of the young transgen-
der political subject. The Safe Schools controversy provided the national stage for
this new subject to demand attention and redress. As the statements made by
young transgender people at the Safe School demonstrations indicate, the
work of Safe Schools had helped carve out speaking positions for gender non-
conforming and same-sex attracted youth. As Abraham, a young speaker at
the Melbourne demonstration, reflected: ‘Ironically enough, it is arguably the
case that a program like Safe Schools has helped me to build the confidence
up to get up in front of you guys to defend it’.63
There was another political irony in the Safe Schools controversy. It has been
a common observation that young transgender people often bore the brunt of
the attack on Safe Schools, echoing the conservative focus on transgender
during the 1996 debates about the Sexuality Discrimination Bill and in the con-
temporaneous debate on marriage equality.64 It was as if their opponents knew
that their long battle against homosexuality was flailing, and sensed that trans-
phobia added value to their discursive arsenal. Clarissa Carden’s analysis of the
Brisbane Courier Mail shows how the newspaper rejected ‘the reality of young
transgender people’.65 Mary Lou Rasmussen and Deana Leahy pinpoint the
focus by opponents of Safe Schools on the transgender body practices of chest
binding and penis tucking. They argue that this focus intends to shame young
transgender people and create shock, disgust and fear among the mainstream
public.66 In attempting to engender shame and disgust, the conservative cam-
paign effectively tried to deny the legitimate subjecthood of transgender young
people. Law ruefully notes: ‘across this entire period, the Australian – self-
appointed guardian of the safety of children – spoke to not a single school-
aged LGBTIQ youth. Not even one’.67
Conversely, this conservative attempt to traduce and deny transgender
youth subjectivity during the Safe Schools controversy helped to coalesce and
magnify the figure of the young transgender political subject as they stepped

62
S.L. Craig et al., ‘Media: A Catalyst for Resilience in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and
Queer Youth’, Journal of LGBT Youth 12, no. 3 (2015): 254–75; Tiffany Jones et al., ‘School Experi-
ences of Transgender and Gender Diverse Students in Australia’, Sex Education 16, no. 2 (2016):
156–71.
63
‘LGBTI Student Abraham’s Speech’, at the Hands Off Safe Schools Public Rally, Melbourne, 10
March 2016, www.facebook.com/ineedsafeschools/videos/lgbti-student-abrahams-speech/
1657691447826783/?so=permalink&rv=related_videos (accessed 15 April 2019).
64
Riseman; Shirleene Robinson and Alex Greenwich, Yes Yes Yes: Australia’s Journey to Marriage
Equality (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2018), 22, 87, 243, 261, 270.
65
Carden, 307.
66
Rasmussen and Leahy, 65.
67
Law, 41.
 Baird and Reynolds: Unsafe Subjects 413

forth to claim protection from hate. One young speaker at a Safe Schools rally in
Sydney on 12 March 2016 decried an ‘upswing in transphobia’ and observed, accu-
rately, that ‘the most vicious attacks, scattered across the pages of The Australian, and
spewed by the ACL spokesmen, are levelled against the parts of Safe Schools that
relate to gender identity’.68 This presence of the young transgender political
subject during the Safe Schools controversy crept ever younger. A video made by
the Parents of Gender Diverse Children to respond to ‘all the negative media at
the moment’ featured five primary school age transgender children, and three of
their mothers. They thanked Safe Schools for ‘helping me to transition at school
safely’, because they ‘helped my school know who I was’, and ‘for helping our tran-
sition be so smooth’.69 One child dissolved into mirthful giggles in front of the camera
to perform, like Noah’s handing back of the microphone to his mother at the Ade-
laide rally, a childness that is nonetheless political, nonetheless speaking out.

Queer vulnerability, harm and suicide

Our second observation relates to the marked presence of a discourse of LGBTQ

youth vulnerability, harm and suicidality during the Safe Schools controversy.
This discourse has a distinct lineage, especially in youth education and the provision
of health and social services by the state. For some years, educationalists and soci-
ologists have rigorously critiqued a ‘naturalization of queer youth as victims’.70 In
2004, Eric Rofes cast his eye over the mass production and circulation of contem-
porary images in the United States and discerned that ‘the dominant image emer-
ging of LGBT youth characterised them narrowly in a “Martyr-Target-Victim”
model’ (although he noted from experience that working-class students were
more likely to identify with the model).71 In her study of ‘safe spaces’ and ‘queer
spaces’ in high school settings in the United States, Mary Lou Rasmussen considered
how a discourse of vulnerability and safety could work to essentialise tropes of mar-
ginalised sexual identities and ‘produces its own spatial exclusions’.72 Aggleton
et al., have noted a binary of queer youth as either victims or unusually resilient
which has dominated recent writing and scholarship.73

68
Defend Safe Schools Rally, Sydney, 12 March 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4iq7BegxJY
(accessed 15 April 2019).
69
Parents of Gender Diverse Children, ‘Thank You to Safe Schools’, 16 March 2016, www.facebook.
com/parentsofgenderdiversechildren/videos/562501357265134/
UzpfSTQwMzcxMDk2MzAyMzY0OToxMDQyMzg1OTM1ODIyODEy/ (accessed 19 April 2019).
70
Daniel Marshall, ‘Young Gays: Towards a History of Youth, Queer Sexualities and Education in
Australia’, The La Trobe Journal 87 (2011): 67.
71
Eric Rofes, ‘Martyr-Target-Victim: Interrogating Narratives of Persecution and Suffering among
Queer Youth’, in Youth and Sexualities: Pleasure, Subversion, and Insubordination in and out of
Schools, eds Mary Lou Rasmussen, Eric Rofes and Susan Talburt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2004), 41, 56.
72
Mary Lou Rasmussen, ‘Safety and Subversion: The Production of Sexualities and Genders in
School Spaces’, in Rasmussen et al., 136.
73
Peter Aggleton, Rob Cover, Deana Leahy, Daniel Marshall and Mary Lou Rasmussen, Youth, Sexu-
ality and Sexual Citizenship (London: Routledge, 2019), 8.
414 Australian Historical Studies, 52, 2021

In the Australian context, Daniel Marshall has historicised the rise of a thera-
peutic and health lens through which LGBTQ youth are understood by state
bureaucracies and funding agencies. In the 1970s, he argues, gay-friendly sex edu-
cation was spearheaded by gay liberation activists working outside state insti-
tutions.74 In this gay liberationist inspired sex education literature – as noted
above, rarely taken up by schools – there is an emphasis on pleasure, politics,
power, activism and solidarity that gets lost in the turn to a therapeutic, health
lens which instead imagines LGBTQ youth as ‘always-already in deficit, as natu-
rally sick or endangered students, as subjects whose very recognition is tied to
the recognition of the risks they face’.75 For Marshall, the demise of LGBTQ radic-
alism in the 1980s with the advent of HIV/AIDS and the winding back of sociopo-
litical conditions that had supported radical collectivist action paved the way for the
health turn in queer sex education. This trend was given political impetus by the
conduct of research on HIV infection in young people in the 1990s, and studies
on harm and suicide in same-sex attracted youth.76 Marshall sees the funding of
SSCV in 2010 as the culmination of the apportionment of government resources
to the needs of same-sex attracted and gender questioning youth in the 2000s
via a health and suicide prevention framework, recognition and resources.77
Notwithstanding Marshall’s pre-history of SSCV, the actual Safe Schools
resource material attempted to buck the health lens by minimising the language
of LGBTQ vulnerability, suicide and therapeutic amelioration. Roz Ward expli-
citly cited her unease with educative campaigns that ‘focus exclusively on sad-
looking people seemingly on the brink of suicide over their sexuality and
gender’.78 As Copeland and Rasmussen note, the All of Us resource brims with
photos and narratives of LGBTQ young people substantially at ease with their
sexuality and expression of gender.79 Yet as Copeland and Rasmussen have
also noted, as the Safe Schools controversy unfolded, the program’s defenders
reverted to understandings of LGBTQ youth as vulnerable, frequently
damaged by homophobia and transphobia, and at heightened risk of suicide.
In this understanding of LGBTQ youth, the Safe Schools program ‘saved lives’,
a common refrain uttered during the controversy.80
This approach was expressed on the 29 February 2016 episode of the ABC’s
current affairs panel show, Q&A, by one of the panellists, prominent lesbian,
medical practitioner and Sydney city councillor Kerryn Phelps.81 Phelps’ status

74
Daniel Marshall, ‘Historicising Sexualities Education’, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural
Studies 34, no. 1–2 (2012): 28.
75
Daniel Marshall, ‘Queer Pedagogies Out of Place and Time: Redrawing the Boundaries of Youth,
Sexual and Gender Difference, and Education’, Journal of Homosexuality 63, no. 3 (2016): 407.
76
Marshall, ‘Historicising Sexualities Education’, 28.
77
Ibid.
78
Ward quoted in Law, 13.
79
Simon Copeland and Mary Lou Rasmussen, ‘Safe Schools, Marriage Equality and LGBT Youth
Suicide’, in Bent Street 1, ed. Tiffany Jones (Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan Press, 2017), 94.
80
Ibid., 91.
81
Q&A, 29 February 2016, www.abc.net.au/qanda/safe-schools-sniping-and-senators/10653398
(accessed 22 April 2019).
 Baird and Reynolds: Unsafe Subjects 415

as a medical professor added extra weight to her declaration that LGBTQ youth
were ‘much more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression and they are more
likely to suicide’.82 Sparring with panellist Lyle Shelton from the Australian
Christian Lobby, high school teacher Christopher Bush, one of the authors of
the All of Us resource, insisted that Safe Schools was working because there is
‘less self-harm and less suicide’.83
The rhetorical manoeuvres of Bush and Phelps during the early weeks of the
Safe Schools controversy to defend the program reflect what Rasmussen, Rofes,
and Talburt described more than a decade earlier as a ‘certain common sense
[that] has overtaken public and professional discussion about queer youth, a
common sense that frames them overwhelmingly in terms of oppression and vic-
timization’.84 The danger of this common sense approach, they argue, is that it
tends to overlook or minimise the agency of children and youth.85 Experts
thus fix LGBTQ youth as already in deficit and requiring disciplinary interven-
tion, through the institutions of medicine, education and professional develop-
ment for their adult protectors. What is striking about the Safe Schools
controversy, however, is the ease and fluency with which LGBTQ youth
deployed the language of harm, vulnerability and suicidality themselves. Nor is
this discourse confined to LGBTQ youth from the kind of lower socioeconomic
groups Rofes had taught two decades ago.
If there is a historical argument here it is that discourses of harm and vulner-
ability have further seeped into and remade LGBTQ imaginings of the self and
the concomitant demands on the state for protection from harm. During the
Safe Schools controversy, at least for the defenders of the program – adult and
the young – it was the figure of the LGBTQ youth as a vulnerable, wounded
subject that packed the most rhetorical and affective punch.
For example, Carter Smith, an audience member on Q&A on 21 March 2016,
was a passionate youthful proponent of the young LGBTQ subject defined by
their vulnerability.86 Smith introduced himself as a queer student with many
sexual and gender diverse friends. What particularly troubled Smith was the
damage and harm inflicted during the controversy on already vulnerable
young LGBTQ people. He explained: ‘I think the problem is politicians are
using young, innocent, in pain children as bullets. That is unacceptable … That
is driving kids to hurt themselves. That is driving kids to kill themselves’.87
Carter Smith’s impassioned plea for the protection of vulnerable queer young
people attracted nationwide attention and five days later he followed up with

82
Ibid.
83
Ibid.
84
Susan Talburt, Eric Rofes and Mary Lou Rasmussen, ‘Introduction: Transforming Discourses of
Queer Youth and Educational Practices Surrounding Gender, Sexuality, and Youth’, in Rasmus-
sen et al., 2.
85
Ibid., 3.
86
Q&A, 21 March 2016, www.abc.net.au/qanda/abcc-double-d-and-rioting/10653254 (accessed 22
April 2019).
87
Ibid.
416 Australian Historical Studies, 52, 2021

an opinion piece in the Huffington Post elaborating on the dangers facing LGBTQ
youth.88 Under the simple by-line, ‘Carter Smith – Member of the LGBT commu-
nity and student’, Carter’s opening paragraph sketched a mournful picture of the
queer youth as a tragic subject:
It was a gorgeous day. The sun was shining, the birds were singing. There
was a procession of people winding up the path of the cemetery. But the
sound of the birds was pierced by the sobs from the distraught mother.
The still-in-shock father. The younger sister who just couldn’t understand
where her older brother went. He’s dead, by his own hand. Dead because
when trying to figure out who he was and where he could fit in the world,
all he could hear that he wasn’t right. Wasn’t normal.89
Whether an actual or a fictional funeral, the effect of the piece is to frame an argu-
ment around societal homophobia, queer vulnerability and queer suicidality.
Moving from scene/mood setting to commentary, and citing medical experts,
Smith declared flatly that ‘LGBTI students are six times more likely to self-harm
and six times more likely to commit suicide. And I believe the attacks on the
Safe Schools program perpetuate the likelihood of youth self-harm and suicide’.
In contrast, in Smith’s estimation, the Safe Schools program ‘saves lives’.90
If Carter Smith spoke on behalf of his wounded LGBTQ peers, there were tes-
timonials from the subjects themselves during the public protests to defend the
Safe Schools program. Student Erik Ly, mentioned earlier, shared his story of dis-
tress and recovery with the assembled protesters.91 In Year 9, Erik had begun to
tell people that he was trans. Over the next two years Erik attended two different
private schools, but neither school was a member of SSCV, ‘so they did not know
exactly how to support me either. And as a result it negatively affected my mental
health and well-being at school’. Erik’s academic achievement suffered as school
became ‘a battle for me to be who I am’.92 Finally, in Year 11 Erik moved to a new
school where teachers had undertaken the Safe Schools professional development
and where there had already been transgender and gender diverse students. ‘My
mental health rapidly improved and I found myself smiling all the time’.93 The
rhetorical and affective power of Erik’s testimony was speedily recognised.
Under the hashtag #I need safe schools, a photo of Erik speaking at the rally was
circulated alongside his declaration, ‘I would like to thank Safe Schools from
the bottom of my heart, for saving my life’.94

88
Carter Smith, ‘When Politicians Attack the Safe Schools Program, They Are Attacking Innocent
Kids’, Huffington Post, 26 March 2016, www.huffingtonpost.com.au/carter-smith/when-
politicians-attack-the-safe-schools-program-they-are-attacking-innocent-kids_b_9535778.html?
ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4&utm_campaign=share_email (accessed 22 April 2019).
89
Ibid.
90
Ibid.
91
Ly.
92
Ibid.
93
Ibid.
94
#INeedSafeSchools, www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1659528447643083 (accessed 14 October
2020).
 Baird and Reynolds: Unsafe Subjects 417

In Perth, addressing the ‘Stand up for Safe Schools’ rally, fifteen-year-old

high school student and self-identified LGBTQ Australian, Oscar Kaspi Crutch-
ett, painted a dystopian picture of the suffering many queer youths endured at
school. ‘For many students, school is a battleground – social rejection, abuse,
peer-shunning and isolation turn life into a daily struggle’.95 Oscar acknowl-
edged the strong support he received from parents, friends and his school
but warned that many others ‘are pushed to mental illness or worse’.
Oscar’s implicit purpose in speaking publicly was to function as a witness to
this victimisation. ‘I know of so much suffering which still burns to this
day’. There were, Oscar explained, ‘an ocean of investigations, studies,
surveys and accounts which remind us of how fragile the safety and well-
being of young LGBTI people is in our schools’.96 Again, the prospect of
LGBTQ youth killing themselves punctuated Oscar’s address, just as it had
Erik’s testimony. ‘Lives will be made unbearable. And most shockingly, lives
will be cut short’. In this schema, the Safe Schools program was not only
life-affirming but life-saving. ‘By gutting Safe Schools’, Oscar declared, ‘the
government is gutting not only the safety but the very mental health and
the very lives of our children’.97 Paradoxically, his cry for ‘our children’ with
its gesture to the national register evokes the imperative to save our children
that so often underpins conservative appeals to childhood innocence and
(white) national virtue.98

Conclusion

To conclude by noting the discursive overlap between the youthful defenders of

Safe Schools and a conservative discourse of childhood innocence and national
virtue may seem ungenerous. We do not seek to deny the harms created by
homophobic and transphobic discourses and institutions.99 Our point is to high-
light how a discourse of LGBTQ vulnerability and harm helped create political
speaking positions for the newly emergent young transgender subject, and
their queer siblings, at some cost.
Seeking protection from harm may well have had more mainstream political
purchase in the 2016 national debate about Safe Schools than earlier gay libera-
tionist modes of sex education that emphasised youthful pleasure and auton-
omy. Even the Murdoch tabloids temporarily called off the hounds in their

95
Oscar Kapsi Crutchett, Stand up for Safe Schools Coalition Snap Rally, Perth, 21 March 2016,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xZbwRshnXU (accessed 25 April 2019).
96
Ibid.
97
Ibid.
98
Joanne Faulkner, The Importance of Being Innocent: Why We Worry about Children (Melbourne: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2011); Barbara Baird, ‘National Virtue and the “Media Sexualisation of
Children” Discourse in Australia’, Sexualities 16, no. 5–6 (2013): 651–64.
99
Kerry H. Robinson, Peter Bansel, Nida Denson, Georgie Ovenden and Cristyn Davies, Growing Up
Queer: Issues Facing Young Australians Who Are Gender Variant and Sexuality Diverse (Melbourne:
Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre, 2014).
418 Australian Historical Studies, 52, 2021

reporting of the suicide of a gay Aboriginal Brisbane boy who had been merci-
lessly bullied at school.100 Highlighting suffering can secure visibility and legiti-
macy. It may also offer the political subject a safe place from which to speak
when facing powerful shaming and expressions of disgust. We recognise that
the Safe Schools controversy took place during a time dominated by a conserva-
tive federal government and its alliance with conservative Christianity, both well
versed in manufacturing moral panic about children and sexuality. Safe Schools
coincided with the marriage equality debate where transgender people were
being targeted.
During the Safe Schools controversy, LGBTQ youth deployed the thera-
peutic language of vulnerability, harm and amelioration to not only make the
case for retaining Safe Schools but to underscore the fresh harm of the Safe
Schools controversy and the federal government response. There is no doubt
that this created a powerful political platform, a reverse discourse that provided
the terms through which to speak back to government and Christian conserva-
tives alike, and to claim citizenship.101 Oscar Kaspi Crutchett excoriated the
federal government for adding to the suffering of young people: ‘We are at a
point where the government should be helping LGBTI youth and trying to
diminish catastrophic homophobia … Instead of being the medicine they are
causing even more pain’.102
Yet there are dangers in recourse to LGBTQ vulnerability and harm, well-
rehearsed by the scholars noted above. From a historical perspective the turn
to a health and therapeutic lens, and the concomitant centring of suffering, vul-
nerability and harm, has succeeded (in both senses) in the mainstream and so
partially erased a politics rooted in pleasure and radical challenge to sexual
and gender norms. We can trace a genealogy of the creation of space for
LGBTQ people within medical and health discourse through the resourcing by
government of HIV/AIDS-focused community organisations from the 1980s, to
sexual health research institutions like ARCSHS (established 1993), to state rec-
ognition of LGBTQ youth needs through health frameworks, to the sometimes
tense but necessary for some alignment of transgender people with medicine,
to support from prominent doctors like Kerryn Phelps.103 We forget the regulat-
ory effects of these regimes of politics and subjectivity at our peril. An era where
queer adults can achieve assimilatory respectability yet queer youth are con-
signed to vulnerability and victimhood demands critical analysis.
But all is not lost. Rasmussen and Leahy described Safe Schools as a process
of public education and ‘an unprecedented expansion of queer world-making in
contemporary Australia’.104 In this context we see that which exceeds the dis-
course of vulnerability – the political critique, the community-producing political

100
Carden, 303.
101
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1984), 100–2.
102
Crutchett.
103
Latham.
104
Rasmussen and Leahy, 78.
 Baird and Reynolds: Unsafe Subjects 419

rallies, irony, humour and indeed childness of the young supporters of Safe
Schools – as the most promising resource for compensating for harm, for the
futures of young people, and as resources for political struggles to come.

ORCID

Barbara Baird http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2444-682X

Robert Reynolds http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3859-3668

Barbara Baird
Flinders University
Email: barbara.baird@flinders.edu.au

Robert Reynolds
Macquarie University
Email: robert.reynolds@mq.edu.au
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