LGBTIQ teachers are consistently positioned as the ‘other’: their lives, identities and families are regarded as different, as unrelatable, as potentially harmful. Straight teachers are spared this burden: their family lives are valued as acceptable models for young innocents, as somehow representative of social and moral norms. This othering is pernicious and pervasive. A male primary school teacher I met at a networking event shared his feelings of betrayal when his husband, who had donated his expertise to help fundraise for the school, was publicly referred to as simply his ‘friend’ by the school principal, someone he had long considered an ally.

The fight for marriage equality is about asking for same-sex relationships to enter fully into the public sphere. The time for grudgingly tolerating what happens behind closed doors is past. Australian children of queer parents, and indeed queer Australian children, are long overdue entry into the equal status now enjoyed by their peers in over twenty other nations.

In particular, the primary and secondary education sectors are a minefield of homophobic and transphobic law, institutional practice and everyday discrimination. In this, LGBTQI people are the collateral damage of the neoliberal push towards privatisation.