My child is friends with a trans kid, has a gay teacher and he doesn’t bat an eyelid. What’s wrong with the Parkfield parents?

I would have felt immeasurably freer and led a far less anxious life if the very notion of sexuality hadn’t been shrouded in secrecy at school. Perhaps I wouldn’t have felt so ashamed about my Wonder Woman fantasies. I certainly needn’t have felt so alone

I recently used these precious column inches to support Parkfield Community School, whose “No Outsiders” programme teaching understanding of LGBT+ people and relationships had been met with protests from religious parents. Mystifyingly, my 800-word decree did not undo centuries of heteronormative prejudice and preconceptions, so here I am again, unwilling to let this go.

If anything, the protests have intensified, with 80 per cent of Parkfield’s pupils having been taken out of school by parents who are mostly from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds. Quite understandably, many people have been concerned about an “open season” being declared on a group who, even in mainstream outlets, are so often subjected to liberal doses of Islamophobic vilification and dehumanisation. I hope it will be clear that I would be every bit as robust in sticking up for Muslim folk whose way of life was being prejudged or invalidated as I am about to be for LGBT+ people.

Parents have accused the school of “promoting homosexuality”. This presents a rather skewed understanding of what the Department for Education’s relationships and sex education programmes entail, as though primary school teachers are going to act out erotic encounters between Action Man figures, rather than simply open up a conversation to allow the children to see that there is nothing to fear from people who are different.

I am not heterosexual myself, although I don’t really know what label to give myself these days, as there are quite a lot of them and I haven’t had the time to try them all on. What I do know is that I would have felt immeasurably freer and led a far less anxious life if the very notion of sexuality hadn’t been shrouded in secrecy at school. Perhaps I wouldn’t have felt so ashamed about my Wonder Woman fantasies. I certainly needn’t have felt so alone.

The No Outsiders programme that these parents are opposing is the creation of Andrew Moffat, an assistant head teacher at Parkfield Community School. Moffat had resigned from his previous post at another predominantly Muslim primary school in Birmingham after parents complained that he had “come out” to his pupils. My son is in the final year of primary school, and his teacher is a woman married to a woman. No one complained about her “coming out” to the children by sharing this information, which she did simply by living her life with the same openness as her heterosexual colleagues. There are Muslim parents at my son’s school too, but there were no placards and no protests, and hardly a batted eyelid. Like all other parents, they just want their child to have a nice time at school and get a good education.

One child in my son’s class is trans. Recently, the children were told of his new name; my son mentioned it to me when he got home from school, as I was making the tea. My son was sweet and quite unfazed by it: “Oh mummy, our teacher told us today that a kid in my class who we thought was a girl is actually a boy.” For my part, I almost dropped the saucepan. His matter-of-factness caught me off guard, but I held it together for long enough to ask if he’d been surprised. “No,” he said, “we already knew. Oh god, you’re not going to cry, are you?”

I’m afraid I was, and I did, and my son rolled his eyes. But I do get a bit teary sometimes when, for instance, I see two young guys walking along the road holding hands somewhere other than Soho. I think of all the people who went before them, who suffered for these simple things that cisgendered heterosexuals take for granted. I think of the bravery of those who came out, knowing that they risk being ostracised by society and even their own families.

So yes, I felt elated for my son’s classmate – and for the parents – that he found himself in a school where the reaction from all of the children was pretty much the same as my son’s. Nothing more was said about it. There was no chatter among the parents, no gossip – only acceptance.

Among the 80 per cent of children at Parkfield whose parents have taken them out of lessons to hold placards with slogans, some of them will be LGBT+; some will discover that part of themselves as they grow up, while others might already know. Every child at that school will live and work alongside LGBT+ people.

We are up against it again. It’s not just the parents at Parkfield who are resisting a cultural shift towards freedom to be who you are: last night, BBC’s Question Time was sufficiently sure of polarised attitudes among its audience that it was emboldened to invite as its only non-Brexit question: “Is it morally right to learn about LGBT+ issues at school?” Can you imagine if they had asked if it was “morally right to learn about other religions at school?” They would neither dare nor bother – it’s a settled subject.

The Parkfield Community School protests are not a flash-in-the-pan news story. The ongoing protests are just the latest battle in the long war for acceptance that we have inherited from previous generations. My plea to you, whatever your sexuality or gender identity, is to keep fighting, to keep showing solidarity with the LGBT+ communities, to support the teachers at Parkfield, and in every compassionate and peaceful way that you can, to try to reassure those who are fearful of change and difference.