exactly this.
Schools should make the legal position clear on matters of sexual orientation and gender reassignment but they should be careful not to drive a wedge between the child and their home life/their parents.
Teaching kids something in school (eg that being gay is always something to be celebrated) when it’s very different to what children are learning at church/mosque/temple/synagogue/at home/at grannies just causes more internal conflict for gay kids growing up in conservative/orthodox families, not less.
Whereas if the legal position is taught (ie same sex marriage is absolutely equivalent to opposite sex marriage in UK law and that some families have same sex parents who can both have parental responsibility, same a hetero couple can) it’s going to be easier for a child (especially a child with an emergent same sex attraction) to rationalise it and look to theIr future, rather than feel that awful conflict of ‘home says this/school says this, only one can be right so the other must be lying to me’.
My DD has just started at a girl’s high school that has majority Muslim students on roll - the school have The Proud Trust listed as their partner org for LGBT issues (of anal sex dice game fame!) so I’m really thinking about this topic at the moment.
I think I might message LGB Alliance for advice because all the Stonewall/
Mermaids/Gires/Allsorts type orgs are more or less the same - what I would imagine teens from orthodox backgrounds need to hear is a combo of ‘the law of a country is a higher authority than the rules of various religions and everyone’s right to religious belief/lack of belief is protected in that law’ and for the actual gay/bi kids, something like the ‘It Gets Better’ stuff which was the message of the 2000s?
Trans does not seem to be a thing at this school, as natal boys aren’t allowed to apply (although I suppose an extremely Mermaids-y parent might try and sneak a boy in via changing passport and NHS records) and the vast majority of the girls wear a hijab and the trouser option (for modesty reasons).
I know the girls have already discussed same sex attraction via talking about the Heart Stopper books. One girl said her mum has told her she can’t read them until she’s 25/has left home, whichever happens first!
The girls who are experiencing same sex attraction and/or gender distress (and gender distress can be related to wanting to be straight and not gay) will need some sort of positive messaging in school but full on glitter and rainbows and mermaids and unicorns is likely to create more internal conflict than resolve it.
(this is a specific example about a Muslim majority school, but the internal conflict of one message in school/a different message at home probably happens everywhere)