Forget the detention of refugee children or the torture of Indigenous teenagers in juvenile detention centres or the institutional sexual abuse of young people, conservative politicians and media have exposed the real danger to kids everywhere: "gender theory."
According to them, gender theory sneaks into curriculums like the Bogeyman, hidden in programs like Safe Schools, to corrupt young minds. It urges children to take hormones (never mind that intersex infants are forcibly subjected to sterilisation) or participate in bondage (never mind that students get "counselling" from some chaplains that being gay is sinful).
But, here's the thing: what they think of as terrifying propaganda, I think of as everyday life.
I remember encountering gender theory when I was a docile two year old frolicking in a dress and coveting my cousin's shiny red shoes. When I was a little older, I would dress up, put on my mother's heels, and ask all my aunts to give me lipstick. At school, I would regale my friends with stories of how I wanted to be just like Xena when I grew up because she was much stronger than Hercules.
I never thought it was wrong to like these things because my parents never made a big deal out of it, nor did they police my femininity. I did endure some teasing at school, but I brushed it off. From my exuberant childhood perspective, I was not making an ideological statement. Honestly, I had not read any Marx by the time I was eight (that came later). I was just being a kid.
For many other young people, however, expressing who you are has violent consequences. Numerous reports over the years have documented boys getting bashed because they "walk like a sissy" or girls being sexually assaulted because they would rather show affection to other girls than make themselves available to boys.
These expressions do not necessarily relate to a person's sense of their sexuality or gender identity. The recent death of Tyrone Unsworth, an effeminate Indigenous teenager, has made the reality of such gendered policing brutally apparent. His fellow classmates effectively and repeatedly told him that his life was worthless because he did not live up to their ideas of what it meant to be a boy. He subsequently committed suicide.
Politicians will offer their condolences over tragedies like Tyrone's death and sometimes express shock at what is actually a frighteningly banal reality of self-harm for many queer kids in Australia. These same politicians will also insist on not "politicising" such deaths, which is strange given that our lives have been made political by those who believe LGBTI existence and civil rights should be subjects of critical public scrutiny (just look at the failed marriage equality plebiscite).
Cultural commentators who mime Helen Lovejoy by imploring everyone to "think of the children" will also insist schools cut "ideological programs" that have the insidious aim of encouraging us to treat LGBTI kids with decency.
Despite not having Safe Schools while I was a student, I was lucky to have had teachers who cultivated my ability to think critically about gender. Instead of ridiculing my concern that our Modern History course cited only men, a high school teacher encouraged me to read feminist writers of history, like Anne Summers and Joan Scott (which, as it turns out, were not hard to find if you were willing to spare a minute or two to look).
At university, I turned these interests into a major and subsequently a PhD. In addition to writing essays about bell hooks on popular culture or Judith Butler on gender performativity, what I learnt gave me the confidence to come out as gay.
As a kid, I did not consume gender theory from books or school resources. I stumbled upon it in moments when I simultaneously fantasised about being an Evil Queen and finding my Prince Charming in a fairytale world. I only found the academic stuff much later in life.
But, having a program at school that gave me intellectual tools to think about gender or sexuality would have made life easier and saved me from awkward Google searching at midnight on the computer while everyone was asleep.
My life has been devoted to gender theory. And so has yours. Gender shapes many facets of our lives. Whether you study it or not, everything we do to "act like a man" or "act like a woman" is gender theory. Gender theory also manifests in ways of living that transgress binaries like male/female or heterosexual/homosexual.
And gender theory can be dangerous. It can be dangerous to a system that prescribes rigid ways of living depending on your genitals. It can be dangerous to a society that presumes heterosexuality is natural or inevitable - and yet so fragile that even the mention of homosexuality can "turn you gay". Yes, it can be dangerous to patriarchy.
So, if gender theory is indeed a Bogeyman, it's one that affirms the integrity of actual people while attacking the longevity of suffocating social norms. It deserves to be embraced not only in schools, but by society at large.
Senthorun Raj just submitted his gender theory inspired PhD at Sydney Law School and has been appointed as a Lecturer in Law at Keele University in the UK.
Twitter: @senthorun
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