Trans* and queer people also study at the Archbishop’s Gymnasium. They should be supported in leadership, not silenced – A2larm

“Unfortunately, some topics are more complex and have a wider context than the students realized (…) I am aware that there is a need to talk about the topic of trans people, however, it is a very difficult topic and people with different opinions meet in it. For an overall understanding and grasp of the topic, the best way of presentation seems to me to be a discussion with the participation of several people, which will bring different points of view…” wrote trans* activist Lence Králové, director of the Prague Archbishop’s High School Ondřej Mrzílek, when he canceled her lecture the day before.

Lenka Králova was invited to the school by the student body itself. “There was a lot of interest in your lecture. It was a kind of beacon of hope for all the queer and trans people at the school. And that there are not a few of them,” reads one of the messages that Králová received following the cancellation of the lecture. The student body itself explains the cancellation of the event by saying that, according to the director, it was too political. At the same time, he said, “it is not in accordance with doctrine for a ‘woman who was a man’ to give a lecture on the grounds of the school” and the problem could also be with the archbishopric, which is the founder of the school.

The moment the school principal cancels Lenka Králové’s lecture because it is necessary to present “another point of view” and because it is “complicated”, he sends a message to the entire student body that they are alone.

“The lives of trans people are not a matter of politics. We are people like everyone else who deal with some complication and obstacles in everyday life. And I speak about it publicly, and I wanted to speak at the gymnasium as well. It’s only marginally political and only because I live in a country where, in order to be officially called Lenka, I would have to have a living and healthy part of my body cut off and thereby ‘impossibility of reproductive function,'” Králová responds on her Instagram profile.

The same director, who was said to be bothered by politics at Lenka Králové, invited Jan Gregor from the Alliance for the Family to class two years ago. Gregor is said to have talked about queer issues at school. At the same time, the Alliance for the Family, in which he is active, fights with great power against the rights of queer and trans* people. For a long time, he has been against marriage for all, but also against the possibility of queer couples to adopt children or against surrogate motherhood. Through instructional speech, the Alliance for the Family tries to indicate that queer and trans* parenting also means shopping with children. “Children become commodities, mothers become incubators for the fulfillment of the wishes of homosexual couples,” reads one of the advertisements of the Alliance for the Family in Učitelské noviny.

A lot of young queer and trans* people grow up in an environment where they constantly hear that there is something wrong with them, that they are against nature, and that they shouldn’t be able to marry the one they love and/or have a family. Jana Jochová Trlicová, the chairwoman of the Alliance for the Family, once even stated that she would rather her son be alone than be in a relationship with another man. This hatred and rejection by the institutions in which they have to survive until adulthood (family and school) naturally falls on young people.

The moment the school principal cancels Lenka Králové’s lecture because it is necessary to present “another point of view” and because it is “complicated”, he sends a message to the entire student body that they are alone. That trans* and queer people do not have a place at school because it is not that simple and their identity is political, according to him. It sends the message that it is more on the side of Gregor, who is fighting against the rights of these people, than Lenka Králové, whom the student body invited itself.

Although anti-gender organizations like to create the illusion that queer and trans* activists are “manipulating” or “trafficking” children, their real fear lies elsewhere. These people are afraid that if Lenka Králová talks to teenagers, she will support their emancipation, help them break free from the oppressive and disciplinary dogmas in which conservative institutions try to raise and maintain them. Trans* and queer people scare bigots precisely because they show that another world is possible. In the end, institutions such as a conservative Catholic family or the Archbishop’s Gymnasium are not worried about the children, but mainly about themselves.

The author is the editor of Alarm.