'There are gay people in schools, too': Teachers form 1st LGBTQ+ committee

“Schools have gay people, too!”

That was the message of support from a teacher in a booklet published ahead of the launch of the Sexual Minorities Committee of the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union (KTU).

On March 1, the committee became the union’s first-ever body dedicated to sexual minorities. It brings together LGBTQ+ teachers and teachers who support them. Their shared hope is that LGBTQ+ students will encounter at least one teacher who supports them during their years at school.

On the evening of Sept. 14, The Hankook Ilbo spoke by phone with “Mo,” the committee’s inaugural chairperson, who uses a pseudonym as an activist.

Schools ask about gender every day

Mo is a 13-year veteran elementary school teacher. At the first staff meeting held at the school where Mo currently works, Mo proposed eliminating a numbering system that divides students by gender.

Under the system, the 30 students in a class are divided into boys and girls, with boys assigned numbers starting with 1 and girls from 16, in alphabetical order. The students are then divided into “boys’ teams” and “girls’ teams” and lined up in separate rows.

“Once they are divided by gender, competition starts,” Mo said. “Even when they play a survival game in which students are eliminated one by one, all the boys cheer for the boys and all the girls cheer for the girls. They’re not even the ones who are trying to survive. That made me realize how harmful separating students by gender can be.”

In a survey on sexual orientation and gender identity released by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea in April, LGBTQ+ youth identified “distinguishing students by gender in school uniforms, class numbers, lines and physical activities” as the biggest difficulty they faced in school life, at 32.6 percent.

Mo said transgender and nonbinary students — those whose identities fall outside the gender binary of boy and girl — are often forced to identify themselves as one or the other. Examples include having to mark their gender on answer sheets that list only "male" and "female," or use a bathroom that does not correspond with their gender identity. Attending an all-boys or all-girls school can also be a source of distress.

“When your legal gender is different from the gender you identify with, things such as uniforms, numbers and exam sheets that specify your gender can make you feel as though the world is denying who you are,” Mo said.

LGBTQ+ students leave school at higher rates because they feel that their existence is being denied. The same survey found that 17.4 percent of LGBTQ+ students had left at least one school, while 69 percent had symptoms of depression.

That figure is about 17 times the 1.1 percent school dropout rate among elementary, middle and high school students nationwide in 2024, according to Basic Education Statistics. Among LGBTQ+ students who had actually left school, 74.7 percent dropped out during high school and 24.1 percent during middle school.

Mo said schools erase LGBTQ+ students in various ways. The Ministry of Education recently removed content related to sexual minorities for a handbook on preventing and responding to hateful and discriminatory expressions.

The handbook was prompted by an incident involving students at Paichai High School’s baseball team who mocked the May 18 Democratic Uprising. It was intended to address a widespread culture of hateful jokes in classrooms, but LGBTQ+ people were excluded from its guidance.

The Education Ministry explained that it had reflected concerns from provincial and metropolitan education offices who worried about complaints.

“There are derogatory remarks against sexual minorities everywhere in schools, yet the content intended to protect them was removed because of complaints,” Mo said angrily. “That means sexual minorities have effectively been left deliberately exposed to hatred.”

Students commonly ask their peers questions such as “Are you gay?” Mo said. Such remarks can disguise prejudice as a joke.

Teachers, meanwhile, often find themselves at a loss when confronted with anti-LGBTQ+ expressions. Responding can be difficult because such cases tend to generate particularly hostile complaints.

With social consensus on how to respond still lacking, the burden of dealing with such incidents falls entirely on teachers. Some teachers even pretend not to notice when they hear homophobic or transphobic remarks. As a result, safe spaces for LGBTQ+ students at school are gradually disappearing.

“Anti-LGBTQ+ hatred is one of the hardest issues to address in schools,” Mo said. “If even the Education Ministry is afraid of complaints, education becomes even more difficult. Excluding the group that is easiest to attack and hardest to protect from the handbook means that neither teachers nor LGBTQ+ students will be protected.”

Mo and their colleagues established the committee because they wanted LGBTQ+ students to know that there is at least someone on their side.

Six months after its launch, the number of supporters continues to grow. The committee now has about 100 members across seven regional branches nationwide.

At the committee’s launch ceremony in May, Seo-young, representative of the Shining Youth LGBTQ+ Group and an activist who uses a pseudonym, recalled their lonely years in high school.

“If there had been even one teacher by my side who accepted me for who I was and told me that it wasn’t my fault, my life might have taken a slightly different path,” Seo-young said.

Some 48.6 percent of LGBTQ+ youth said they had not encountered even a single teacher who supported sexual minorities during their elementary, middle or high school years.

Mo said the committee’s goal is to give young people the experience of meeting the teacher Seo-young described.

When asked whether Mo had ever met such a teacher as a student, Mo replied, “Not at all.”

The teacher who Mo did not have back then now stands in a classroom.

Some of those teachers were once LGBTQ+ students themselves. Now, they have become the teachers they themselves never had.

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.