I was introduced to a powerful little book by John Powell in 1974 when participating in the first of many personal development training programmes in the early 1970's. 

In the book Powell says, "I am afraid to tell you who I am, because if I tell you who I am and you don't like who I am – Thats all I have."  So we create masks – we present to people an image of ourselves that we think they want to see. That way we can avoid the risk of rejection.  Because if I present a mask, and you reject that mask, I can always create a new mask.

I spent my life until I was 50 living a lie.  I know I should have been born female, but I was not. So to express myself the way I felt, would have led to ridcule and rejection.  Instead I tried to be the man everyone seemed to believe I should be,  I missed out on so much. When I finally did change gender and showed people who I really was I did experience a huge amount of rejection and ridicule. But the joy I experienced from the real acceptance I encountered, the real friends who accepted me just as I was, was worth all the rejection. 

There was another benefit.  All my life I lived in fear of being outed, of people discovering my terrible secret self.  Once I showed the world who I was, all other fears were easy to face. It was like going through my own room 101 and coming out of that experience was the most liberating I have every encourntered. 

I spend a lot of my time coaching people to speak in public and most people believe that speakign to a group of people is the number one fear.  In fact very few people are really afraid of speaking in public, what they are afraid of is making a fool o themselves, rididule, embarassment – and standing up in front of a group of people and speaking without any training is a pretty good way to guarantee embarassment and ridicule. The problem is that many of us had teachers at school who did not understand this and ritually embarassed us. So we grow up belieiving that we cannot speak to a group of people, when actually we are just trying desparately to avoid the early humuliating experience of speaking in public.

 There are consequences to being yourself – not everyone will thank you and you have to be prepared for the worst – but I found that when things were even worse than my worst fears, when it happened, it was never nearly as bad an experience as I had expected. Our greatest fear actually is fear itself.. As a speaker I have had every possible thing that can go wrong go wrong. I don't often make the same mistake twice, instead |I try to use the experience to prevent it from happening again  - which in turn helps me to be more confident and successful. 

Colleges are presently at the forefront of tackling LGBT discrimination which it really important because so many LGBT people fall far short of their academic potential at school due to the relentless bullying and harassment they have to endure. All too many schools seem to have ignored the widespread introduction of “gay” slang to describe anything considered to be “gross”, “minging” or “bad”. Similar discriminatory words referring to race religion or disability have not been tolerated, whilst LGBT based slang has been allowed to become acceptable.

The government is now beginning to tackle this with the publication of their Working for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Equality  action Plan and more recently the Trans Action Plan.

These two publications set out a clear strategy by this government to work with all sectors, especially education in tackling discrimination and bullying.

By far the best way to address the issue in education is to engage students in open discussion about LGBT issues and apply a zero tolerance policy to prejudicial language and behaviour. To help with this process Pinnacle training Solutions have produced an excellent online training too called the Empower LGBT Toolkit. All participants in my workshop were asked to complete this programme before attending which helped to encourage better discussion and debate.

Whilst this could work as a good standalone training tool, I feel it is better employed as a preparation tool prior to an interactive session where students and staff can then raise questions that have arisen from undertaking the online training.

The toolkit is available free to anyone – and is especially recommended for all FE colleges or Schools.

As February is LGBT History Month – I recommend that you forward this link to all staff and encourage them to use it in work with students.

Empower LGBT Toolkit.

TheTransgender Action Plan sets out the areas that the government feels that following extensive research , are those issues of transgender equality that need to be addressed as a priority and falls in to four sections

Section 1 – Early years,education and social mobility

Section 2 – A Fair and Flexible labour market

Section 3 – Opening up public services and empowering individuals and communities

Section 4 – Changing culture and attitudes

What I feel is good ab out this action plan is that it places emphasis on tackling prejudice and discrimination in schools and in the workplace in private sector. Tackling prejudice in schools in particular is an area that has not been effectively addressed by previous equalities legislation prior to the Equality Act 2010 and this action plan puts some additional emphasis on the duties of schools.

Tackling transphobia, homophobia and all gender based bullying, prejudice and discrimination early at school is, I believe the most important step needed. Children are far more receptive to equalities ideas and will often encourage parents and older people to change attitudes rather than the other way round. Often by the time someone completes school their prejudicial attitudes are fairly well embedded and they are likely to pass those negative attitudes on to their children.