- Hey everybody, today I'm here with:
- Lindsay.
- Yeah, she has a really great channel
called Queer Kid Stuff
and today I just kinda wanna talk about LGBT+ stuff
and talking about that stuff with kids
and is that an appropriate topic and all of that stuff.
Can you just tell me a little bit about your channel
and what you do?
- Yeah, okay.
I do LGBTQ+ education for kids
ages three and up, pretty much.
So it's like all-ages content.
And it's something I've been wanting to do for a while.
I used to do it in theater
and then I transitioned into digital platforms
with the work I was doing.
The biggest thing for me is about
media representation for children
about just general diversity and inclusion,
just showing the world as it is
with all the different colors and identities and humans
that live in it
and making sure that,
content right now is so focused on what's normalized
and that really feeds into children's content
in a very pervasive, overwhelming way,
and diversity is hard to come across in children's content.
- A little bit.
A little bit. - Yeah, just a little bit.
I mean, it's generally hard to come across in any content.
- Yeah, yeah.
But one of the things I've noticed in a lot of media
is even when it becomes okay for two men to kiss onscreen
or two women to kiss onscreen in an adult show
or in just a regular TV show or whatever,
it's still inappropriate for that to happen in a kids show.
It's like people are able to be like,
"Oh this is okay, just not for children."
It's like they've kind of accepted it but not really.
- I think it's very tied to this stigma around queerness
and the fact that
if you're talking about queerness with children
that you have to explain queer sex to children.
And that's just,
it's this huge misconception
that children equate sexuality with sex.
Because here's the thing: children don't know what sex is.
They're not coming at queerness from that context,
which is the context that adults are coming from,
and why a lot of queerness is taboo
is because your sex looks different for adults who are queer
versus adults who are straight.
- I think people sexualize queer people in general.
- Yeah, definitely. - It's like with children
to a three-year-old girl, you can be like,
"She's gonna have a strong boyfriend someday."
or "She's gonna be such a princess when she grows up,"
and that's really gendered stuff,
but it's also about their sexual orientation.
It's like saying the people they will date in the future
and that's okay,
but if it's the other way around,
then it's like you're sexualizing them somehow.
- Yeah, and what's important about it is that
kids understand the two things that are important
about sexuality and identity,
which are gender and love and romance
and connections with humans and empathy.
Kids understand those concepts,
and you can talk about queerness in terms of those ideas
and sex doesn't have to be a part of the conversation.
And that's kind of what I try and do on the channel
is bring these ideas that can be so complex
and heavy and confusing to adults
and show that they can be very simplified
and they can be understandable
from a three-year-old's perspective
and that it's not a hard thing to wrap your brain around.
- Yeah, I feel like one of the things
when we talk about sexuality
is people focus so much on sexual attraction
and not on romantic attraction,
and forget that oftentimes gay people or bisexual people
are also biromantic or homoromantic or whatever.
It is about love a lot of the time and not just sex.
- Yeah, I worked on a video on defining what asexual is,
and that was really interesting to talk about for children
because I did have to avoid sex,
'cause it's not appropriate.
Also, sex doesn't concern children.
It's not something they need to know about.
I mean, reproduction is important for children to understand
because babies are in three-year-olds' lives,
and that's something that can be conceptualized
on their level.
But you don't need to talk about sex with kids.
It's just not necessary.
There's sex-ed topics that should be talked about,
I did a consent episode I thought was important,
but yeah, in my asexual episode
I basically talked about asexuality as aromanticism,
and talking about different kinds of love,
so looking at platonic relationships,
and looking at romantic relationships,
and then kind of using a metaphor of like,
kissing for sex.
So it's definitely something you can touch upon.
- 'Cause it's simplifying things for children.
- Yeah, exactly. - Trying to bring it down
to that level so that they can understand.
They don't know attraction and all that,
they know liking people and not liking people or whatever.
- And there was a,
I came up in theater for young audiences,
and so I had this fantastic playwriting teacher,
this professor of mine in undergrad
who always told me to write children's content
from under the doorknob.
So looking at the world from a perspective of smallness.
'Cause children are just little people.
And people just forget
that children are also humans with brains
and capabilities and autonomy.
So it's about respecting a child's brain
as having the same capacity as an adult's
just without the experience.
- One of the things that I think is really important,
in addition to all the education stuff
is just normalizing it, just having that to exist
as a thing that they see.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
- Yeah, I mean it's also about making it fun, too.
That's why I have Teddy on,
that's my childhood toy.
That's from when I was a baby,
and having the songs and stuff,
and making it something that becomes,
something that's not scary to talk about.
A big part of the videos that I make
is about starting a conversation between grown-ups and kids,
and really making it something
that can be talked about regularly,
and if you have the vocabulary for it,
you can integrate it into your life more,
and point out like, if you are watching Beauty and the Beast
and that's a very invisible moment that happens,
and I doubt that kids are actually picking that up,
and so you can have an adult talk to the kid about,
"Did you see that moment?
Let's talk about what happened there."
- Or when a child has same-sex parents
and a lot of people are like,
"How do I explain that to my kid?"
But there are ways to do that,
there are easy ways to explain it.
- Yeah, and there's kind of two camps of it as well,
of making it visible and talking about it directly,
but then also just allowing it to exist in your space
and not even talking about it.
I think it's important for kids,
especially in the climate that we're in
I think it's important to talk about it,
but I wanna live in a world where nobody has to come out.
- Yeah, where it's just a thing, you're like,
"Oh, there are all of these people that are different
and that's cool."
- Exactly.
Apparently, I've heard that kids these days
are cluing in instead of coming out.
- What's cluing in?
- Cluing in is letting people in on the fact that you're gay
rather than it being like, "I'm gay!"
and a big coming-out-of-the-closet moment
because it's not as big of a deal anymore.
- I've seen people criticize it
and say that's not appropriate for that age range,
that you should be making content for an older age group,
and I'm wondering how you would respond to that.
- There's a lot of content
that actually targets those age ranges already,
and that's kind of where,
in most schools, it depends on where you are,
but most schools do start integrating sex ed
in middle school
and talking about these things in middle school
and then in high school, obviously.
But for this age range,
for elementary, preschool,
that's essentially where my content is targeting.
There really isn't any content at all for these age groups,
and I think it's super important to target them
because this is such a formative age
where you're really learning about
the totality of what the world is and who exists in it,
and what the different categories are,
and just building your whole structure
of how the world functions.
And if you're learning about that world
in a way that is normative and focused on the majority,
you're not getting a whole picture of the world,
and you're growing up
in this false sense of what the world is and is like
and who exists in it.
And that's where bigotry happens,
and that's how you internalize homophobia,
and that's how you get people
who don't understand other marginalized identities
because they don't understand that they exist
and they don't understand that oppression exists.
And especially if you're growing up in a conservative space
and you happen to be a queer person
and you find that out later,
that's something you have to unlearn
and work through a lot of internalized bigotry,
and I think if you are talking to kids at this age,
you avoid a lot of that
because you're teaching them correctly the first time.
- You're just teaching them this stuff is normal and okay,
or even that just it exists.
I don't think I knew growing up that trans people existed.
And so just knowing that that was a thing
would've made me feel so much better
when I started to question my own gender.
And I know a lot of other people feel that way,
especially, as you were saying,
if they grow up in conservative spaces.
But I didn't even grow up in that conservative of a space,
it was just like,
"Oh, we don't really talk about it
because it's not a thing that you deal with
unless it directly affects you."
So I dunno,
I'm really glad that you do this stuff that you do,
I think it's really important,
and yeah, thank you for being here.
- Yeah, totally.
- So go check out Lindsay's channel.
I will link it in the description,
it's called Queer Kid Stuff.
Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.
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