There is a lot here that I find very, very confusing. When I was growing up as a teenager in the late 1970's to mid 1980's, there was no need for state / government interdictions against teaching about being LGBTQIA+, simply because the special unit I was in had a psychotherapeutic model that was a priori against such stuff.

I was drawn to a boy when I was around 16 or so, and it was treated as a psychopathology that had to be 'worked through', so that I could go on to lead a useful (re)productive lifestyle with myself as a pliant factotum within the strictures of the society's expectations.

Peer pressure (the threat of taunts, mockery and physical assault), were sufficient to keep me suppressed so very well.

My horror at the prospect of male puberty, with all that ugly, deformation that this entails was leveraged against me. The fact that I didn't want to grow a beard, didn't want hair all over my body, didn't want to live the socially-determined role of a man, was always hidden against a backdrop of subtle and not-so-subtle threat of portentous happening.

I'm pretty sure that they were spiking me with testosterone in order to make me ugly, though of course, these many years later, that would be impossible to prove. I do know, that from 15, when I was reasonably ok-ish, to 19, I want from what might have been an attractive 'boy', to an ugly gargoyle and I suspect that they revelled in that, knowing I could never live my life as I should have been able to.

I still remember the mockery and ridicule that was leveraged against me, the weaponising of a Freudian 'therapeutic' model which basically gaslights its victims was very successful in crushing me down.

One day, we were given money to go clothes shopping, and I happened upon a Benetton store, which sold items in unusual colours, and I bought a few of them.

When I was wearing them, one of the thug-bullies ripped me to shreds with the usual epithets and slurs and implicit threats of violence. I hope he's dead now, seriously.

I was so nervous and anxious, that I did something I never did before; I went into the school gym and tried to do stuff. I only did it once, because I only had to do it once. I didn't wear that stuff again, because I had been humiliated and bullied into not doing so. I doubt that Damien Bradley or Malcolm Hunter have ever had to use any of the software development platforms that I have used.

The special unit I was at billed itself as something that it was not; my local authority had petitioned for me to go there because I took these mental tests which made them think I was quite bright. It was supposed to help me catch up with the missing education that my worthless, scummy, malignant, dysfunctional family situation had deprived me of.

Turns out it was a residential camp for certain types of staff/screws to form intimate relations with the right sorts of teenagers. Those of us who were either non-compliant, or who might blow the whistle, or were otherwise undesirable were allowed to be the targets of the bullies, and I'm pretty sure it lent something to the frisson that the screws were getting from their interactions with the dominant, thug-studs who were their bed/playmates.

So, the blocking of LGBTQIA+ awareness was not even necessary, since it was already considered a pathology that needed to be 'worked through'.

It took me a while to actually begin to emerged from their wilful and spiteful suppression of me.

Because of the way I was treated in older adolescence and young adulthood, I believed myself to be gay. A while after, I realised that this was not it really. It took me several decades to realise I'm actually trans. They certainly won that one; ruined any hope I may ever have had of having a happy life. Pure sadism on their part.