Laïla El-Métoui reflects on the significance of Sue Sanders’ honorary degree
PICTURED: SUE SANDERS (LEFT) AND NAZIR AFZAL (RIGHT)
This summer, in Whitworth Hall, the University of Manchester gave one of its highest honours to a woman who has spent decades insisting on something deceptively simple: that LGBTQIA+ people belong in the story.
In the world of LGBTQIA+ education, Sue Sanders is an institution. Ask any teacher who has stood in front of a class in February and talked about Alan Turing, or Pearl Alcock, or the history of Section 28, and you will find her fingerprints on that lesson.
In 2004, Sanders co-founded LGBT History Month. It started in the UK and is now marked across the country and beyond. That did not happen by accident. It happened because someone refused to accept that an entire community’s past could simply be left out of the textbooks.
As chief executive of Schools OUT UK, a charity that has been challenging prejudice in education since 1974, she has pushed, persuaded and persisted. Its mission is simple: every LGBTQIA+ person should feel safe, seen and able to thrive. Each year, LGBT+ History Month (LGBT+HM) sets a theme and spotlights five historical figures and offers free resources to schools, organisations and businesses. The charity has helped other countries launch history months of their own.
The OUTing the Past festival brought researchers and historians together with museums, archives and libraries across the UK and beyond. The Classroom website gives teachers free lessons for pupils aged five to 19, built around a whole school approach. Sanders has also advised government and the police on hate crime. Add free webinars, workshops for businesses, conference talks and a presence at Pride events up and down the country, and you begin to see the scale of what she has helped build.
But perhaps her most powerful contribution is a single word.
Sanders is credited with coining the term “usualising”. “Usualising means making something part of everyday school life so it feels familiar, reduces fear of difference, and helps challenge discrimination.”
Usualising is not about a special assembly once a year. It is not a poster in the corridor that nobody looks at. It is a maths problem that mentions two dads. A history lesson that notes who a scientist loved. A reading list where a queer character is simply there, living their life, without their identity being the plot twist. It is the quiet, steady work of making difference ordinary.
And ordinary is exactly what LGBTQIA+ young people need right now.
We are living through a time when LGBTQIA+ lives, and trans lives in particular, are debated relentlessly in newspapers, on social media and in Parliament. Young people hear those debates. They absorb the message that who they are is controversial, a problem to be solved, a topic to be argued over. Fear thrives on unfamiliarity. Prejudice feeds on silence.
Usualising is the antidote. When children grow up seeing LGBTQIA+ people as a usual part of the world around them, the fear has nowhere to take root. When LGBTQIA+ pupils see themselves reflected in what they learn, they learn something else too: that they are not alone, and that they have a future.
That is why this honour is more than a personal tribute. It is a reminder of what inclusive education can achieve, and of how much is still at stake.
Sue Sanders has given us the language and the tools. The question now is whether schools, governments and all of us are willing to use them. Every classroom that usualises LGBTQIA+ people in all their diversity is a classroom where a young person feels a little safer.
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