Does talking to kids about gay or trans people "turn" them?

This worry has a spot where it punctures itself: if seeing and hearing about something made you become it, then decades of television, textbooks and fairy tales — which showed almost nothing but heterosexual love — should have “talked” everyone straight by now. Instead, people of every orientation grew up inside exactly that environment. Information has never had that kind of power.

“Having seen it” and “becoming it” are two different things

Does a child turn left-handed because they learn left-handers exist? Do they swap out their mother tongue because they studied another language? Orientation and gender identity run deeper than either, and are far less at the mercy of outside information. Telling a child “some people are drawn to the same sex, and some people feel their gender isn’t the one they were registered as at birth” hands them a more complete map of the world — not an instruction that rewrites what’s inside them.

The strongest counter-example is right in front of us: children raised by same-sex couples, steeped in these ideas from the start, grow up with the same spread of orientations as everyone else (see Do same-sex parents make their kids gay?). Whether loving a BL story can “bend” you works the same way (Does BL turn you gay?).

Silence won’t make a child straight — only lonelier

Not talking changes nothing about who a child already is. A child naturally drawn to the same sex will be, silence or no silence — the only difference is how many years they’ll spend circling through shame and self-doubt before they realize nothing about them is broken. Avoiding the subject was never protecting the child; it was soothing the adult’s unease.

Learning these things early and calmly helps in both directions: if the child is LGBTQ, they’re less likely to sink into self-loathing; if they aren’t, what they pick up is a little more respect for people unlike them. Both outcomes are good. Neither is “being turned.”

A word on “grooming” and “recruiting”

Calling plain explanation “recruitment” or “grooming” is an old trick for stigmatizing knowledge — as if queer people only exist by signing others up. But no one was recruited in, just as no one was ever “talked into” being straight. If you’d like to do a good job explaining this to a child, the guide for parents has some concrete ideas.