the

biyuti project

Queer and Trans Filipinx Youth in Catholic Education

Recommendation #7

7. Provide anti-racist, anti-oppressive, culturally responsive and relevant mental health and wellness supports.

Given the above recommendations and relevant themes and findings of the study, the importance of anti-racist, anti-oppressive, culturally responsive and relevant mental health and wellness supports in schools is needed. This springs from our analysis that the experiences of exclusion, non-belonging, and invalidation faced by the participants have an ongoing impact on their mental health and well-being. These experiences result from participants’ ongoing confrontation with the standardization of certain identities (white, cisgender, heterosexual) alongside normative expectations of masculinity, femininity, and what it means to be a “good” Catholic and a true Filipino.

“It's just very visceral pain, just like a lot of... all of the intersecting identities being like you're pulled every which way. It's almost exhausting to be queer, which is something so beautiful and you want to feel joy in... but you're also Filipino, but people don't often accept that, but also a person of colour, people do not accept that... So the people around you in the schooling system, they don't accept you either.”

As described by this participant, there is a pain that comes from having to “seek acceptance” in a world that rejects racial and queer identities. The “exhaustion” described here is the onus and emotional labour that comes with navigating one’s intersecting marginalized identities while pursuing belonging. Schools can take these students’ need for support seriously by intentionally providing them access to inclusive mental health supports, education, and services - be it for individuals or groups.

In order to promote the mental health and well-being of racialized queer and trans students, it is important for schools to address the systemic normalization of certain identities and take active steps to uphold diversity. School Mental Health Ontario describes this as the foundational everyday work of all school staff that attends to student inclusion, engagement, and belonging (“Think in Terms of Tiers” 2024).

In our study, most participants shared experiences of others’ assumptions about their sexual orientation and gender identity.

One participant, for example, expressed peers’ expectations that being trans was incongruous with feeling joy. This participant grappled with peers’ belief that being a trans person inherently comes with suffering and pain. Another participant expressed the harmful assumptions about her lesbian identity as temporary and fixable by simply “meeting the right man”.

As these experiences of harmful assumptions create distress, promoting anti-oppressive mental health supports requires challenging cisheterosexism and white supremacy that shape the wrong stereotypes that impact queer and trans people. Catholic school boards can actively disrupt such wrong stereotypes and harmful normativities through diverse representations in curriculum and inviting mental health workers trained in critical and anti-oppressive mental healthcare (Ocampo and Pino 2014; Pino 2024) . Attention, therefore, can be given not only to racial and ethnic diversity but also to diversity in gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, and religious Catholic identity.

School Mental Health Ontario uses a multi-tiered system of support, ascribing mental health promotion to the first tier in which all school educators and staff have a role in student engagement and belonging (“Think in terms of tiers” 2024). As part of providing identity-affirming spaces for students, schools are asked to “dismantle and remove oppression and racism with anti-oppressive and anti-racist policies and practices” (“Identity-affirming school” 2025 ). School boards can engage in a critical review of anti-discrimination policies and examine how explicitly or intentionally reflected gender expression, gender identity, and sexual identity are included (Airton et al. 2022). One participant expresses how others’ disrespect of her sexual identity resulted in feelings of isolation and negative school experience. Another shared how preoccupation with being different affected self-confidence and self-esteem.

So being queer has always been like, an isolating experience for me. And not even just being queer, like even in elementary school when I already figured out my identity, I was the only queer kid in elementary school. And then going into high school already having like, a bad, like, you think about being queer, I get outed. I was ‘the lesbian’, by the way, not even ‘lesbian’. And people I didn't know already formed a thought about me before.

“Sometimes [labels] really got in the way of my confidence and self esteem growing up in high school, because also in high school, like, I honestly wish I was as expressive as I was with you guys, or because I was mostly, like, just figuring myself out and I, I was, I was always insecure. I remember like, oh, if I don't join sports teams, would I be, like, less masculine? If I joined the vocal class would I be more feminine? So I was always so wrapped up in my head on who I want to be.”

School mental health providers and educators can also recognize the strategies for survival already engaged by racialized gender and sexually diverse students for their belonging and inclusion within school spaces and engage in intentional “seeing” of those who may feel Othered by messages about a certain way to be. One participant shared that at school, it was easier to be the “weird” kid rather than the queer kid, who faced greater social stigma and negative attention.

“One of my friends who was very outwardly queer as well, he was known as the kid, the gay kid, and I was known as the weird kid, but he had more flack and he had more, like, fire on him. But I didn’t because I was the weird kid. Because the weird kid– it’s okay for them to be weird, but for the gay kid, it’s not okay for them to be gay.”

Promoting student connectedness can serve all students’ mental health and well-being, but especially those who are navigating exclusion resulting from living in systems that communicate their intersecting identities as less acceptable. Investing in affinity and community spaces such as Gender and Sexual Alliances (GSAs), Black Student Alliances (BSAs), and Filipino Student Alliances (FSAs), identity-specific conferences, and culturally reflective mentorship opportunities with queer and racialized community members can help make students feel more included, less alone, and better supported (Ontario Human Rights Commission 2025). Studies show that GSAs increase perceived school-level safety for students who identify as part of the LGBTQIA+ community as well as those who do not (Kitchen 2013; Li et al. 2019). To support Catholic belonging, research shows that youth reconnection to their faith resulted from joining supportive youth and church groups that affirmed their identities, enabled a deeper understanding of their faith, and promoted an overall experience of confidence (Chiongbian et al. 2023). It is important to recognize that ethnic community spaces need to be “queered” and queer spaces need to be made more “cultural” in order to allow for students’ integration of their intersecting identities (Sadika et al. 2020). This is also applicable to Catholic spaces and school groups that can be “queered” and made more “cultural”.

³ Cisheterosexism: “Discrimination at the intersection of cissexism and heterosexism which privileges cisgender and heterosexual norms and identities, and punishes anyone who fails to uphold those norms” (Egale Canada 2024)

⁴ White supremacy: the ideology that white people and the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions of white people are superior to non-white people and their ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions. This also refers to the political-economic social order that provides structural advantages to white people at a collective and individual level (Sensoy and Di Angelo 2017).

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