By Kaylyn Tu
May 11, 2026 · 3 min readAs of 2026, the LGBTQ+ community continues to face conflicting religious beliefs while being challenged by their ubiquitously stereotyped media representation as a scandalous community. Among the flags of pride and triumph, rises an anonymous writer vocalizing the prejudice with quiet strength.
In 2017, a pseudonymous UK-based writer, under the anonymous name Deenah al-Aqsa, authored the article highlighting the protests against Birmingham’s Anderton Park Primary School’s 'No Outsiders’ programme back in 2014, which has raised moral dilemmas about how Muslims and the LGBT community can co-exist. While outsiders like Nazir Afzal were commissioned to mediate the long-standing dispute, Afzal claimed in a School Week interview that the removal of the LGBT programmes in Birmingham did children “no service at all, and no good at all", pointing out that despite arguments of implementation, a child doesn't “become gay just because” they “learn about gay things.”
The author shares her fair side of the issue, vocalizing the injustice of schools remaining oblivious to the existence of the LGBTQ+ community despite the very same curriculum permitting topics just as morally conflicting. While acknowledging the multitude of opposing people, primarily Muslim parents, the author points out the ignorance, comparing the situation with the hypocrisy that schools also teach Cleopatra's norm to marry her brother, or King Henry VIII, and how he beheaded his two wives, at which point no one seems to protest the moral inflictions.
And while such protests received proper handling, with both sides adhering to valid points, some emerged as volatile and spontaneous, often resulting in uncalled public assaults. It is not masking the queer community's achievements, but despite receiving over 55% support from British adults, with 47% now comfortable coming out, the severe levels of hate crime remain a serious issue.
Like many LGBT people across the UK, Deenah al-Aqsa's response to the multitude of homophobic incidents was recalled as “hurtful” and “worrying”, particularly in the rising involvement of young people. The author listed two at-the-time recent incidents, both involving a gay couple, and neither was provoked first. The first involved a female couple on a London bus who were assaulted by a group of teenage boys, while the second involved a man who was knocked unconscious in a London station in an unprovoked homophobic assault, with the group that carried out the act making hateful comments saying “gays should be strung up". This pattern of uncalled assaults only proceeded further, with no prominent signs of stopping by 2025, where the latest Home Office statistics reported more than 18,000 hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation and over 3000 trans-related hate crimes between 2024 and 2025.
The author calls out these volatile mistreatments condoned by surging young adolescents as a “learned” behavior, firmly believing that rather than an inherent characteristic, homophobic teens are taught, further establishing that derogatory phrases like “homos”, “lezzies” and “dykes”, were unfortunately her first impressions into the concept of homosexual attraction as a 10-year-old due to the Islamic environment she was raised in.
These assaults were further described as “insults added to the injuries sustained,” referencing how the incidents happened during Pride season, the time of year made to celebrate such identities.
Amidst the media's queer activists, Deenah al-Aqsa's work transcends the limits of what an article with an anonymous profile can do, offering depth, vulnerability, and raw truth that speaks up for the religious communities who differ slightly from both the LGBT community and their religious roots.
Kaylyn Tu
Grade 9
International School of Ho Chi Minh City
Written on May 11, 2026 (Monday)
