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18 July 2022 4:00 PM

The Sussex based charity connecting young LGBTQ people and their families with each other

"The magic is putting a 15-year-old trans boy with a 15-year-old trans boy, and them connecting over something that it can feel like no one else understands."

By Emily Maskell

Words: Alastair James; pictures: All Sorts Youth

When I came out, my LGBT+ friends were an invaluable and supportive network which has stayed with me. Despite that, the process was difficult and still can be, no matter the circumstances. 

Although the news didn’t come as a complete surprise to my parents, they had to adjust the ideas they had formed about my future.

Although I tried to reassure them that I would be OK and could be happy, I wish they’d had someone to talk to who they could relate to and ask questions.

If we’d had something like the charity Allsorts Youth Project (ASY) in Bristol back in 2015, I like to think we would have used it.

A beneficiary of the Attitude Magazine Foundation (AMF), ASY is a Sussex-based LGBT+ charity founded in 1999. Operating across Brighton, Horsham, Worthing, Chichester, and Hastings, it works with children and young people under 26 who are either LGBT+ or are exploring their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.

It also provides a support service for parents and families.

Once referred to ASY, young people have an informal meeting with an LGBT+ youth support worker, so the charity can decide how best to help them. They do this through both group work and one-to-one sessions, both in person and online.

Split into three age brackets: 5-11, 12-15, and 16-25, the youth groups take place on a fortnightly or monthly basis. Activities such as craft and board games are provided to help participants get to know one another and share their experiences.

Families/parents meet twice a month to exchange their stories.

The charity also carries out training and education programmes in the wider community, which includes appearing at assemblies for young people in schools and collaborating with organisations to help them be more inclusive and supportive of LGBT+s.

“We work with a vision of a world in which LGBT+ children and young people are free to be themselves, and challenge exclusion, prejudice and discrimination in all areas of their lives,” ASY’s communications and fundraising officer Effie Fowler tells me over Zoom.

“The magic is putting a 15-year-old trans boy with a 15-year-old trans boy, and them connecting over something that it can feel like no one else understands,” she goes on to say. It’s the same with the family support work.

“Parents who are navigating new territory tackle that together and have a space where they can meet someone five years into their journey and know they’re not alone.”

Colin, 22, is trans-non-binary and turned to ASY’s services eight years ago after coming out at 14. “Allsorts felt like a really positive force, a celebratory space,” they say. “A lot of online spaces are a bit more like, ‘Everything’s terrible,’ whereas ASY said, ‘This is a good thing and you’re gonna be all right.’ It was normalising.”

In between doing collages and numerous games of Jenga (“I’m sick of Jenga to this day because of the amount of Jenga we played!”) and other regular youth group activities, Colin formed a close group of friends who could all relate to one another.

“You could make a throwaway comment and not have to contextualise it, or not have everyone give you a sad look because you referenced you were trans. It was nice to be doing wholesome craft activities with other people who got it.”

From a parent’s perspective, Colin’s mum gained a lot from attending ASY’s support groups, and found connecting with others there empowering.

“She had a really hard time discussing it with her friends who had no idea what it was like,” shares Colin. “A lot of parents talk about going through a mourning process. You have to reassess your vision of your child’s life and your child’s safety. So, to talk to other parents in the same position and to not feel alone was so important.”

Colin now works as an LGBT+ trainer for ASY. In this role, they lead sessions in schools where they talk about being trans and discuss what others can do to be better allies to the LGBT+ community.

“We work with a vision of a world in which LGBT+ children and young people are free to be themselves” —Effie

Colin says that ASY has formed a big part of their identity over the past eight years.

“I’m incredibly confident in myself and mentally strong, and because of that, I feel like I have a lot of privilege as a trans person. And I really feel I should be using that to be able to go into schools and teach kids about my community.

“It feels good to be giving back to a charity that has done so much good for me and for so many of my friends. If you had told 15-year-old me that by the time I was 22, I’d be working for ASY, I think they’d be really excited about that.”

For Boris, 17, a trans man, and his mother Milly (not their real names), ASY provided similar relief.

Growing up, Boris was always a tomboy. He preferred boys’ clothes and would say that girls sucked. If he played ‘Mums and Dads’ with his friends, he would always be the dad.

After attending an ASY session about supporting children who were questioning their gender, Milly realised a lot of what was said might apply to Boris. Later that day, Milly told Boris about the workshop, which led to Boris, then aged 10, to come out as transgender.

Sat together on their sofa at home in Kent, the pair explain how that moment was a turning point for them both.

Milly says, “I understood that this is more than him saying, ‘I want to be an astronaut when I grow up’ or something like that. It was who he was, and I needed to start really understanding what it was he was saying to us.”

Asked whether it was difficult not being able to communicate how he felt to his family, Boris’s view is that he was waiting for his parents to “catch on”.

Milly offers a different perspective.

“For the few years before Boris came out, he was very, very unhappy. We couldn’t really put our finger on why. We tried everything to work out what was going on because when he was little, he was a happy little person, and that disappeared.”

“We held each other in moments where we had nothing left to give and we had lost hope” — Milly

In their desperation to understand their child, Milly and her husband would take Boris down to Brighton, where there’s more of a diverse community, to show him exactly that. But it was ASY that enabled the pieces to fall into place.

“We had the vocabulary to talk to one another and develop an understanding,” Milly shares.

“And then also, we were able to start meeting other trans people of all different ages, which meant that we could see that, actually, Boris had a very normal future ahead of him and that we were going to find our way through this. There’s no manual on how to be a parent, but there sure isn’t a manual on how to be a parent of a trans child.”

Boris recounts meeting a youth worker for the first time, and it’s clear the experience was life-changing.

“That was the first time that I’d ever met anybody else who was trans or had been in that environment. At ten, to be meeting someone who was trans and happy and successful in their lives — and I was not at that time — it was such an inspiring thing to see. It was one of the first times I realised that I’m not alone.”

For the first time, Boris felt safe. Like Colin, he felt respected and understood.

Sitting together in a room chatting over coffee and biscuits might not sound “radical”, but in the parents’ groups Milly attended, conversations would range from how they were doing emotionally to traversing the fraught and trying (to say the least) world of trans healthcare.

“We held each other in moments where we had nothing left to give and we had lost hope and were completely frustrated and we helped each other find solutions around things or we just encouraged each other,” Milly recalls.

She adds, “Having access to those other families and seeing how they did it and being inspired by them and seeing their energy and their hope. It really kept me going.”

Through ASY, both Boris and Milly have made friends for life. The sense of community they’ve been given and are helping others find today continues to normalise their situation, as ASY works towards its vision of a truly accepting world.

Sadly, we’re some way off that reality. Half of LGBT+ young people responding to the Albert Kennedy Trust’s 2021 homelessness survey said they feared expressing their identity to family would lead to them being evicted.

LGBT+ charity Just Like Us report that LGBT+ youth are twice as likely as non-LGBT+ youth to worry about their mental health daily, with this worsening during lockdown.

Looking to the future, ASY wants to continue building on its successes and furthering its reach.

The family support service has grown hugely since it started in 2013 and continues to grow and, says Fowler, is now getting the funding it needs, including the charity’s first dedicated family support worker.

On top of this, ASY is continuing its education work in schools and organisations as part of its mission to ensure that all LGBT+ people can feel as safe and included as possible.

Find out more about All Sorts Youth on their website: allsortsyouth.org.uk

The Attitude July/August issue is out now.

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