The Safe Schools Program isn't just there to make LGBTIQ kids safe, as crucial as that project is. It's also there to make sure straight, cisgender kids understand that people with different sexualities and gender identities aren't wrong or bad or lesser. Because they aren't. Ultimately, the campaign against Safe Schools gained traction outside the tiny pocket of far right Christian groups because straight kids were framed as the victims. Parents became concerned their kids would be exposed to ideas about sexuality and gender and that might make them confused about their own identity. The idea that cisgender identity, that is feeling comfortable with the gender you were assigned at birth, and heterosexuality is so fragile that mere exposure to anything alternate will turn someone queer is baffling. Take me, for example – I grew up with straight parents, absorbed straight storylines in books and on TV, received cisgender, heterosexual sex education, and didn't know any queer people until I was about 17. Nevertheless, my queerness persisted. If an anecdote about myself does not convince you, please consider the existence of every LGBTIQ person ever.

To think that providing teachers with resources to address homophobic and transphobic bullying in their classroom might make children gay or transgender is ludicrous. So why are we having this discussion? Let's not forget the Safe Schools program was launched under the Abbott government in 2014, welcomed by his education ministry and left alone for the next two years. When it was reviewed in early 2016, a result of the far right's sudden obsession with the anti-bullying resource, it was found to be entirely appropriate. You can almost pinpoint the moment anti-LGBTIQ groups became obsessed with the program. The winter parliamentary break of 2015 saw the country heave with rainbow flags, marching boots and parliamentary pushes for marriage equality. The 72 per cent majority of people supporting the reform had become deafeningly impatient. By August of 2015, the momentum of the marriage equality campaign forced the Abbott government into an emergency meeting. They spent six hours discussing not if we should amend the Marriage Act, but by which parliamentary process. Sure, we haven't won the campaign for marriage equality just yet, but by mid-2015 our opponents had certainly lost it.

It remains appalling and unsurprising that the people who organise against LGBTIQ rights always target the most vulnerable in our community. The sick, the visible, the young. And once it became obvious that marriage equality had secured significant public support, playbook in hand, these far right conservatives pivoted to the young and the visible. Transgender children became their new means of convincing the mainstream that LGBTIQ people were trying to destroy society with their "gay agenda". Lo and behold, it wasn't long before Queensland MP George Christensen compared the Safe Schools Program to "the grooming of a paedophile". The attacks on an anti-bullying program were not born of genuine concern about its substance. This cheap shot campaign was merely the spiteful floundering of the anti-LGBTIQ movement against the momentum of progress. We stopped the plebiscite, won majority support for equal marriage in both houses of Parliament and now marriage equality is tantalisingly close. State governments are allowing same-sex couples to adopt and offering apologies to those who received criminal convictions for homosexuality. Transgender kids and their families are blazing a truly glorious trail, lobbying Parliament for appropriate access to healthcare and for their rights at school. Corporations are tripping over themselves to align themselves with our struggle, understanding that marriage equality at least is now commercially popular.

There are more schools signed up to the Safe Schools Program than ever before. And when this generation of Australians leave school and start running the joint, we'll live in a country where all people understand it's OK to be queer and/or trans. The federal defunding of the Safe Schools Program, and the vilification and humiliation of transgender children, is the shameful death rattle of anti-LGBTIQ campaigns. Someday, everyone will look back on the time Premier Gladys Berejiklian bowed to the bigotry of the far-right with shame and utter disbelief, as I do today. Sally Rugg is a Sydney-based LGBTIQ activist and GetUp campaigns director.