How “it’s only banter” becomes a child’s survival lesson
I have a habit, perhaps an odd one, of reading legal judgments. It began while studying mental health law and never quite left me. Usually I read them for professional curiosity. Occasionally, one reaches past the law and touches something much older.
The claimant was not gay. That is what makes the case so revealing.
In an Employment Tribunal judgment1 concerning racist and homophobic abuse at work, a heterosexual man described being repeatedly called “gay” and other degrading terms by colleagues and managers. The employer tried to present this as banter: rough, familiar workplace humour.
The tribunal rejected that argument.
It recognised something important. Homophobic banter does not become harmless because the person receiving it is heterosexual. The insult works because homosexuality itself is being used as a marker of contempt.
That is what caught my attention. Not only as a gay man. Not only as a psychiatrist. But as someone who once learned to laugh at jokes that frightened him.
As psychiatrists, we are increasingly encouraged to ask a different question. Not, “What is wrong with you?” but, “What happened to you?”
Behaviour, emotion and personality rarely emerge from nowhere. People adapt to the environments in which they develop. They learn rules. They learn risks. They learn what brings safety and what invites danger. Sometimes those adaptations protect them. Sometimes, years later, they become the very chains they are trying to break.
Reading that judgment, I found myself asking the same question.
What happened to me?
What happened to so many gay men of my generation?
And what happens to a child who grows up hearing his future identity used as a punchline before he has even found the language to name it?
A few weeks ago, I was teaching clinicians about minority stress and its impact on LGBTQ+ mental health. During the discussion, someone observed that similar dynamics can occur in Islamophobia. I agreed, at least in part. Many forms of prejudice create vigilance, fear, exclusion and a painful awareness of difference. Racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and transphobia all teach people that the world may not meet them neutrally.
Yet the mechanisms are not identical.
For some people, difference cannot be hidden. Skin colour, accent, name, dress, visible religious observance or cultural markers may expose someone to prejudice before they have spoken a word. Other aspects of identity, including sexual orientation for many people, can sometimes be concealed.
That concealment is not freedom. It is a burden. It is a second life. It is the constant possibility of hiding.
And that possibility changes everything.
Homophobic banter and minority stress
Although every story is different, many gay men, particularly those of us who grew up before wider social acceptance, describe strikingly similar memories: feeling different long before having language for it; hearing the word “gay” used as an insult before it became a way of understanding ourselves; learning there were questions we could not ask, feelings we should not disclose, and rooms in which safety depended upon silence.
You watch. You listen. You calculate. You shrink.
Because you are a child, you do not necessarily experience this as extraordinary. It simply becomes life. You become skilled at reading rooms, changing subjects, adjusting your voice, laughing at the right moment, offering enough of yourself to seem sociable but not enough to be known.
Psychologists call this minority stress. I sometimes think of it as survival training.
The tragedy is that the rules which help a frightened child survive often remain long after the original danger has passed. Do not draw attention to yourself. Do not trust too easily. Do not reveal too much. Do not let people see who you really are.
Over time, those rules stop feeling like strategies. They become assumptions. A laugh across the room becomes suspicious. A casual question about relationships becomes a threat assessment. A new workplace becomes a room to scan rather than a place to belong.
That is why shame is so persistent. It is not simply an emotion. It becomes a way of organising your life.
When I think about childhood, I do not first think about football.
I think about netball.
In my first years at primary school, the children played together. I loved it. I was good at it. Then, almost overnight, we were divided. The girls played netball. The boys played football and rugby. I was hopeless at football. More truthfully, I was frightened of it.
The aggression frightened me. The roughness frightened me. I did not have whatever it was the other boys seemed to possess: that appetite for collision, mud, shouting and competition. My mother would warn me about coming home covered in mud. I remember her anger at my feet growing so fast, relentlessly, until they reached a size 13. These things stick. The anxiety about clothes, shoes, money, mess, damage. A child may not understand the family finances, but he understands tension. He understands when his body seems to be creating expense.
I do not want to over-explain my mother. Parents carry their own fears. Poverty has a way of sharpening ordinary frustrations into something harder. But those memories became part of the atmosphere in which I learned what was safe.
My father had left home for another woman when I was four. Yet his judgement somehow remained. His name could still be invoked, especially when my mother noticed something in me that he might have considered sissy, soft, or inconsistent with his obsession with football. He was absent, but his imagined masculinity was not. It hovered. It measured. It disapproved.
That is another way children learn shame. Not always through the person in the room, but through the person whose judgement is carried into it.
There were safer places.
My father’s mother gave me something different. In the safety of her home and kitchen, I could paint, sew and bake. I could be interested. I could be absorbed. I could be competent at things that were not organised around aggression. I think she always knew. Or at least, I think she knew enough. She rarely judged.
Her partner was a different kettle of fish. The wider world still found its way in. But my granny’s kitchen mattered. It was a small sanctuary. A place where curiosity was permitted.
Those small sanctuaries matter more than we sometimes realise. They do not remove shame, but they interrupt it. They give a child evidence, however fragile, that another kind of world might exist.
At school, that other world often felt impossible.
I feared football because of the aggression. I feared rugby because of the bodies. I feared the changing rooms because my own body might betray me.
An involuntary erection is simply physiology, particularly for an adolescent. But to me it felt like evidence. Evidence that I was different. Evidence that I was what other boys laughed about. Evidence that could expose something I barely understood myself. Evidence that might lead to ridicule, violence or rejection.
Whether those fears would actually have materialised is almost beside the point. I believed they might. So I avoided the risk. Yet I also avoided the thing I had loved. Netball had become a girls’ game, and choosing it meant risking a different kind of injury.
Sissy.
Poof.
Faggot.
Bullying chat…
Banter.
So I stopped choosing the thing that brought me joy.
That is what prejudice does at its most intimate. It does not simply stop you doing what you fear. It can stop you doing what you love. It narrows the world until avoidance begins to feel like personality.
Looking back, the lesson was not merely that football was unsafe. It was that there might be nowhere safe to stand. I was frightened of the boys’ world because I did not belong in it. I was frightened of the girls’ world because wanting it might expose me. So, like many children, I adapted. I disappeared into the spaces between.
When banter becomes information
This is where “banter” becomes more than a joke.
It becomes information.
It tells you who is safe. It tells you what kind of masculinity is acceptable. It tells you which bodies can relax and which must remain under surveillance. It tells you what will happen if the thing being mocked turns out to be you.
Homophobic banter as trauma
In trauma-informed practice, we are careful not to reduce trauma to a single dramatic event. Trauma can be acute, but it can also be cumulative. It can be found in repetition, unpredictability, humiliation, powerlessness and the loss of felt safety.
Not every joke is traumatic. Not every careless comment leaves a wound. Not every person exposed to homophobic banter develops post-traumatic stress disorder. That would be too crude, and clinically inaccurate.
But repeated direct abuse, indirect messages and microaggressions can become a developmental environment. A child hears enough jokes, enough warnings, enough silences, enough laughter, and eventually he learns what the world thinks of him before he has even had the chance to introduce himself.
That is what I mean by banter as trauma.
Not trauma as a diagnosis, but trauma as a process: the embedding of shame through repeated exposure to humiliation, threat and concealment.
The audience hears the lesson
The Employment Tribunal case concerned a heterosexual man. A man working in a company of 120 people. Yet I could not stop thinking about the gay apprentice who might have been standing nearby. The young man who heard “gay” used every day as shorthand for weakness, inferiority or contempt. The office worker who said nothing. The colleague who laughed because not laughing would have looked suspicious. The closeted employee who learned, once again, that disclosure would carry a cost.
That is the part people miss when they defend banter. They imagine only the target. They forget the audience.
Banter is rarely private. It is performed. Its audience is the whole room. The person being mocked may be one individual, but the lesson is for everyone.
When racist language is used, it tells people of colour something about the hierarchy of that workplace. When homophobic language is used, it tells LGBTQ+ people something about the price of visibility. The dynamics overlap, but they are not identical. Race may be read on the body. Faith may be visible or assumed. Nationality may be heard in an accent. Sexuality, for some, can be hidden, and so the hostile environment creates its own terrible incentive.
Stay hidden.
Pass.
Collude.
Laugh.
Disappear.
At different times, I have done all five.
That is not an easy thing to admit. There were times when I laughed at jokes that hurt me. There were times when I tolerated comments I should have challenged. There may even have been times when I joined in, not because I believed what was being said, but because the safest place to hide was among those doing the laughing.
That is one of shame’s cruellest tricks. It recruits you into your own concealment. It persuades you that survival requires collaboration with the very thing diminishing you.
This is why the tribunal irritated me as much as it moved me.
Not because the decision was wrong. Quite the opposite. It was right, and that is precisely why it felt so uncomfortable. There was the weary recognition that this still happens, day after day, in workplaces across the country. Not always with the same words. Not always so visible. Not always documented in a tribunal bundle. But in workshops, depots, call centres, offices, staff rooms, mess rooms and group chats, people still learn what they are permitted to be.
I chose a profession where this kind of language is usually squashed quickly, at least in its more obvious forms. Medicine is far from perfect, but it has formal structures, policies, hierarchies of accountability and a professional language that makes overt homophobia harder to sustain.
I have also worked in factories and call centres. I know there are workplaces where challenging this kind of humour would still be met with a familiar roll of the eyes.
“It is only banter.”
“People are too sensitive.”
“You cannot say anything anymore.”
“Political correctness has gone too far.”
I understand the complaint. Nobody wants a world stripped of humour, warmth or irreverence. I do not want that either. Some of the best communities I have known are built on teasing, innuendo and sharp wit.
But that is not what we are talking about.
The injury is not humour. The injury is hierarchy disguised as humour. The injury is contempt with a laugh track. The injury is the child quietly listening.
From minority stress to belonging
Years later, I found the leather community.
People sometimes imagine leather is principally about sex, clothing or fetish. For me, it has meant something much deeper. It was one of the first places where I discovered what it felt like to stop performing.
I remember an event at Fetish Week London. We were standing there in Bluf gear, leather visible, identity visible, desire visible, and yet the conversation was wonderfully ordinary. We chatted casually about day-to-day life, then just as casually about being collared. No shock. No smirk. No sudden change in the air.
It was another kind of banter.
Not the banter that polices the edge of belonging, but the banter that confirms it.
That was the difference.
What struck me was not the leather itself, though leather mattered. It was the absence of explanation. Nobody needed translating. Nobody was being asked to make themselves smaller. Nobody treated desire as evidence against us.
In leather, masculinity was not narrow. It was expansive enough to include dominance and submission, confidence and vulnerability, eroticism and tenderness, discipline and care. I did not have to apologise for the shape of my desire. I did not have to turn myself into something more acceptable.
In trauma-informed language, leather offered something shame had denied me: safety, recognition and choice.
It was not leather that changed me.
It was belonging.
That is why this judgment touched such a nerve. It reached past the adult who can now write openly, dress openly and speak openly. It reached the boy who could not. The boy outside the sports hall. The boy avoiding the showers. The boy giving up netball. The boy laughing at the joke. The boy who had already concluded that something about him was defective and that exposure would be catastrophic.
I wish I could go back and find him.
I would sit with him for a while. I would tell him that nothing about him was wrong. I would tell him that his fear made sense, but it was not prophecy. I would tell him that one day he would find men who understood him, communities that welcomed him, and spaces where the parts he was trying so desperately to hide would become the parts of himself he valued most.
I would tell him he was not defective.
He was adapting.
There is grief in that realisation, but there is also hope.
When I see young LGBTQ+ people growing up in affirming families, inclusive schools or workplaces where their identity is treated as ordinary, I feel something complicated. There is envy, yes. Not bitterness, but a quiet ache for what might have been. How wonderful it must be to reach adolescence without assuming there is something fundamentally wrong with you. To join a sports team because you enjoy it. To play netball, football, rugby or nothing at all without your choice becoming evidence. To mention the person you fancy without rehearsing every possible consequence. To be known before shame has taught you to hide.
Not every young LGBTQ+ person has that experience. Many still grow up in fear, rejection or silence. But more do than when I was a child, and that is worth celebrating.
It is also worth defending.
This is why equality law matters.
Why equality law matters
Every generation inherits a different emotional landscape.
Mine inherited Section 28, playground insults and the constant suggestion that homosexuality belonged somewhere between pity and ridicule.
Today’s children inherit something else. Not always. Not everywhere. Not equally. But more often than before.
They inherit teachers who can say the word “gay” without whispering. Parents who attend Pride with their children. Schools that celebrate difference rather than merely tolerate it. Workplaces where a complaint about homophobic language is not dismissed automatically as humourlessness.
None of this happened by accident.
It happened because countless people insisted that equality should be written not only into hearts, but into policies, classrooms, workplaces and law.
No Act of Parliament can erase shame. The tribunal cannot give someone back an adolescence organised around fear. A judge cannot undo the years spent laughing at jokes because silence felt too dangerous.
But law can change the atmosphere in which the next generation grows up. It can make explicit what should never have been in doubt: that dignity is not conditional upon being in the majority. It can help create environments in which fewer children learn that authenticity is dangerous.
Equality law does not protect people from offence.
That is the lazy accusation.
At its best, equality law protects the conditions in which people can grow without humiliation being treated as normal. It protects the possibility of entering a workplace without becoming a punchline. It protects the child who is not yet out, not yet ready, not yet safe enough even to understand why the joke hurts.
That is why the tribunal’s rejection of “banter” is important.
Not because the law is capable of rescuing us from every cruelty.
But because it draws a line.
It says that a workplace culture built on humiliation is not neutral. It says that homophobic language is harmful even when the person targeted is not gay. It says that the social meaning of abuse matters. It says that the room is listening.
And the room always is listening.
Somewhere, still, there is a child hearing “gay” used as an insult before he has ever dared to use it as a name for himself. Somewhere there is a teenager avoiding sport, shrinking in a changing room, laughing too loudly at a joke that frightens him. Somewhere there is an adult walking into a new workplace, scanning for danger, carrying rules learned decades earlier.
What happened to me?
I learned that “gay” was something people spat before it was something I could say. I learned to laugh before anyone noticed I was afraid. I learned to stop playing the game I loved because joy itself had become suspicious. I learned that my body might betray me before my mouth ever could.
I learned to survive.
It took me years to learn how to belong. So when someone says, “It’s only banter,” I no longer hear harmlessness. I hear a question.
“What happened to you?”
I cannot go back and comfort the child I was.
But perhaps I can help build a world in which fewer children need comforting in the first place.
- Hoch v Thor Atkinson Steel Fabrications Ltd (Employment Tribunal, Case No 2411086/2018, 2 August 2019). ↩︎
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