It is well established that school-level Physical Education (PE) lessons are largely heteronormative spaces where gender stereotypes are reproduced and maintained by teachers and students alike (e.g., Brown, 2005; Landi, 2019). Consequently, PE lessons are often sites where LGBTQ+ students experience overt homophobia and discrimination – experiences which often act as barriers to participation and contribute to individual and collective trauma (Sykes, 2011; Lynch, et al., 2022). In this paper, we take an interdisciplinary approach drawing on perspectives from sport, education, and linguistics (e.g., DeFina et al., 2020; Busch & McNamara, 2020) to understand the prevalent discourses of ‘gay trauma’ in social media narratives of PE lessons.

Within this study, we participated in a three-month digital ethnography of TikTok that involved engaging directly with videos that explicitly discussed experiences of being LGBTQ+ in PE lessons. Digital ethnography involves observing and analysing online practices with the ultimate goal of acquiring insights into online behaviours and the formation of digital publics (e.g., Pink et al., 2015). After we had completed the three-month digital ethnography, we designed a sampling procedure based on our insights that would enable us to collect a corpus of video for this analysis. We subsequently extracted 50 topical TikTok videos and their comments to analyse how PE lessons are framed as a type of ‘collective trauma’ by the author and those who respond to the video (i.e., the gay community). Through a discursive analysis of the visual-aural memes and their textual responses, we identify two main traumatic discourses related to PE: i) PE as an expression of inadequate masculinity and ii) PE as a site of overt discrimination and homophobia.

Through a discursive analysis of these video-based memes and their textual responses, we identify an overriding discourse of ‘disengagement’ which emerges as a collective response to the traumatic experiences of PE lessons. Reflecting on the findings of the study, we argue that social media facilitates a participatory forum through which LGBTQ+ members reconcile their collective trauma of PE. In this way, we suggest that these narratives become a communal articulation of what Coupland and Coupland call the ‘discourses of the unsayable’ (1997, p. 117).

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