CityNews reporter Avery Haines speaks with Kanwar Anit Singh Saini about the photo snapped of him that made him understand tolerance and acceptance are two different things.
Kanwar Anit Singh Saini: "I don't want to use a wide paintbrush to paint the Punjabi Sikh community in any country, but it's not a far stretch of the imagination to realize that these sentiments are really pervasive."
Interviewer: "The South Asian community has been fairly vocal in it's opposition to the new sex-ed curriculum coming out. Does that surprise you?"
Saini: "Not at all. Much of the vocabulary doesn't exist in Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu to talk about things. The vocabulary needs to be there. LGBTQ, how do we say that in Punjabi? There are loose terms, slang and idioms that exist to talk about cross-dressing and homosexuality, but there isn't the sexual health words."
Interviewer: "And Saini says the current sex-ed could've prevented what happened to him when he came out to his parents."
Saini: "As a teenage, their solution was to send me to a fortune-teller to basically tell me that I was wrong and I'm on the wrong path, who subsequently prescribed me a special stone to wear. There was a lot of hocus-pocus, to ward off the gayness, the depression that came with come out."
Interviewer: "Of the protests against the controversial new curriculum, Saini says the key is education."
Saini: "Of coarse you're going to see an opposition from small communities. 'Why wouldn't we want our kids to be LGBTQ and have a harder life, in a way that we're already not familiar with.' What needs to happen is more outreach so these concepts can be explained and talked about openly."