This study explored the disruption of queer celebrities on the normalisation of heterosexuality and cisnormativity amongst school youth. Qualitative research was employed with a phenomenological research design to conduct semi-structured interviews with seven high school learners between the ages of 16 and 17 in the town of Kroonstad in the Free State Province of South Africa. The findings highlight the symbiotic relationship between queer celebrities and school youth gravitating between self-identification, challenging stereotypes, visibility, and advocacy. Bigger platforms for queer celebrities should be created in schools to raise awareness of LGBTQ+ issues and equal rights. This will contribute to a more inclusive society, making its way to educational settings, and leading to more inclusivity of gender and sexual diversity in the school system.

BACKGROUND Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is now an ordinary feature of adolescent help seeking, and users reportedly form alliance-like bonds with such systems. Debate about AI in mental health care has been dominated by capability benchmarking, and has been conducted almost entirely with reference to well-resourced Global North settings. Little is known about what these systems would have to substitute for in low-resource school settings, or in work with sexual minority learners, for whom disclosure to an dules in a school carries distinctive risks. OBJECTIVE This study examined how school-based counselling practitioners in South Africa describe their work with gay and same-sex attracted learners at risk of suicide, in order to specify the constituent properties of relational support, determine which are plausibly substitutable by current or foreseeable AI systems , and established where AI may and may not be legitimately deployed. METHODS We conducted a qualitative descriptive study using semi-structured individual interviews with 11 school-based counselling practitioners working in three South African provinces, purposively sampled on current practice and experience supporting learners who had disclosed same-sex attraction and suicidal ideation. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis; reporting follows COREQ-32. Participants were not asked about artificial intelligence and none raised it, the comparison between their accounts and the AI capabilities is an analytic overlay contributed by the authors and declared throughout. RESULTS Five constituents of relational support were identified: trust as an accumulated and accountable achievement rather than a procedural formality; the reading of distress in embodied and paralinguistic cues; identify affirmations as a staged developmental process rather than a single affirming response; advocacy conducted beyond the counselling room within school and family systems; and the moral and emotional cost borne by the practitioner. A sixth, contextual finding cut across the others: participants described schools in which teaching and support staff were themselves sources of stigma and bullying, and in which no counselling resource existed at all. Mapping these against the AI literature yielded a three-part taxonomy of limitation: contingent-technical, which current systems are already overcoming; institutional-structural, durable but contingent on law and regulation; and constitutive, concerning reciprocal vulnerability and moral answerability, which do not reduce to technical capability. CONCLUSIONS Arguments for the irreplaceability of human practitioners frequently rest on contingent-technical claims that are already obsolete, weakening an otherwise sound position. The durable case rests on institutional standing and on constitutive reciprocity. We propose a permissibility framework specifying where AI may operate independently, where it may operate only as an adjunct, and where it should not operate at all in school-based support for sexual minority learners, together with the safeguards each tier requires. We further argue that the common recommendation of AI as a bridge to human care presupposes that the human destination is safe, an assumption our data do not support in all settings. South Africa currently has no regulatory instrument governing AI-delivered psychological services; we set out what such an instrument would need to address

Learner wellbeing in schools depends on practitioners presumed competence of protecting it, yet little is known about how those practitioners appraise their own capacity. This qualitative exploratory study examined the perceptions of registered practitioners regarding their competence in assisting gay learners facing suicidal ideation in South African schools, and the rationale behind these judgements. A total of eleven practitioners from three provinces participated in online semi-structured interviews, with seven additionally taking part in a focus group. Data were analysed by reflexive theme analysis, guided by self-efficacy and minority stress theory. Out of eleven, ten reported no specific preparedness for sexual minority learners, with four answering in a single word. Appraisals nonetheless diverged sharply, and the divergence did not track training, which was uniformly negligible. Those who assess themselves as sufficiently prepared grounded their appraisals in registration and general education rather than experiential mastery; one also asserted that suicidal ideation are uniform across all learners. Colleagues reached a contrasting conclusion by regarding competence as a definable entity whose absence could be identified. We term the first pattern presumed competence: an efficacy appraisal warranted by institutional position in the acknowledged absence of relevant enactive experience. Making such competence a required rather than elective component of continuing professional development would align the warrant with what it certifies.