Making Sense of the Senseless - and What Can Educators Do? with SSC's Beth Reis

This article by our co-chair, Beth Reis, was just published in Teaching Tolerance Magazine, a project of Southern Poverty Law Center.

Certainly there are potential costs for a gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender student's honesty … discrimination by teachers, rejection by "friends" and, yes, even assault, rape, or murder. Are these experiences universal consequences of coming out? No. Do they happen? Yes.

But there's a flawed prevailing assumption: that being out necessarily increases a child's risk over some sort of bully-free baseline. Gay and, especially, gender variant children are often harassed long before consciously deciding whether to be out. It starts in primary grades. Gender variant little kids don't "choose" to be defiant about the larger culture's gender straight-jackets; it's how they're born. They may become more overt about it as they become more aware, at puberty, of its meaning and of their rights, but the harassment is hardly something they bring on themselves. In fact, whether you're gender variant or gay/lesbian/bi or both, coming out sometimes reduces the harassment you experience. It's not so much fun to hurl the vicious, "What are you ... gay or something?!" at a person whose response is a simple, non-defensive "yes."

The secrecy of the closet isn't without its own costs. These can include academic decline if you can't pay attention in class for worrying when a word or a gesture might lead to your life's unraveling. The costs can include profound loneliness. You can never be sure if those who love you are loving the mask or the person. You may deny yourself a supportive peer group because even accessing the gay-straight alliance may feel dangerous. You may deny yourself conversations with caring adults, unsure if you'll lose their esteem. You may forgo the typical adolescent social venues and, instead, find yourself in riskier adult environments. The closet can lead to depression and self-harm.

Read all of:
Making Sense of the Senseless: The Murder of Lawrence King
by Beth Reis, Safe Schools Coalition Co-Chair
Published in Teaching Tolerance Magazine, Number 34, Fall 2008

Web Exclusive! What Can Educators Do?
Teaching Tolerance sat down with Beth Reis and Helen Stillman of the Safe Schools Coalition, which shares the latest research, programs and ideas about preventing and responding to anti-gay harassment in schools to zero in on ways teachers can curb anti-gay bullying.

And: RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

Newsweek Gets It Backwards

Newsweek's cover story this month is entitled "Young, Gay and Murdered: Kids are coming out younger, but are schools ready to handle the complex issues of identity and sexuality? For Larry King, the question had tragic implications." [ http://www.newsweek.com/id/147790/page/1 ]

The reporter, Ramin Setoodeh seems to me to have concluded that it was because Larry came out and because he dressed in a vampy way and directed sexual and romantic comments toward boys at school that he was gossiped about, harassed and finally murdered. I would question the chronology. I am totally skeptical about the assumption that his behavior led to the other boys' hostility rather than their hostility fueling his behavior. Because it’s the latter that I have seen so often. A little kid starts out gender variant by nature, even in pre-kindergarten. But often subtly so. Then other kids' discomfort and grown-ups' refusal to address their discomfort or teach about stereotypes leads to their excluding that child from play and refusing to sit with the child at lunch. The teachers continue to hope the problem will go away.

In each grade, the class' meanness grows and teachers still don't talk with them about gender as a continuum rather than a binary concept. They don't even bring up female athletes or male dancers. In each grade, the targeted child tries new strategies to manage the hurt. One year, they will hardly talk at all. Another year, they'll talk nonstop. Often, eventually, they will become defiant and exaggerate what comes naturally: a gender expression others find discomfiting. Their peers' meanness -- and adults' refusal to address it in meaningful ways -- often accompanied by isolation from healthy well-adjusted LGBTQ role models -- precipitates the targeted child's using bitter humor and dramatic flair as a defense. And sometimes that works. Once you are clearly not trying to hide your sexual orientation or gender identity or whatever about you is different, it sometimes makes calling you "gay" anti-climactic and gets kids off your back. Sometimes, it doesn’t work. It didn't work, in the end, for Larry.

Know that I am not saying that transgender youth are necessarily exaggerating anything. I have no idea if Larry would have eventually identified as trans or not. I just imagine that, in time, Larry's spike heels and glitter might have given way to more garden-variety femininity or andogyny. If it hadn't, so what?

The point is that Setoodeh infers from his interviews, especially with Brandon's father, that the way to protect Brandon would have been to change Larry's behavior. But liking someone and wanting them to like you back is not a crime. Middle school is the time when most kids get crushes and tell friends. It doesn't sound to me as if Larry's behavior had risen to the level of stalking at all. If it did, then why haven't all the girls on that pre-Valentine outdoor quad been charged with stalking? Their behavior and Larry's appear to have been the same.

Maybe, rather than changing Larry's behavior, the most effective way to protect Brandon would have been to help him see someone's flirting -- even another boy's -- as flattering instead of insulting. We let homophobia and transphobia go unchallenged all the time and then we seem shocked when a young person becomes enraged at the thought that his peers might think he was gay. We let Brandon down not by failing to prohibit Larry from saying he liked him. We let Brandon down by letting him grow up believing that who Larry was (and who he would be by extension if he liked Larry back) was the worst thing a person could be.

And we let Larry down by letting his whole school grow up hating his difference and making his life there hellish. His femininity and his getting a crush didn't lead to his murder. Brandon's soul-searing transphobia and homophobia did. And adults' behavior, in turn, led to that.

Educators' Never-Ending Process of Reflection

Last week, I had a conversation with a middle school student who attends a relatively wealthy public school in New England. She related a story to me about a teacher at her school whom she characterizes as "funny" because of the easygoing and sarcastic tone he takes with his students. A few weeks earlier, a boy in this student's class had made fun of her notebook because she had sketched dresses all over the cover. The teacher had responded to the boy by teasing him "Well, I bet you'd look really good in that dress, Adam." Though her teacher resorted to a transphobic joke that reinforced stereotypical gender norms, the student with whom I was speaking considered it not a non-offensive, well-intentioned effort on the part of the teacher to defend one of his students from harassment.

My immediate response is to think: For every teacher who assumes that no middle-school-aged "boy" would want to wear a dress, there is a student sitting silently in the corner of the room who gets the message that what she/he wants is ridiculous. This scenario works itself out in many ways in classrooms. My conversation with this student connected to my recent thought processes about assumptions teachers often make about students, and the many limitations of our perspectives as educators.

Last week I breezed through a young adult novel called Keeping You a Secret, which, in combination with my week spent around people who do not yet know about my transition, reminded me of how exhausting and devastating it can be to withhold information about one's identity on a daily basis. Keeping You a Secret is a compelling description of the coming-out process of a high school lesbian that captures how emotionally and psychologically taxing it can be to stay silent about an aspect of oneself. The book avoids being a purely "tragic queer" novel while still tackling the many issues encountered by young, queer people who often rely very heavily on the support offered by their families and people in their schools.

Gender- and sexuality-proscriptive interactions among teachers and students, such as the one that the middle school student told me about last week, happen all the time in public schools. I imagine most teachers often don't even realize the weight our words can carry in these conversations. As an educator, I'm learning that it is crucial to keep in mind that I don't really know what's going on in students' minds or lives. It is my professional obligation to try to avoid making assumptions about what students may or may not be going through, because it is very possible that nobody knows except for they themselves. Anything I say and do as an educator could affect my students, whether I realize it or not – so, no matter what my intentions are as a social-justice-minded or radical educator, it is my responsibility to continually examine my own assumptions and internal biases to ensure that I am not unknowingly taking them out on any of my students.

Along this line of thought, I've recently started to re-evaluate some of my own negative assumptions about straight male sexualities and the ways my personal biases could potentially have the effect of "closing down" conversation and discussion in my classroom. This reflection process was sparked by an incident last week when I saw several teachers at my school separate two eighth grade students, a boy and a girl, who were kissing during our semi-annual trip to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The act unsettled me with its undertone of sexual policing, and I found the "white teachers, Black students" racial dynamic of the interaction deeply problematic.

This prompted me to think about my positioning in my classroom, as a white Yale graduate teaching mostly students of color in a Title I school. If I exude discomfort with or disdain for straight male sexualities, even without intending to, what effects could that have on dialogue in my classroom? For a specific example, what effects could that have on discourse about oppression and the many stereotypes and stigmas confronted by straight men of color?

While many LGBT people and LGBT youth face challenges that many straight individuals do not (which is a questionable generalization), the last thing I want to do as an aspiring social justice educator is shut down avenues of conversation and intellectual thought about the challenges and pressures my students – straight or gay, male or female or trans - face. I'm only just beginning to understand that to open dialogue in a radical way and encourage critical thought in my classroom, I must constantly reassess the limits of my own perspectives about sexuality, gender, and the many facets of my students' identities.