The tomboy dyke in gym class. The faggot in home ec. The he-she beside you in Spanish. Bullying is a natural occurrence in school; after all, mandating that a large number of personality types spend a third of their day together in a controlled–often disciplinarian–space will definitely lead to friction. Tension is rising already a month into the 2009-2010 school year, and for many students, a fear of bullying is increasing. We expect to be bullied, from representations of middle and high school in media, many times as the result of an arbitrary personality clash. But recently, anti-LGBT bullying has become a rising trend. The tragic consequences of this type of bullying ended the lives of 11-year-olds Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover and Jaheem Herrera as well as three students in Illinois. It was also a major factor in the highly publicized murder of Lawrence King in his classroom two Valentine’s Day’s ago. These were not simply cases of unbalanced students not being able to deal; these were cases that highlighted how acceptable it still is for anti-LGBT harassment to occur without repercussion.
A main factor is the refusal to acknowledge the problem for what it is: a systematic and targeted scapegoating of LGBT people by factions and zealots that makes the topic of sexuality, especially in regard to identity, a taboo in society. This taboo is understandably troubling and confusing for children whose minds and questions are developing, but who are given no direction on how to respond to behavior outside of the expected. They take their cues from others, and it is scary to realize that for many students, those cues are to abuse and degrade non-heteronormative children. The boys who killed themselves were too young to know if they were gay or not; all they knew is they did not want to be people who were constantly ridiculed.
The beliefs that feed the bullying are not held by a small group of people who are righteously justified by their intolerance of homosexual and transgender people; they are promulgated by mass media, given a framing that makes an easy, if obscure, case for rejecting LGBT issues. The best example comes from a recent Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson:
For many gay-rights supporters, it is easy to shrug off Fox News’ rhetoric as off-base and without merit. But Fox News consistently outperforms other cable news channels by roughly twice the amount of viewers every night. MediaBistro details how the audience share Fox enjoys is larger than CNN and MSNBC combined. Millions of people are taking the word “news” as a factual analysis, and thereby using it to legitimize their disgust of the LGBT community. Children only know to be afraid of showing signs that could cast them as one of those outsiders, and so they reject it in a more direct way that is natural to them, by bullying others.
Some ways to prevent this are fortunately being implemented in many progressive school systems. Chicago’s own public schools have recently expanded their anti-discrimination policies to include sexual orientation and gender expression. The key to this reform is an advisory council of students; by respecting the intelligence and autonomy of teenagers and young children, CPS has shown that it is possible to promote tolerance. National Coming Out Day is coming up on October 11, and the surrounding days are a perfect time for allies to show their support and for LGBT students to make themselves heard. Curricula that explore LGBT issues and problems in ways that engage students rather than keep them sheltered and afraid are important to creating a rich school environment, and the better the environment, the less students will feel a need to lash out. The more their intelligence is respected, the less reason they’ll have to fall back on prejudiced rhetoric to justify their behavior. And the more we fight for the integrity of free discourse in schools, the less likely we are to lose children due to shame and fear.
