Gay, transgender kids need help from schools, teachers

A trial grips America right now, troubling a nation who face a story that hits on so many taboos. Here we a nation that must face an uncomfortable reality that children have sexual desire, murderous rage, can know right from wrong but still be capable of an act of extraordinary violence. Here we have a story about a “sweet faced boy” [sic] who shoots his classmate because despite being a boy he insists on wearing make-up, dresses and nail polish. And further fueling the disquiet is the idea that a 14yr old boy had access to a gun and was willing to use it to kill someone. Do we think the outcome would have been different in the absence of a gun? I suspect not, in the absence of a gun perhaps he would have sought out a knife or club – the desire to kill was there.

But what was the driver for this need to kill, to annihilate another human being. It seems from the various reports that Brandon McInery was unsettled by the idea that his 15 year old classmate might be gay. So at the heart of this is the idea that a boy’s sexual orientation could be so threatening he needs to be killed: where does someone get an idea like that?

Here we face an uncomfortable truth – that some kids are gay, some kids are transgender and that this awareness is often evident long before they have a label or name for it. Children are raised in a society that places primacy on the idea of achieving a ‘lifelong monogamous committed heterosexual relationship’ and does not offer young people, particularly within schools the idea that other relationship types exist, other ways of being exist. Our history is full of famous people who were gay or even transgender but for a long time these aspects of their identities have remained hidden. We might study Shakespeare’s sonnets as the greatest love poems ever – but not discover the homoerotic subtext in many of them until we study English at university.  We don’t learn that Joan of Ark was killed for her insistence on wearing men’s clothing – academics increasingly see her as a transgender person living in a world that couldn’t cope with that.

Children get bullied in schools for just about any reason – there are hierarchical and status battles endlessly waged and sexual orientation is an easy insult to throw at someone in a society where it is seen as an insult. Our responsibility as adults raising children – be that as parents; as teachers; as significant others in the world of a child, is to help them learn to accept diversity: that others might think and act differently but to see that as an opportunity to learn from rather than be fearful of. We also have a responsibility to protect vulnerable children by giving them the tools to defend themselves. The National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce is quoted as saying “right now, right this minute — [children are] being bullied and beaten in school while adults look the other way.” and certainly it’s been my experience both as a teacher within secondary education, and as a child, that often teachers saw the bullying and mostly ignored it: dismissed it with ‘man-up, just tough it out’ or ‘everyone gets bullied, its part of growing up’. It may be a part of growing up but the small child doesn’t necessarily have have the tools or self awareness to know how to handle or deal with it and for me this is the biggest failure in this case – that the school saw the problem but acted in ways that allowed the problem to continue.

In this case it is reported that the boy connected to the teachers but struggled to make peer connections. Hardly surprising if the peer group were not helped to understand his difference, were hostile to his gender identity and sexual orientation. A teacher is reported as saying that “The teachers were upset because [King's appearance] was disruptive to the environment and upsetting the students.” Well please – behavior can be disruptive – but appearance?

Of course, the inference here is that the child’s overt homosexuality was the unsettling aspect– and this I find troubling because schools need to help young people accept and understand same sex attraction and gender non-conformity to prepare them for the complex world they are entering.

Some kids are gay, some are transgender: we need teachers to understand that and then help young people understand that. Then we’d go a long way to making our society a safer place for everyone – not just those of use who don’t fit the box.  I hope that this case provide the motivation to start creating the necessary change within schools so that this might never happen again.  Perhaps a vain hope?