You Are Unspeakable
"Don't say gay" laws--Do they matter?
When I was in early elementary school, we didn't have a curriculum that mentioned sexual orientation, but I still learned about gay people in school. From jokes and insults, I learned that they were no good.
If teachers aren't allowed to make simple statements about everyone being valuable and beautiful, that informal education is still going to be there, making sure children who are different from the majority know they are inferior. If a child has some inkling at an early age that they might like someone they're "not supposed" to like or want to dress a way they're "not supposed" to dress, barring teachers from saying a few positive words about LGBT people isn't going to make those feelings disappear. It only ensures that the voices telling these kids to hate themselves meet less opposition.
In a 2013 Pew Research survey of over 1,000 adult LGB respondents, about 27% said they first started thinking they might not be straight sometime before the age of 10.
That shouldn't be surprising given that among people who grow up to be straight some have an innocent crush or two when they are still very young. There doesn't have to be anything particularly sexual at all about these feelings. Society is quite adept at telling a little girl that if she daydreams about being someone special to a little boy it's something to blush about and that if she daydreams about being someone special to another girl it's something to be downright ashamed of. And just as little kids who grow up to be straight and to agree with society's perception of their gender don't think when they are very young, "I know that I'm attracted to the opposite sex and that I express my gender as society has traditionally wanted me to," little kids who grow up to not be straight or gender conforming may not be thinking about these issues specifically at all; they may just feel that they are different in some way that they only find the words for as they look back in later years.
A 2021 survey by The Trevor Project of over 33,000 LGBTQ respondents from age 13 to 24 found that the percentage who had attempted suicide in the last year approached or passed 20% among those who also said their family, friends, or communities were not supportive or who did not have "affirming spaces" (translation by me: places or groups in which they know they are viewed positively because others communicate their positivity).
Check out the details of how the survey was conducted here by clicking on "Show Full Methodology,"
By the time youth are old enough to have a better understanding than a 3rd-grader of these issues (like the respondents of this survey), they are already dealing with the hostile attitudes that develop so easily when negative depictions of LGBT people are not countered by positive ones.
Please, I beg you as a fellow human being, if you haven't had the experience of growing up knowing or fearing that you belong to a group of people who the majority views with disgust, listen to the stories of those who have! By the time most youth who identify as gay, transgender, etc. put a name to their experience, they've already had years of adults preaching that people like them should be able to change who they are, that they are evil, that they are dangerous, that we would all be better off if they didn't exist. They've already learned to see themselves as a problem that adults wish would vanish so they can get on with raising the kids who actually matter. They already hear their peers making fun of people like them, or even threatening them in some way.
The Florida "Parental Rights in Education" bill that has been getting a lot of attention (just one of many, many similar bills around the country right now) would prohibit instruction on gender identity or sexual orientation in early elementary grades. Supporters talk as if young children were being taught about sex in their classrooms and this bill was intended to stop the problem. If that was actually the case though, the bill would have a different focus than it does. What the bill states is, "Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards."
It does not define what constitutes instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity.
It says nothing about prohibiting overly sexual content in general.
If legislators were actually afraid that children were hearing overly sexual information at school, they would have written a bill that attempted to define which approaches to teaching various subjects were overly sexual. Instead, this bill states that the very concepts of gender identity and sexual orientation are inappropriate for early elementary.
But how can that be the case? Kids know that people fall in love, that they have crushes, that they go on dates, that they get married, that they raise families. Any discussion of people who are in love with or attracted to each other shows something about their sexual orientation. No one has to use the term "sexual orientation." Kids are seeing that a man and a woman are attracted to each other all the time. If it's not too sexual to see a picture or read a story that involves a male-female couple holding hands or taking their children to the park, how can it be too sexual to see a male-male or female-female couple doing the same things? Does a picture of two people holding hands become sexual if they aren't opposite genders?
If the bill cared about preventing overly sexual content, it would define what a too-sexual presentation of love or attraction or family was. For example, it could say something more along the lines of, "don't use the words 'sexual orientation'" or "don't use materials with pictures of people kissing until after 3rd grade." Stating that instruction on sexual orientation is prohibited but not defining the term makes no sense because topics that involve heterosexual orientation come up all the time. It could be argued that in order to comply with this bill, no lesson could mention any couple in any way because, unless you carefully conceal the genders of the couple, you are providing information on sexual orientation.
If there is a problem with too much sexual content in Florida schools, the bill should say something about where these gaps in content-policing by existing policies are occurring and then establish guidelines about how to draw the line between what is too sexual for a given age group and what is not. Doubtless there would be arguments about where the line should fall, but at least the focus would be correct. Unless Florida parents actually want all allusion to the fact that people can feel attracted to each other forbidden until after 3rd grade, the existing bill does not have the correct focus.
The same thing goes for the topic of gender identity. If instruction on gender identity is not allowed to occur until after third grade, then early elementary teachers are going to have to invest a lot of time carefully removing all material that shows people dressing and acting in traditionally male and female ways because that material portrays those people's gender identity.
Again, politicians are pretending that this all has something to do with exposing children to sexual content, but if that was really the case, they would have identified what age-inappropriate content was being presented in schools. Instead they wrote a bill that implies a concept as pervasive as gender identity can just be ignored, when this is unrealistic. The words "gender identity" don't have to be used. The way people are portrayed in educational materials and treated at school communicates whether or not students have to wear certain clothes, engage in certain activities, and refer to themselves certain ways according to whether people see them as a boy or a girl. If a picture of a girl wearing a dress, which expresses a traditional gender identity, is not sexual, then neither is a picture of a boy wearing a dress and expressing a non-traditional gender identity.
Of course we already know what the real problem is here: Too many people perceive the topics of sexual orientation and gender identity as too sexual only when non-heterosexual or non-gender-conforming people are involved. It's so familiar that men and women fall in love and have children that we don't feel their wedding pictures are inappropriate for kids at all. It's so familiar that people act in certain gender-defined ways that we don't even think of the fact that they are expressing a gender identity at all. It's only when attractions and gender identities that look different come up that people feel discomfort over the unfamiliar and end up labeling it as too sexual in order to explain their discomfort.
When you are in the majority, you can count on a majority of people understanding where you're coming from and empathizing with you. But when you are in the minority, you constantly have to deal with people around you misunderstanding your intentions, your experiences, your needs, your struggles. Understanding of people who are not like us doesn't dawn magically in our minds. It has to be learned. Effort has to be expended getting the information that allows us to look at things from another person's perspective.
That is why it's so important for kids to hear positive things about any minority group at an early age, if possible, early enough to help head off the development of fears and prejudices against the "other" who is unlike them or the development of self-hatred as they come to realize that they fall into the less-favored of two groups. Not talking about the subject does not help anyone. The dislike, the fear, the feeling that some people are inappropriate just by existing--none of these things takes a day off because we decide not to talk about those people's existence.
Teachers who seek to create a safer, healthier environment for students who feel different aren't looking to sexualize their lesson content. They simply want to state that everyone deserves to be treated well and that differences don't have to be scary. They want to say that every student is valuable and beautiful no matter who they like or how they dress. They want to talk about how important it is to be nice to all your classmates and not make fun of them if they act more masculine or more feminine than you think they should. They want to have storybooks and illustrations that include LGBT characters going about their normal lives so that kids don't get the message that an ideal world would be one where LGBT people didn't exist.
Nothing adult or sexual has to be said to communicate that LGBT people are just people anymore than it does to communicate that straight people are just people. But, in an age-appropriate way, something does need to be said because for centuries society has defaulted to seeing these people as lesser. If we don't say positive things to contradict this harmful default, it gets to stand and continue making people's lives worse from childhood on up.
Any law that claims to protect children from inappropriate content at school should be better written to screen out content that is actually inappropriate rather than pretending that avoiding topics which can't actually be avoided in any practical way is good for kids. Acting as if these topics can be avoided means talking about LGBT people will be avoided while talking about heterosexual orientation and traditional gender identities will continue because that orientation and those identities don't count. This hurts kids who are in a minority while also depriving the majority of education on how to be a good friend and neighbor to everyone.
Chances are, legislation similar to this Florida bill is being discussed near you too. It only takes a couple minutes to do a few quick internet searches and find out if it is. If you find something, please take some time to look into what is being proposed and think about the effects it would most likely have on people if implemented, as well as seeing what others have to say on the question. It's also informative to see who is promoting the legislation and what reasons they give for their support. It's no accident that as elections draw near politicians talk about proposals that target a minority of people as if they were intended to save the children of the majority. They are counting on people being too afraid of looking like they didn't support a children-saving law to question what it was actually about.
Additional Resources
* Also check out this 2019 survey of over 16,000 students in grades 6 to 12: The 2019 National School Climate Survey by GLSEN - Notice in the Executive Summary section at the beginning the bullet points about high percentages of respondents experiencing various forms of negative treatment at school. It is important that teachers be allowed to start promoting inclusivity for everyone early on, before students get to these stages!
* Follow @mattxiv on Instagram for regular quick summaries of news relating to LGBT+ issues. Here's a good compilation to click through first.
* @JustFlintIsFine is on TikTok sharing about life as a nonbinary educator. Check out this clip to start with.
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