Punishing Teens Who Are “Gender Nonconforming”
According to a recent article from the Ms. Magazine Blog, parents, teachers, police, and other adults in charge of discipline are more likely to punish the victims of bullying rather than the bullies when it comes to LGBTQ youth.
Thus, teens who are “gender-nonconforming”—whose bodies and sexualities rebel against the state’s “political strategy”–may be subjected to systematic punishment. Girls are even more likely to be targeted because the feminine body has been manipulated to be inextricably linked with sexuality. (Just check out any American Apparel ad for proof.)
This all sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory out of 1984, but remember that these processes work on the subconscious level. Adults who are more likely to punish LGBTQ teens aren’t evil machines of the state. Instead, they—like all of us—have been conditioned to fear, suspect and, yes, punish non-normative bodies and behaviors. On the high-school level this social conditioning is expressed as bullying; on the adult level, it becomes institutional discrimination.
Unfortunately, I have seen this institutional discrimination at work. I had a student in one of my classes a long time ago come to me very upset because another student was yelling homophobic slurs at him outside of the lunchroom. He told me he was just so angry that he wanted to punch that kid in the face. I tried to talk to him about the situation and we talked together to come up with some solutions for him, one of which was to talk to his counselor to switch his lunch period so he wouldn’t have to see that kid anymore. I then sent him to his counselor who sent him back with a list of anger management techniques he should use to avoid punching that kid in the face.
Now, I wasn’t in the counselor’s office with this student, but assuming he told his counselor what he told me, this is a serious case of victim-blaming. This counselor made it the bullied student’s responsibility to not escalate the problem, and essentially gave him strategies to “put up with” bullies, asking him to internalize the issues he was facing even more.
Now, this student wasn’t punished in the out-of-school-suspension sense of the word, but he would have been if he had punched the bully in the face, especially if he had thrown the first punch.
I’m curious, have any of you as teachers or students experienced this kind of discrimination in punishment or seen it in your students? If so, what did you do? How did you deal with it?