Transgender People and Bullying
Bullying’s been in the news rather frequently recently, with the nine suicides of people who are clearly presented as cis gay men, and how the bullying plus the consequent suicides are a real problem, but there has been an elephant in the room while this conversation has gone on:
That is, we rarely hear about trans teens who are bullied and attempt or commit suicide. There have been a few, but there hasn’t been much talk about it. The findings from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey were just released, with some rather harrowing numbers:
“From our experience working with transgender people, we had prepared ourselves for high rates of suicide attempts, but we didn’t expect anything like this,” says Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. “Our study participants reported attempting suicide at a rate more than 25 times the national average.” Forty-one percent of all respondents reported that they had attempted suicide, compared with a national estimated rate of 1.6 percent.
…
Other findings include:
- Thirty-five percent of the participants who had been bullied, harassed, assaulted or expelled because of their gender identity or expression while in school said that they used drugs or alcohol to cope with the effects of discrimination, compared to 21 percent of those who had not had similar experiences in school.
- Twenty-five percent reported that they were currently or formerly homeless, compared to 14 percent of those who did not report mistreatment in schools.
- Those who reported they had to “leave school because the harassment was so bad,” had an HIV infection rate of more than 5 percent, which is more than eight times the HIV infection rate for the general U.S. population.
This is part of the reason I am not entirely thrilled with the “It Gets Better” campaign – that for a lot of us, it simply does not. While many of us have the autonomy to begin transition, this often happens while forced into survival sex work, homelessness, and HIV, among other difficulties. Trans people have at least twice the unemployment rate of the general population. Other factors such as race and disability also factor into this, meaning that unemployment is much more likely for many. More data in the PDF, including breakdowns in population by race (but unfortunately not disability).
I don’t mean to introduce these statistics to say anyone has it harder, but rather to question why with all the talk about bullying and getting better, why what trans people specifically face is not discussed at all. I mean 41% of respondents reported attempting suicide? As compared to the 1.6% of the general population? I remember when people questioned the idea that trans people really had a 50% rate of attempted suicide, but it looks like that is confirmed. This is, honestly, reprehensible that this is constantly kept invisible, in the background. And it’s not as if trans people are a such a small minority, either. Educated guesswork puts us at .2-.4% of the population, with numbers supported in multiple countries, not even counting non-transitioning trans people that were neglected by Lynn Conway’s paper. In the US that means out of 310,430,000 people (per Wikipedia). 620,000 – 1,240,000 trans people. Relatively small compared to the rest of the population, but still significant. Not that population size should reflect anyone’s worthiness to not be bullied, harassed, denied employment, denied housing, and so on.
Suzan Cooke wrote about bullying as well today. I won’t quote the whole post but you really should read it. What she’s writing is not unusual. It is not out of the ordinary. It is what many trans people have had to deal with during our lives. And what she says about bullies is far more accurate than aphorisms about how they’re insecure or afraid. Studies have shown that bullies tend to be self-confident and popular.
Suzan writes:
Bullies are bullies because they reflect the patriarchal paradigm.
Bullies are considered tough. Because being tough means being able to dish out pain, hurt and humiliation without feeling guilt.
Being able to take pain, hurt and humiliation without being destroyed by it is called celebrating one’s victimization. Even though surviving such abuse without committing suicide or killing one’s tormentor takes great strength.
Destroying the lives of others is rewarded while having one’s life destroyed by bullying is punished further by people who treat the victims of bullying as weak and cowardly, unworthy of decent opportunities in life.
Damages are rarely awarded to people whose childhoods were destroyed by bullies. Or to children who were deprived of their right to an education and the right to experience school as a safe place in which to grow and learn.
Bullies bully because bullying is the path to success. It is the path to alpha status whether in a wolf pack or in the corporate structure.
Refusal to join the bullies places one with the victims. Joining the bullies gains multiple rewards. That is the mentality of Tea Baggers and lynch mobs alike.
Read the whole post.
One of my issues with the “it gets better” campaign is it lumps together the experiences of LGBTQ people without acknowledging that, yes, with some groups just moving to a progressive city with a larger gay population doesn’t make everything all happy and sunshiny. In fact, their chances of being murdered or attacked in some of those places is greater than if they stayed in the sticks.
I think this study is much needed and, moreover, I think it should to be broken down even further to components within the trans community because viewing our community as a whole and pretending everyone gets equal versions of hell is just intellectually lazy. Btw, allow me to say anyone responding to this post using the phrase “pity Olympics” can go screw themselves.
ginasf
8 Oct 10 at 3:04 pm
The study itself breaks trans people down into smaller groups:
I didn’t directly quote the study because I hate pasting from PDFs because I have to edit out all the hard returns, but it’s definitely worth a read.
Lisa Harney
8 Oct 10 at 3:07 pm
And in high school, quite often if you complain about being bullied, you get in trouble, not the bullies. God help you if you’re bullied by star athletes, children of teachers/administrators, or like in the small town shithole I grew up in, children of connected and powerful people.
Yeah, I agree that it doesn’t get better for a lot of trans people. Some people obviously make it, but at least cis queer people can enjoy, among other things, cis privilege when they graduate from college and look to join the upper/middle class. I suppose its a perverse incentive if you are trans to stay closeted and transition later in life as an adult.
Amanda in the South Bay
8 Oct 10 at 3:09 pm
Ugh.
Time to get away from the screen and find a drink.
Marlene
8 Oct 10 at 3:45 pm
I have been writing about this disparity on my facebook for the last week, and today, I was accused of “bitching”. Now, I’m not surprised, but I find it interesting that once again, cis, white, gay, men are the spokespersons for the entirety of the GLBTQ community…yet, for years transwomen of color have been the most heavily targeted group in the GLBTQ umbrella. And yet, not ONE word, ANYwhere about the recent murders. It greatly saddens me. And it disgusts me that bringing up the disparity and the issues is seen as “bitching”.
Dylan
8 Oct 10 at 4:53 pm
glad someone else has noticed this.
also thinking that if in the case of Andy Moreno
(www.bilerico.com/2010/10/transgender_student_barred_from_running_for_homeco.php)
if andy was seen as another girl student, this wouldn’t be a problem,and that glb reporting as usual leaves much to be desired on these issues
“…transgender student…”
(‘woman runs for homecoming queen, is thwarted by bigotry’-kinda works for me….)
*sigh*
javier
8 Oct 10 at 5:14 pm
“The Gender Recognition Act 2004 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom
that allows transsexual people
to change their legal gender.
The Act gives transsexual people legal recognition as members of the sex appropriate to their gender
(male or female) allowing them to acquire a new birth certificate, affording them full recognition of their acquired sex in law for all purposes,
including marriage.”
(wake up USA……)
javier
8 Oct 10 at 5:58 pm
The UK is busy running backwards from the GRA right now.
Also, the GRA doesn’t really do much to help bullying, for example.
Lisa Harney
8 Oct 10 at 6:01 pm
I was with this post and its quotations 100% until that “tea baggers” comment. Jeez, do people still not realise how ridiculously petty they are when they throw around that taunt?
It was such a non sequitor that I forget what I was going to say about bullying . . .
Jack
8 Oct 10 at 7:00 pm
Are you saying you’re only with everything but the tea baggers quote, or that the tea baggers quote has sabotaged your support for the post?
As far as it goes, I’m going to take a stand here and say that Questioning Transphobia’s stance on hurting teabagger feelings is “Do not give a fuck.” I do not believe the teabaggers give a shit about trans rights in general, or about the things we need to survive – and in fact actively fight against them – so I am not sure what the point of being nice to them is.
It’s not as if they’re an oppressed group.
Lisa Harney
8 Oct 10 at 7:07 pm
Oh, and debating whether it’s okay to call Tea Partiers teabaggers or not is off-topic and derailing, so please don’t try to continue that conversation. We absolutely do not need to concern troll a discussion about how harsh bullying towards trans people is with complaints that we’re not being nice enough to actual honest-to-god political opposition.
Lisa Harney
8 Oct 10 at 7:14 pm
I totally agree with your point. The cis queers in my life don’t seem to be troubled at all by the incredible erasure of trans peoples’ experience when it comes to bullying. I just get tired of being the whiny “bitch” bringing up the problems with Dan Savage’s campaign.
alexmac
8 Oct 10 at 7:58 pm
On a related note, I’m strongly considering setting up a site that calls out organisations for using the ‘T’ in in their inclusive acronyms (like LGBT) when they are only tokenly including trans people and don’t actually give a fuck about them.
Of course, we can’t MAKE people stop using the ‘T’, but at least we can set up a resource that allows people to check whether or not they deserve to use it.
Cate Johnston
8 Oct 10 at 9:31 pm
Is there some way I can say more clearly: Don’t derail this post with discussion about the tea baggers.
alexmac,
I agree totally. Check out this comment that was left a few minutes ago.
Cate,
That’d be interesting. It’d be nice to have a group that basically graded LGBT groups’ actual efforts toward trans needs. It’d be nicer if it had leverage.
Lisa Harney
8 Oct 10 at 11:01 pm
The attempted derails based on one line of a quoted post are a perfect example of how people will obscure the fact that *we are dying*. Transphobia is killing us. Our youth are hugely vulnerable. And what do people focus on? That’s right, something that has nothing to do with it, yet again.
Look anywhere but at the facts, people, and make yourself complicit in what’s being done to us and our children.
Jack
9 Oct 10 at 6:33 am
Yeah, some clarification to everyone:
I said drop it.
Jack the Published,
Yeah, I totally agree. We can’t just talk about the impact bullying has on the trans community, how so many of us end up suicidal and depressed and other fun mental health consequences of this socially sanctioned abuse that does not go away when you are an adult, it continues in the way the media dehumanizes us and of course face-to-face interactions that range from how WPATH SOC is about protecting cis people from transitioning at the expense of trans people to your friends and family refusing to respect your gender to even our political allies trying to throw us under the bus and treating our basic human rights as a bargaining chip.
That would, I guess, be distracting or something.
Lisa Harney
9 Oct 10 at 7:36 am
Oh, and derailing in this context is:
Changing the subject from the post’s topic, which is the damage bullying does to trans people. And practical solutions as to what can be done about it.
Lisa Harney
9 Oct 10 at 7:54 am
I’m a little concerned about the figures here. 41% of 3% of the population (to go with the middle of your range of 2-4%) means that 1.23% of the population are trans people who’ve attempted suicide. If the general figure for attempted suicide is only 1.6%, that means that the vast majority – over three quarters – of suicide attempts are made by trans people. Now, I realise that some of these figures are not very robust (the 2-4% is an educated guess, as you say), but I find that hard to believe. On the other hand, if it’s true then it’s a mindblowing statistic.
Charlie Butler
9 Oct 10 at 9:23 am
I should add that maths isn’t my strong point, so if I’ve made any mistakes here, feel free to blow them out of the water.
Charlie Butler
9 Oct 10 at 9:23 am
.2% – .4%, not 2% – 4%, sorry. It looks like the underlined link hid the decimals.
Also, it was 41% of trans people who reported being subjected to bullying.
Lisa Harney
9 Oct 10 at 9:25 am
I think this deserves about a million times more attention. personally I believe one thing that complicates any attempt at serious conversation about bullying, transphobia, and suicide with the general populace is that too many still view those who need to transition, or who have transitioned, or who identify as trans, as inherently mentally instable. to put it more bluntly, they are expecting us to kill ourselves. and indeed, if transphobic bullying and harassment disappeared tomorrow, that of course would not relieve the pain of dysphoria or the million other manifestations of a transphobic/cissexist society.
but my point is… I can easily see the possibility for people to minimize transphobic bullying as a problem (if they even understand bullying is a problem, which is a whole nother story) by claiming that, basically, “we” would keep dying with or without the bullying. it’s an ugly train of thought but I’ve already seen it popping up.
as for what to do about this statistic. one of my bones to pick with IGB is that it encourages suicidal students to stay wherever they are, keep going to the same school, until graduation. that’s just not necessary. homeschooling, GEDs, and internet schools are three basic examples of why that’s not necessary. not every alternative will truly be accessible to every student, but I think it’s BS for a project like that not to even consider ways that “it” could be better now, not years from now.
also, as the GLSEN stats linked below point out, anti-bullying laws don’t solve everything but they do seem to have an impact. as regards sexual orientation, laws and policies with enumerated categories (i.e. sexual orientation) are more effective in reducing homophobic bullying than non-specific plans. I’d be interested to know whether the same is true for “gender identity and expression”…
http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/news/record/2624.html
*I linked this even though this seems to be an instance of fakey inclusion of “T” in “LGBT”. incidentally, I wish the big orgs would finally shift from encouraging “Gay-Straight Alliances” [due to bi/trans exclusion in title]… but anyway..
MHS
9 Oct 10 at 9:26 am
Thanks – that makes much more sense! (Sorry for misreading.)
Charlie Butler
9 Oct 10 at 9:34 am
Any further comments about the Tea Party on this post will be a permanent and an immediate ban. I should not have to warn one person three times.
Lisa Harney
9 Oct 10 at 9:43 am
I think the fundamental problem with any anti bullying action is that society as a whole actually valorises bullying in particular and aggression in general.
My experiences with bullying have told me that the victim is almost always blamed for what happens on the grounds that “they bring it upon themselves”. This is unless a law is actually broken, then the victim ‘might’ just possibly win the space to be left alone. The only answer I ever found to the being bullied has been to either attack or withdraw, neither are good options.
The concept that “It gets better” seems an odd one for a campaign IMO – for one it implies that adults don’t bully, when in my experience bullies only get worse with age, and it also seems to imply that the victim should wait it out passively in the knowledge that things, one day, (in a galaxy far far away?) will improve.
(My inner pedant is also curious as to how one defines ‘better’ – slightly less bad perhaps?)
Em
9 Oct 10 at 8:37 pm
An element of being suicidal is, feeling in massive pain while being alone, and feeling like that can never change. Yet for myself, I found a way to achieve change, even so. My own
focus on “it gets better” is – I got more mobile, and I began searching for others like me. I left the small town high school of several hundred where I was so isolated, and on a college campus of several thousand, I found a greater degree of acceptance, because there were more like minded people to connect with.
I did not wait passively – I searched actively.
To me, the use of “”it gets better’ is saying, “You are not alone,
there is a reason to survive, there are others like you, here we are. We care about you. We want you to survive, and heal.”
To me, “it gets better” means hearing that there is something worth searching for. There is a chance for the pain to lessen. It means, there is a reason to survive.
I grieve for all the youths we cannot reach in time, when the weight of pain is too much. And yet I feel that it is vital for us who have survived to reach out, and say, “Here I am, I found
others who care, you can too.” We need to give our young people something worth surviving for.
So OK, probably the slogan needs to be improved. But the effort of reaching out, of being visible in good ways, of caring, and offering resources to support our young ones – that, we need to continue.
Peg
10 Oct 10 at 5:32 am
Em-
To a certain degree, I can see how it gets better-for cis (specifically men) queers especially. Cis privilege helps, at least compared to trans people, and I think the underlying context of the it gets better campaign is that you’re supposed to follow some sort of Cis Queer American Dream-go to college, preferably not a podunk college, graduate and enter the middle class, work your way up to the upper middle class, and if possible move someplace that is relatively gay friendly, like the West Coast, etc.
I agree that bullying can continue in adult life, but its a little different than being stuck in high school and having to deal with it, especially if you stick to that American Dream script and become an affluent cis yuppie.
Its an extremely cis centric narrative (and is just oozing with class privilege), and obviously totally ignores the reality of being trans.
Amanda in the South Bay
10 Oct 10 at 8:17 am
unk. Clicking here provides one of the saner/more helpful sources of trans news on the net, but I try hard to avoid reading things that cause little grunty wimpers before coffee. 40 percent! What a terrible thing.
I have my own issues with Mr. Savage, who tends toward the cisnormative on his best days, but I have to say that I think the point is not that it _does_ get better, but that it _can_. Our lives our lived and livable. Its just harder. I don’t think it takes away from recognizing the “harder” part to say that it can be worth remaining in the world and giving it a best shot, and that sometimes, the results don’t completely suck.
If we respect ourselves as a community — and we should, because for all our intragroup wars and endless BS, our survival, voices and grace are no small thing — I do believe that we should be turning to the youngest trans folks and saying look, these are livable lives. Because, y’know, they are.
jessl
10 Oct 10 at 8:55 am
I refuse to back away from the fact that the Republican and “Tea Baggers” are actively engaged in the bullying of transsexual and transgender people as well as women. gays, lesbians , immigrants and people of color.
Virtually every conservative organization with either “Family” or “Traditional” in its title is an organized hate group that institutionalizes bullying of LGBT/TQA etc people through its constant spew of lies and bigotry.
Indeed Concerned Christian Conservative is KKK in a suit instead of a robe and hood.
They try to win people over by claiming they only represent politics when they are a hate group that bullies and intimidates.
Suzan
10 Oct 10 at 9:56 am
[...] been launched to tell TBLGQ youth, “It gets better.” I think others (see Lisa Harney’s remarks at Questioning Transphobia, for example) have already done a good job elucidating what’s [...]
You Belong « Faithful Image
10 Oct 10 at 11:17 am
[...] Gets Better project. Most of them center around the fact that it often does not get better. This is especially true for trans folk. Defenses have been made that emphasize the project’s intention to address the [...]
It might get better. It might not. | Fukshot
11 Oct 10 at 9:11 am
I realize I’m weighing in a little late, so this may not get noticed, but I’m curious what the equivalent “It Gets Better” campaign would be, targeted at trans issues. Would it focus on the youth population? Adults? Both? Neither?
I like the idea of It Gets Better, from a perspective of allowing individuals to offer general support to kids who may not otherwise be receiving it. But I also agree that it whitewashes situations where it won’t get better: you can’t therapy your way into a new body.
Any thoughts?
Rebecca
12 Oct 10 at 7:57 am
With what I wrote I wasn’t implying that anti bullying campaigns shouldn’t happen, or even that they shouldn’t be targeted at a specific group (a campaign specifically targeting gay teens does have merit, even if it doesn’t benefit many other people), it just seems a nebulous and frankly specious argument when applied beyond a very particular scope. For one there is the aspect that’s been commented upon that it doesn’t get better for many people.
But more so, it’s problematic in that many people can’t leave their issues behind – especially if they are impacted by multiple discriminations. If one looks a bit further then they’ll see that kids are bullied and victimized for many things, sexuality, gender identity, able bodied/minded status, race, wealth, class, educational abilities, and any of a range of other issues/traits – of these most cannot be left behind by moving towns, and some in fact preclude moving. Further, all a teen has to do is log on to the net, or to watch television to see exactly how accepted their demographic is – It’s still okay on mainstream television to ridicule and stereotype most minority groups – teenagers aren’t stupid, they can see how adults act towards each other.
My issue though with the “It gets better” concept is in it’s specificity – it’s only applicable to a small section of the GLBT(TIQA) community that it’s supposedly speaking to, but more so, it’s passivity – it promotes a narrative that almost amounts to hazing for GLBT teens, the idea that it’s normal for queer kids to get treated like crap as teenagers, but that things get better after that – I personally don’t think that it’s acceptable for anybody to be victimized and bullied, and this passive campaign slogan feels dangerously close to tacit approval of bullying for my tastes.
I wonder what it would take for a campaign against bullying to gain traction with a slogan like “It’s not acceptable – Ever!”
Em
12 Oct 10 at 6:38 pm
“it’s passivity – it promotes a narrative that almost amounts to hazing for GLBT teens, the idea that it’s normal for queer kids to get treated like crap as teenagers, but that things get better after that – I personally don’t think that it’s acceptable for anybody to be victimized and bullied, and this passive campaign slogan feels dangerously close to tacit approval of bullying for my tastes.”
yes, this.
I would love to see a campaign that provoked action to change the system(s) that allow this type of bullying to continue. it wouldn’t be re-inventing the wheel either, the groundwork is already there…
MHS
12 Oct 10 at 7:58 pm
Well yeah. And this really applies to trans – all the misgendering and ungendering is really bullying aimed at dragging the trans (woman, more often than not) back to the bullying hell they may have escaped by transitioning or other means. ‘Cos make no mistake, constant, pervasive misgendering, no matter how well-meaning, is bullying. Coupled with the intense tracking we’re all subjected to, it comes to a system that not only enables, but positively encourages bullying of people who are not satisfied with their allotted place, and dare to question and change it.
Carto
12 Oct 10 at 10:45 pm
I’m going sorta off topic from the OP, but it’s not that the gay mainstream is flinging trans, disabled, POC, lower socioeconomic status or whatever people under the bus that gets me – it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest, I’m afraid I’m too cynical for that.
But tacitly telling even their main audience that they’re not worthy of better treatment is tantamount to emptying the bus altogether, it’s just weird. I do have issues with the GLb(t) framing of the campaign, but the passivity in the face of bullying is just mind boggling to me.
Surely campaigning for anti bullying laws, or for schools to have to be safe places for everyone would be a more logical path – at the very least a more proactive campaign than “It’ll get better”
Em
12 Oct 10 at 11:59 pm
[...] for statistics on transgender and transsexual victimization and suicide rates, and today read a blog entry that quoted a study by the National Center for Transgender Equality, a United States [...]
Trans and Bullied « Equality Kitten
13 Oct 10 at 12:00 am
The math with a 1.6% national average of suicide attempts, a 41% national trans average of suicide attempts, and a .2-.4% trans population:
Between .08% and .16% of US Americans are trans people who have attempted suicide. That’s between 254,000 and 510,000 people. So 5-10% of people who have attempted suicide in the US are trans people.
Quixotess
13 Oct 10 at 4:22 am
[...] worth examining more closely, particularly in lite of trans populations. Questioning Transphobia brought up the issue last week: [Recent statistics showing trans populations being particularly at-risk for suicide attempts, [...]
The Thang Blog » It Doesn’t Always Get Better
14 Oct 10 at 12:51 pm
[...] (Related): http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=3231 [...]
Survey: More than half of transgender bullying victims have attempted suicide(from The Edge)
21 Oct 10 at 2:36 pm
[...] media attention, and that most of the publicity has surrounded the loss of white gay men to the exclusion of trans* youth, bisexual and lesbian youth, and queer youth of color. There were also criticisms of Spirit Day [...]
Arkansas School Official Wishes Death on Gay Youth — The Curvature
28 Oct 10 at 10:58 am
[...] And it is safer. For such a small population, one of us is reported murdered every day. Who knows how many of us are severely beaten (but not to death) or discriminated against in other ways- job loss, eviction, harassment, molestation, being the butt of jokes by those who cruelly question who we are, refusal to be let into spaces that, by all rights, should be safe spaces even for us. And then, when that happens, it can have horrific effects on us. “Our study participants reported attempting suicide at a rate more than 25 times the national average.” (from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, found via QuestioningTransphobia) [...]
Binary Subverter
30 Oct 10 at 10:05 am
The problem with assuming that a trans could just bury their feelings and go on to a successful cis life and then transition when their set is that for many its impossible to live that normal life. How can you live a normal life if you feel like an impersonator
The result of this is depression, anxiety, self-alienation, low self-esteem, etc. None lead to a good life pre-transition. You may get a measure of success, that is but a shadow of what could have been (which leads to more guilt and depression, etc.).
The issue of sexuality alone is messed up. If your sexual preference is equivalent to the normative het one, good for you, at least one thing matches ;-). Otherwise your faking both your gender and sexual attraction! Whoaa that’s crazy.
Of course, then there’s the “gay option”, with the mismatch being the gender rather than the sexuality… That hasn’t work either for me.
So, there’s not way to bury this and avoid the bullies, the bullies will follow you all your life or you’ll avoid life to get away from them! Welcome to my past history…
Keira
14 Nov 10 at 12:50 am
[...] was released on February 3rd. Pieces of this report have come out over the past several months (posted about here and on Bird of Paradox, as well as likely many other locations). This is, however, the full [...]
Injustice at Every Turn at Questioning Transphobia
5 Feb 11 at 4:29 am
Is a life deprived of social behavior, without relationships, in fact the ideal life for one in this community? Should we be telling young people in this community to stay out of school, get home schooled and don’t let your childhood become as ruined as so many others? That sounds like a good idea, in my opinion. It could be the only option, as bullies are only getting worse and I know things are worse now than ever, because I just got through the system myself and no one is discussing some of the horrors I have faced in subtle discrimination. Generation Y is hypocritical beyond belief when it comes to gay rights, and then how they stab transwomen in the back in every which way they can.
Noname
10 Apr 11 at 12:48 pm
[...] calendar supports Dan Savage’s It Gets Better project. Being in agreement with many of the criticisms of the It Gets Better project, I am extremely interested in how the [...]
oh, librarians « The AcaFEMic
29 Sep 11 at 6:34 pm
[...] media attention, and that most of the publicity has surrounded the loss of white gay men to the exclusion of trans* youth, bisexual and lesbian youth, and queer youth of color. There were also criticisms of Spirit Day [...]
[link] Arkansas School Official Wishes Death on Gay Youth « slendermeans
13 Oct 12 at 5:39 am