Last weekend, the Times Colonist’s Amy Smart reported that only 24 out of B.C.’s 60 school districts have explicit anti-discrimination policies to protect LGBQT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer-identifying and transgender) youth.

The thing is, official anti-transphobic and anti-homophobic policies create a safer environment for all students, whether they are gay or straight, cisgender or transgender.

article continues below

According to recent research by University of B.C. professor Elizabeth Saewyc, not only do these policies decrease bullying and promote a sense of community within schools, they’re also associated with lower rates of underage drinking and other forms of substance abuse in both transgender and cisgender students.

(Terminology sidebar: “Cisgender” refers to individuals, like me, whose gender identity matches the sex they were labelled with at birth. I, therefore, am a cisgender woman. This does not, however, make me a “real” or “normal” woman, nor does it make me a more “authentic” woman than a woman who is transgender.)

While individual teachers and principals can make a huge difference in the lives of transgender students, Saewyc argues that they shouldn’t have to depend on the luck of the draw.

Every B.C. student should have the ability to attend school without having to face transphobia and/or homophobia, which is what district-wide policies could achieve.

Official anti-discrimination policies, then, seem like a pretty good way to promote a sense of safety and well-being among students. Healthy schools, hurray! So what’s preventing the rest of B.C.’s school districts from getting on board?

Ryan Dyck, director of research and policy at human-rights advocacy group Egale Canada, provides a possible explanation: “There’s still a lot of fear in our school communities today that if we talk about bullying or violence based on sexual orientation or gender identity, that teachers or parents will be reprimanded because it’s inappropriate conversation,” Smart quotes him as saying.

Transgender issues still remain beyond the pale of topics that we feel comfortable broaching with our children, but this reticence has harmful consequences. As we all know, LGBQ youth are at much higher risk of physical, verbal and sexual harassment in schools than their peers, and transgender youth even more so.

But the thing is, kids tend to be smarter than we think they are.

When we talk about the harassment of LGBQT students, we evade the real issues in favour of the nebulous category of “bullying.”

But bullying doesn’t come from nowhere: Its perpetrators know very well why certain students are more acceptable targets than others. This knowledge comes from what we’re already teaching them through the media and our own everyday interactions. Kids pick up on cues. Kids hear what we’re not saying. Kids already know that transgender people exist, and that we often marginalize them, and bullies use that knowledge. Bullies don’t decide to be mean to the transgender kid because they pulled numbers out of a hat: They know that kid is a fair target because we told them so.

If we don’t choose to explicitly counter that message, how can we be surprised that homophobia and transphobia leak into our schools and manifest there?

When I was in elementary school, one of the janitors had a prosthetic arm. One day in the gym, he gave a presentation about his arm to the entire school. It was pretty cool, even if we were a little old for the heavy-handed “people with disabilities are people too” shtick that the teachers gave us. It was a positive conversation. It helped us.

Compare this to the story of Cerrie Burnell, who was made host of a BBC children’s show in 2009. Parents complained that Burnell — who was born with a missing forearm — would scare their children and demanded that she be taken off the air. The goal, I suppose, was to protect the children, but the only lesson that would have been learned was that people with disabilities were too scary to be on TV, that there was something frightening and awful about them. What’s worse, nobody would have known that that was the lesson they were learning, but they would have internalized it all the same.

We aren’t shielding our children by refusing to talk about transgender issues, we’re simply ceding the floor to ignorant stereotypes and harmful opinions.

Let’s give our kids some respect: They’re smarter than we think they are. If they’re old enough for trigonometry, then they can handle a good, solid conversation about LGBQT issues.