NJ schools have to fight systemic harassment (Oh, hell yes)

From the Daily Record:

Public schools can be held liable for repeated, prolonged student-on-student sexual harassment, the state Supreme Court ruled today in a case brought by a New Jersey boy who contended he was victimized by years of homophobic taunts and attacks until he finally withdrew from school.

A bill to a similar effect is being debated in Iowa.

It's about time for this to be happening. One has to wonder if school officials who know about that sort of harassment and do nothing to stop it aren't tacitly endorsing it. Like they're outsourcing gender policing to kids. Especially since in this case the bullying went on for years and was so bad that the kid had to go to a private school instead (an option that the vast majority of GLBT youth don't have).

I think that many queer people can identify with this kid and the need for GLBT-specific anti-bullying programs. While Iowa "Republicans wanted all references to specific groups removed from the bill so that it would simply ban bullying of any kind," not mentioning sexual minorities is basically saying that harassment of GLBT students is A-O-K. Bullies of queer students think that it's different enough from other sorts of bullying, and many school officials look the other way because they think that it's different from other sorts of bullying, that it's boy-will-be-boys or girls-will-be-girls gender policing.

I know, because, like many of you, I lived with it.

When I was fourteen, in ninth grade, I ran Cross Country for my high school. I wasn't all that great, but I liked it enough and I had some friends on the team. A couple weeks into the season an eighteen-year-old Senior decided that it would be fun to start making jokes, calling me names, and taunting me because of my perceived sexuality. (I say "perceived" because I wasn't out at that age. Even though that silly Guy Quiz said I'm a "Level 2", let's just say that I'm not fooling anyone.) It eventually escalated to include other eighteen-year-olds, more physical harassment (like holding me down and grabbing at my genitals), and harassment during school hours.

One thing that seriously bothered me about it was that it was done in full view of many other students (making it humiliating) and in front of several teachers and coaches. And the adults did nothing about it. I can only guess that they thought it was funny too, especially since one of the coaches called me a pussy in an unrelated situation.

When they graduated, it ended, but I was left with a feeling of embarrassment in front of my peers and a jumpiness at physical intimacy that followed me through part of my adult sex life. It also added to my distrust of culturally masculine institutions and authority figures.

Like I've said before, GLBT people are uniquely traumatized during adolescence in our culture, and I can only wonder what we'd be like as a people if we weren't. This ruling in New Jersey recognizes the school's responsibility, first, to react to such harassment, and, second, to fight against this discrimination as a systemic problem instead of individualized instances of bullying.

Oh, yeah, and no exceptions for religious schools. This is not what Jesus would do.

(Crossposted to bilerico)

Entitlement knows no bounds

I live in Indiana, about an hour away from downtown Indianapolis, in the far corner of a small town. A suburban kid who came to visit recently told me that I live, gosh, out there.

So it wasn't unusual when I was returning from a visit with two new gentleman friends that I stopped at a grocery store at 2 AM. It's a big-box grocery store, at the heart of suburbia, surrounded by a sea of cookie-cutter houses. It's one of those reminders to me about how weird American culture is. We have vast expanses of houses, all designed pretty much the same, with stores and restaurants that are large and bland, repetition after repetition, like Warhol's soup cans without the color change. In the middle of all this, we put a school system and some sort of "small town downtown area" that no one really wants to have to visit, and then replicate the entire system around every major city in the country. It's a vast organization of repetition that one could spend his or her entire life in not knowing that there's an outside, except, of course, for those urban areas where the last person from here who ventured down there was shot by a gang member, didn't you hear?

But, grocery store's a grocery store, and I was in need of produce that I can't get out there. Walking past the entrance, though, there were several men who were outside, laughing and smoking in the cold, their uniform shirts untucked and hanging out from underneath their coats. I don't see this when I shop shop shop for bell peppers during the day. The workers have to go around the back of the store to have a smoking break. Smoke is smoke; it pollutes the same either way. But in order to make the whole operation less offensive, someone took it upon him or herself to force these people to not just get out of the way (they were already at least ten feet away from the door) but completely out of sight. At that point I realized that that someone had to think, and probably with good reason, that people would choose not to shop there simply because they don't want to see the workers taking a break and smoking. It was only in this slippage during the who-gives-a-fuck hours that I was reminded, not at all unpleasantly, that these workers exist outside of the workplace. (Contrast that with an experience from when I lived in France: I was mis-billed for my cellphone, so I went to the store to work it out, and the guy working there told me three unique lies to get me to leave so he would not have to do the five minutes of work to fix the problem. I was to know that he was a human being, and he plain didn't feel like working at that moment. But I digress.)

So it's only in that context of willful blandness, an absolute attachment to not-feeling any momentary discomfort to which a large part of the American population has convinced itself (with the enabling of a few large corporations) that it has a right, that we can have a story like this. I otherwise cannot wrap my mind around how a man could get so riled up over a video being shown to kids that depicts families of queer people. Nor can I comprehend without a primer in dominant group entitlement how a woman could say: "When does Evesham Township or any school have a right to show to my grandchildren something I believe to be morally wrong?" Somehow in the middle of the most diverse country in the world people believe not that they just shouldn't be forced to do something that they feel is wrong, but that they and their extended family should not even have to acknowledge the existence of anyone they disagree with.

And out here, we call that pretty fucking spoiled.