This article was originally published in the Spirit of Jefferson Aug 2, 2023
Teen years are a time when you’re trying to establish a balance between being accepted by the group that you’re aging along with and distinguishing yourself from them so you don’t come across as just one of the herd.
When you’re lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual, or queer, nature has already decided for you that you’re going to come across as different from what society expects of you. You stand out as nonconforming within your majority peer group, a condition that more and more our society is identifying with the word “queer.”
Queer used to be a slur, but the LGBTQIA population is now reclaiming it as a shortcut for the whole long acronym that has evolved (and continues to evolve) to respectfully describe the wide diversity of sexual orientations and gender identifies. I’ll use queer in this way and apply it to myself too as a gay man.
Knowing who you are within the LQBTQIA “rainbow” can occur very early, especially for transgender kids, who can have a persistently nagging feeling that they’ve been born into the wrong bodies. Your parents, siblings and young friends provide you clues as to how you ought to consider yourself; meaning, either as a girl or a boy. It starts right at birth with the colors of your little infant outfits. Blue if you’ve got boy “parts” and pink if you’ve got girl “parts.”
Your male or female anatomy are determined mainly by your genetics, specifically your sex chromosomes: an X and Y pair and you get the boy parts, two X’s and you get the girl parts. (In reality it’s more complicated than that for kids born with an intersex condition. These individuals can have both male and female anatomical features, supporting an argument that nature has created more than a simple two-way or binary set of genders.)
But beyond anatomy, the American Psychological Association recognizes gender and sexuality as aspects of being human that lie as much in the mind as in the body. They can be influenced by hormones, the immune system, and interactions between the environment and the genes. All of this is encapsulated in our expression that it’s all about your “chemistry.” If you’re gay, then you are a male who has chemistry for other males. If you’re lesbian, you are a female with chemistry for other females. If you’re bisexual, your chemistry extends to both males and females. If you’re asexual, you lack sexual chemistry.
The norms of our society establish the initial rules for what goes along with blue and what with pink. They specify what kind of clothes and toys your parents buy you, how your hair will be cut, even how you’ll be named. They also determine the pronouns people use to refer to you. Coming along with all that will be many expectations about the kinds of activities you can participate in and for how you should present yourself and behave toward others.
Oftentimes as you’re growing up, those older than you will start laying out lots of do’s and don’ts that relate to whether you have boy or girl anatomy. You’ll get abundant reinforcement of these rules through books, TV, movies and social media. All of this you take in, and early on you start to sense how comfortable you are with all these rules. For some young kids, the “normative” expectations fit well, for others not so much. For some kids, the fit is awful and even painful.
There are two aspects to this idea of how you fit in with parents’ and society’s traditional expectations of acceptable sexual orientation. According to many psychologists, the first concerns gender identification, how you see yourself on the boy-girl dimension. The second concerns sexual orientation, who you see yourself attracted to. Psychologists recognize that both these characteristics are valid markers of a person’s identity and once they’re settled in, not subject to change. Gender identification can happen as early as age 3 or 4, but sexual orientation develops more gradually and firms up closer to pre-adolescence or later.
But it’s important to realize that these are not preferences. They’re built in. They define us. By implication, then, you can’t be “groomed” to be something other than what you identify as. It’s who you are. This statement is in line with the findings of the American Psychological Association that sexual and gender identification are stable and persistent characteristics.
So here’s where we are now. The reality is that some kids don’t fit the traditional stereotypes of sexual orientation and identities. So what do we do about that? Do we force them to conform, or do we help them develop in the way they see themselves?
Again, the American Psychological Association is clear that it’s up to the majority of those in our society to change their expectations and to reduce the social stigma and prejudice directed at queer people, especially vulnerable queer youth.
When this question becomes critical is about the time a young person starts middle school, give or take at about 12 years of age. It’s here when puberty kicks in and who you’re attracted to progresses into dating behavior. Who do you want to kiss on your important first date? And who do you want to be when you do it? Or don’t you want to kiss anyone at all?
Another complicating factor at this time is that society’s expectations about genetics become locked into the minds and behaviors of the adolescent majority peer group. Kids who match with society’s expectations of gender identity and sexual orientation are those in the majority and they can reject those who don’t meet those expectations. This means that for queer kids, the middle and high school environments can become toxic. They can be unfriended, harassed, bullied and find it difficult to find a safe niche.
There have been queer teens probably for all of history and in all cultures, and many of them have been victimized, though not always or everywhere. Some cultures, even today, are accepting of sexual and gender differences. Others demonize and criminalize them. The victimization of queer youth in cultures which are not accepting shows up in bullying, name calling, physical harming, shaming and ostracizing, and it leads statistically to psychological problems, substance abuse, self-harming and even suicidal thoughts and actions.
Data and statistics reported by the Human Rights Campaign find that queer youth are twice as likely to be bullied, twice as likely to be assaulted, twice as likely to be socially excluded, twice as likely to experiment with drugs and alcohol and twice as likely to say they’re unhappy. Some of these numbers apply to as much as half of this youth group.
In my own case, I attended a Catholic boys high school that mandated respect by and for all students. It had a dress code and because it was a boys only school there was little in the way of overt sexual posturing. That kind of environment probably spared me harassment, but the official policy of the Catholic church made it abundantly clear that I needed to change my sexual orientation. And I did try, but my sexual orientation won out and I eventually left Catholicism behind.
I was still a young man when I had my one and only experience with physical violence for being gay. I was mugged in broad daylight coming home from work, and knocked unconscious. Gay friends helped me recover, the police showed up but did nothing.
Other than that one episode and numerous instances of name calling, I’ve not been brutalized anywhere near enough to take it out on myself. My life has been and still is rewarding and gentle. I think all queer youth should be able to say the same every step along their own journeys and I hope society allows them to.