How to Alleviate Bullying

Although there are a large amount of problems and perpetuated norms that lead to bullying in schools, I would like to point one easy way that teachers and administrators can support students that they know are LGBTQIAP or a part of any group that is marginalized based on gender, sexuality, race, religion, or ability level. Pascoe says it is by teaching about and representing other people with those identities in their curriculum. If that means purposely including in an English class a book written by a trans or gay person, then doing that. As Pascoe said in Dude You're A Fag, it can be a very easy way to eliminate some stereotype or misconception about a group that is only a product of ignorance. I can remember a time in high school when we were reading Walt Whitman's poetry. For the first time all year (a year filled with reading works by old white men cis heterosexual men) I felt represented and proudly made sure that everyone in the class was informed that Whitman, an extremely talented and well-known poet was gay. My teacher then said nobody knows for sure if he was and for our purposes let's just assume that he is writing about women. I felt so squashed. I don't think in all of my high school years that I ever learned about a person whose life I could relate to or see myself in. We learned about symbolic annihilation in "Ms Representation", and when you don't see anyone in history who looks like you, it is hard for you to imagine that whatever marginalized identity (or multiple) that you have won't keep you from also making history. So being a young person who was just discovering their identity, I couldn't help but notice that everyone I ever learned about was straight, and in that moment in my english class, my teacher could have made a difference in my life by saying yes, this person is gay and also an extremely talented writer who made it far and life and is now a household name. But instead, she turned him being gay into something negative, a quality that we don't want to disgrace his memory by attributing to him. I felt personally targeted by this. I also cannot help but think about what this made the other people in my class think. Did they think "yes if this is about a woman it's a good poem but if it is about a man it's disgusting". It would be extremely helpful to people of all identity groups if we would include trans people in history so that trans people don't feel erased, or disabled people so that people with disabilities don't feel like there physical ability level is determinant of what they can accomplish. If we talked about the real struggle of people with these identities and how it could be anyone, even you reader, and not a personal choice that is made, we could help a lot of students who feel invisible or are mocked because of the stereotypes associated with certain identity groups.