What Are Words For
The Debate of Whether Trans Kids' Should Be Outed by Their Schools Starts with a Battle Over Language
The debate over trans kids in school is at least partly a debate over language. Even the best reported and written stories on the topic are falling into the trap of accepting seemingly neutral language that is anything but neutral.
Case in point is Thursday’s story in NJ Spotlight — a news site for which I have written and that is probably the best in the state.
The story focuses on a debate in Hanover, a town in Morris County, one of the more affluent counties in an affluent state. The debate revolves around the questions of parental notification of information that “could impact a student’s health or well-being, including sexual orientation and gender identity.” The board approved a policy earlier this year that requires such notifications, which led the state to sue and the courts to issue an injunction and order the policy to be rewritten. The board has approved a revised policy and is awaiting a ruling.
The Hanover case is part of a national debate over the rights LGBTQ+ students — lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and allies. Advocates for the LGBTQ+ community — like me — argue that parental notification laws like the one in question amount to the forced outing of students, potentially endangering them, and ultimately forcing them back into the closet. Parents’ groups argue that as parents they are entitled to all information about their children — and they have assumed the mantle of “parents’ rights,” which has been an effective way of framing the debate for public consumption.
What about the children, as the cliche goes? What about those kids who do not feel comfortable telling their parents about their sexual orientation or their gender questions? Parents at the Hanover meeting earlier this week acknowledged “special circumstances where children experience unfortunate home lives.”
“However,” said Brittany Smith-Wichelns, a mom of three from Whippany who supports the repeal, “not telling parents information about their children automatically implies and assumes that the parent does not know what is best for their child,”
This makes it seem like those “special circumstances” are rare. They are not. A narrow “majority of parents” told pollsters they “would be comfortable if their child came out as LGBTQ, including over half if their child came out as transgender or nonbinary (54% and 57%, respectively),” reports the Trevor Project. That still leaves more than four in 10 without support, and that assumes that parents would practice what they say to pollsters — which is never a sure thing.
Trevor Project, which works to prevent suicide among LGBTQ teens, also reports (in a different study) that:
Research suggests that among LGBTQ youth, only one-third experience parental acceptance, with an additional one-third experiencing parental rejection, and the final one-third not disclosing their LGBTQ identity until they are adults (Katz-Wise et al., 2015). Another study found that LGB young adults who report high levels of parental rejection are eight times more likely to report attempting suicide and six times more likely to report high levels of depression (Ryan et al., 2009).
A third study also found that “LGBTQ youth are overrepresented among young people experiencing homelessness and housing instability in the United States.” More than a quarter of LGBTQ+ youth were homeless at some point, with one in six reporting "they had slept away from parents or caregivers because they ran away from home, with more than half (55%) reporting that they ran away from home because of mistreatment or fear of mistreatment due to their LGBTQ identity.” Another “14% of LGBTQ youth reported that they had slept away from parents or caregivers because they were kicked out or abandoned, with 40% reporting that they were kicked out or abandoned due to their LGBTQ identity.”
The numbers are higher for trans kids:
Homelessness and housing instability were reported at higher rates among transgender and nonbinary youth, including 38% of transgender girls/women, 39% of transgender boys/men, and 35% of nonbinary youth, compared to 23% of cisgender LGBQ youth.
My own bias is clear here. I think the Hanover policy is dangerous for LGBTQ+ kids and I see it as part of a larger national movement that has been trying to role back LGBTQ rights and impose restrictive laws. I’m not saying that parents in Hanover — or elsewhere in New Jersey — have any direct connection to the right-wing groups driving these bill. I’m saying they owe an ideological debt, and their efforts have little to do with good parenting or fair treatment.
We see this kind of framing — or branding, if you prefer — play out in the abortion debate. The New York Times, as A.G. Sulzberger points out in the Columbia Journalism Review, argues that “one of the ways propagandists and advocates try to steer coverage to advance their agendas is to win the battle over terminology.”
“For this reason we generally try to use the everyday language of the public, what we call idiomatic English, rather than the specialized language embraced by academics, activists, and marketers,” he said, which includes “trying to avoid market-tested phrases that have been designed specifically to shift public opinion (generally avoiding terms like ‘pro life’ or ‘pro choice’ and instead describing such views as for or against abortion rights).”
This is not perfect and it “can be contentious,” he admits, but the goal is not to defuse the language so much as limit the potential for bias, though
Personal biases and agendas can still distort the work reporters and editors produce—just as people’s personal experiences and backgrounds can elevate it. But good journalistic processes reduce the frequency of mistakes and create mechanisms for self-correcting when we err.
I want to make clear that this essay is not an attack on NJ Spotlight. My goal here is to identify how even the smallest and seemingly most innocuous word choices can color a story, and help drive agendas. On their surface, “parents’ rights” and “parental choice” seem unassuming. Within the larger debate over trans rights, and the teaching of LGBTQ+ issues and even the history of slavery and race in America, these are far more loaded phrases. We need to understand that and, as Sulzberger says, avoid easy shorthand or self-description.
Attached is my annotation of the NJ Spotlight story.