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A
Capacity-Building Approach to Fighting Homophobia and
Transphobia
Catherine
Taylor
Faculty
of Education/
Department
of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications
University
of Winnipeg
Canada
The mental health effects
of homophobia and transphobia on queer youth have by now
been well documented in many English-speaking countries,
including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United
Kingdom, and the United States, where studies have found
disproportionately high levels of depression, dropping
out, suicidal ideation and suicide attempts among queer
teenagers, and a correspondingly high incidence of
school-based homophobic experiences that include
name-calling, threats, social and curricular exclusion,
cultural and religious-based condemnation, and physical
assault. In the wake of retaliatory violence by bullied
youths, teachers and school officials in some areas have
undertaken a range of measures to address homophobia,
mainly by subsuming it under the general category of
bullying.
In Canada, this often takes
the form of therapy for the victim and punishment for the
perpetrator. More specifically queer approaches, where
they exist, tend to be limited to developing curriculum
materials for optional, and thus infrequent, use. This
paper reports on my research into the implementation of a
groundbreaking anti-homophobia initiative in a large
inner-city school division in Winnipeg, Canada, now in its
sixth year, that goes beyond such individualistic
approaches and aims to increase the resilience of victims
by building the whole school community’s capacity to
oppose homophobia.
While the Division has not
yet been able to implement an anti-homophobia mandate for
the curriculum, the 80+ schools in the Division now
mobilize a range of other approaches to capacity-building
that involve pre-service teacher education; workshops for
all current and incoming staff of the school division
including administrators and janitorial staff; online
resources for students and educators; Gay-Straight
Alliance groups; and library resources for every school
from kindergarten through senior high school.
I explain how the
components of an holistic approach are not merely additive
but mutually supportive and integral to each other’s
effectiveness. The approach can be critiqued for
reinscribing problematic identity categories that
ultimately entrench hostile social relations between
differently positioned people, for largely ignoring
transgender issues, and in general for failing to
integrate the insights into sexuality and gender developed
through the last 10 years of Queer Theory and Cultural
Studies. However, I argue for the merits of addressing the
problem of school-based homophobia through such local
efforts to implement a multi-pronged approach to
transforming school culture, particularly, as is the case
in Canada, in the face of a return to social conservatism
and religious traditionalism at the level of national
government.
About Catherine
Taylor
Catherine Taylor is
Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education and the
Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the
University of Winnipeg in Canada. She has published in the
area of anti-homophobia education, research ethics, and
Lesbian Studies. Most recently, she conducted a study of
the health and safety needs of the transgender and Two
Spirit commmunity of Manitoba. She is currently conducting
an audit of Canadian journals in the field of Education to
determine the extent to which they are participating in
the struggle to end homophobia in the school system.
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