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Did I stutter

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I graduated high school in 99.

There was a student at our school named Wayne.

Wayne was gay. It was obvious. He was unable to stay in the closet even if he wanted to. To make matters worse, he was also Black. From a bullying standpoint, that was not a great combo. Both Black and white students made fun of him relentlessly. He was ostracized from the only community that may have given him protection. Only us theater kids stuck up for him, but not to significant effect.

Wayne was bullied so much that at one point he finally snapped and attacked his bullies with a lunch tray. I was actually seated in perfect line of sight and just sat there chewing my soggy fries in stunned silence. It didn't even seem real as I was witnessing it. The image of him wailing on his main bully as the food on his tray flew off is permanently logged into my long term memory.

The bully he attacked had blood all over his face and went straight to the nurse. Other than superficial cuts, he was not injured.

Before the attack, Wayne went to teachers for help. He went to guidance counselors for help. He went to the principals for help.

He did all of the things you were supposed to do. No one helped him. They wagged a finger at the bullies and warned them to stop.

Wayne's lunch tray melee was the only thing that worked. His bullies stayed far away from him. But a week later Wayne was expelled and the bullies were given no punishment.

So... no.

No one in my school talked about being trans.

Because the only way to survive being openly queer was to bash people with a lunch tray.

jenroses

Graduated high school in 1990. There was one guy in my class who was bullied and called gay because... he liked wearing eyeliner. That's it. he had a girlfriend. He's still, afaik, straight and cis. But he wore one item of makeup and had a fashion sense and that was enough. I left my small town and went to college at an extremely liberal private college and immediately met trans and gay and bisexual and lesbian people and started considering my own identity, which it had not been safe to do AT ALL in high school.

And later learned that a number of people I'd known in high school were queer. By later, I mean 20 years later when we all found each other on facebook.

vaspider

Kids started calling me a "lesbo" on the playground and beating me up for it while I was in elementary school. I became "boy crazy" as a form of self defense. If I was a slut, at least I wasn't a dyke.

It was a joke in my family that my youngest sibling hated dresses, which of course were mandatory for "girls." Ha ha, it's funny, ha ha. Because of course we just have to put up with wearing dresses.

That's my brother. Jake. He graduated from HS in 2001.

Fuck that asshole. We broke ourselves trying to survive. Some of us didn't.

wolfinthethorns

If you were in the UK, there was a little thing called Section 28 that made it illegal for schools to discuss "homosexually" (which was the catch all for any non-het, non-cis identity) in a positive light. Three internet wasn't an easily accessible thing yet, and positive representation in the media vanishingly rare. Many of us who have grown up to be some variety of queer literally did not know there were options beyond Gay Man (predatory or tragic, will be dead from AIDS by 30), Lesbian (ugly and shrill, always predatory) or Transvestite (see Gay Man but more laughable).

Aside from similar experiencing similar levels of violence and ostracisation to those described by previous posters, would my mental health been better had I known I was bisexual and genderqueer at 15 (rather than 28 and 39 respectively) instead of being keenly aware that I was Doing Woman Wrong despite trying Really Hard to be normal and not sure how I was still failing? Almost certainly.

Do I remember Eddie Izzard describing herself in the mid 90s as "a lesbian with a man's body" and feeling a strong sense of kinship, albeit the other way around, and then immediately dismissing it because female "transvestites" didn't exist, so I guess I couldn't feel like that? Painfully.

So why didn't you get kids coming out at trans prior to 2000? Because if we weren't getting any non-conformity beaten out of us by peers/teachers/parents, we were beating it out of ourselves thinking we were the only ones who felt like this so it could be real.

anxious-mess19

Yall are talking 2000 and earlier but ik kids at my fucking school who are too terrfied to come out bc they're in a bad class.

I spent middle school clutching my identity in secret because if it came out I was more then a emo girl with funky colored hair we'd be fucking dead. Litterly.

We went to a good school, in a big-ish city. Our current school is considred one of the queerest, and yet we can still point out each and every closeted person we only know to be trans because they've confided in us.

Its still like this. It's better, but it's never been the time. It's been that if we come out, we're fucking dead.

seananmcguire

Graduated high school in 1996. One of the first people I met in the school who wasn't awful to me was a splendid, but awkward individual who took me home and handed me off to their big sister as a more suitable mentor for a weird, loud, mouthy little baby lesbian.

Said person was several grades ahead of me, and graduated long before I did, but I remained very close with the sister.

Said person fully transitioned the minute we were all out of high school, and he was my manager at my first full-time office job. No, he never talked about being trans on campus. He would have been beaten to death by the other students. But he was trans, and the minute he could live his truth, he did.

emotionalhimbo

Graduated HS in 2010 from a private high school. There was one gay girl at our school and she was slowly forced to leave by the school banning her from all activities that involved changing clothes cause “parents were worried about their daughters”. She couldn’t do PE unless she changed in the bathroom at the other end of the school which made her late every time. She was banned from acting in any plays cause she wasn’t allowed to use the dressing room. She joined us in tech cause none of us cared (and 9/10 of us ended up coming out as queer later in life) but I was partnered with her anytime she had to go behind stage during costume changes ‘just in case she tried to go in the dressing room’. She couldn’t do sports or any activity that involved overnight trips. They took away everything from her. Most of us students didn’t care that she was gay, she was a great friend and smart kid, but the school didn’t care. The faculty and staff bullied her out of any group activities.

I came out 2 years after I graduated and slowly 9 other members of my 60 person class have come out since. 5 of us are trans in some way. 0 of us talked about it until after graduation cause we all watched how this girl was bullied by her own school and it didn’t matter how many of us students tried to say we were chill with her on our teams or in the dressing room, the faculty didn’t care, they had decided she was an “other” and she was gonna be treated like it.

something-like-a-heart

I graduated from high school in 2001. (At the time, Ontario had an optional fifth year of high school. I’m that old.) I didn’t know anyone at the time who was out as trans; however, I know a few people from my graduating class who have since come out as such. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they weren’t trans back then. It just means that it wasn’t as safe to be anything but cishet at the time. It sickens me that things are getting to be that bad again.

fractiousrvt

I graduated from an all-girls catholic high school in 2000. One of my dear friends, whom I still very much regret losing touch with, was trans. He was the first trans person I ever met and while very much not out to anyone else, our friend group of the loners and outcasts (most of us ended up being some flavor of queer) was accepting. I devoutly hope that Matt is doing well.

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