4 Ways to Support LGBTQ+ Students

LGBTQ+ students require special support.

Even if they’re not out, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning (LGBTQ) kids are statistically very likely to be enrolled in your school. In 2020, about 5.6% of adults identified as LGBT—about 18.5 million Americans. Though some people may not recognize they’re not straight until well after high school, it occurs to some kids quite young. A 2013 Pew Research Center poll of 1154 LGBT adults found the median age at which they first thought they were, or might be gay, lesbian, or bisexual was 10 to 13 years old.

Unfortunately, LGBTQ kids are also statistically likely not to feel like they really belong to your school. Many peer-reviewed studies have shown that LGBTQ students are at higher risk for bullying, teasing, harassment, physical assault, sexual assault, substance abuse, depression, and suicide-related behaviors. A 2015 nationally representative study of adolescents in grades 9-12 found that lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth were nearly three times as likely to have attempted suicide in the previous year as their heterosexual peers.

When I say that LGBTQ kids require special support, I’m not trying to suggest that their experience as part of a minority population is necessarily worse than what members of racial or religious minorities experience—or those with other differences. School can be a rough place for anyone who seems different at a given time! However, when, for example, a Jewish child is harassed or insulted, chances are that she knows some other Jewish kids or adults she can turn to for support. In contrast, it’s very easy for LGBTQ kids to believe that they are alone. Here are some steps that help.

LGBTQ suggestions for school leaders

1. Educate yourself. In 1997 I was fortunate to join the faculty of a public high school that was already engaged in a conversation about how best to support every student in the school community, with specific concern for our non-straight kids. I soon learned about GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, whose mission is to ensure that every member of every school community is valued and respected regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. The GLSEN website is an excellent starting point for information and educator resources.

As someone who several years ago offended a student by using an outdated term, I know that the language related to LGBTQ issues (e.g., “gender identity” vs. “gender expression”) can also be a challenge. GLAAD periodically updates references that you may find helpful: an LGB glossary and a guide for transgender issues, which includes terms to avoid.

2. Engage your staff. Of the 16,713 students (ages 13-21, from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and Guam) that GLSEN polled for its 2019 National School Climate Survey, over half (52.4%) reported hearing homophobic remarks from teachers or other school staff. Of students who reported an incident of harassment or assault, only 13.7% reported that staff intervened most or all of the time.

There are people of good conscience who are not comfortable with the idea of homosexuality, or who believe that schools should have nothing to do with sexuality aside from certain units in health class. Based on two decades of consulting and presenting on LGBTQ-related issues, I believe that the best approach for leaders is to model respect for different points of view as you appeal to a deeper morality: this is about the kids. If teachers really care about kids, this means all kids—rich kids, poor kids, straight kids, gay kids.

You can make the case that all kids benefit from a more inclusive school. All students, regardless of sexual orientation, report the lowest levels of depression, suicidal feelings, alcohol and marijuana use, and unexcused absences when they are in a positive school climate and not experiencing homophobic teasing.

3. Maintain an inclusive school environment. The GLSEN survey showed that 56% of LGBT students felt unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation. About 1 in 3 LGBT students missed at least one entire day of school in the previous month because they felt unsafe or uncomfortable. Many LGBT kids avoid bathrooms and locker rooms, school functions and extracurricular activities, with words like “dyke,” “faggot,” and “no homo” pushing them away.

The CDC website includes suggestions and regularly updated resources for parents and schools, LGBT youth and allies, teachers, administrators, and family members.

4. Develop an inclusive curriculum. Only 19% of LGBT students in the GLSEN survey reported experiencing positive representations of LGBT people, history, or events in school; less than half said they could find information about LGBT-related issues in their school library.

When schools do post information related to sexuality, gender identity, and gender expression, it is often confined to health classes, the nurse’s office, and the guidance department. Although it is important to have information in these places, having it only in these places can send a message linking LGBT identity to illness or crisis. 

Rather, it’s important for educators to own that history has set the record too straight: for thousands of years, great inventions, works of art, scientific discoveries, philosophical concepts, and social movements have been contributed by LGBT and straight people alike. From Socrates and Sappho to Leonardo da Vinci, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Alan Turing and Audre Lorde, people of all sexual orientations have enriched every subject ever taught in a school. It’s just that we tend not to acknowledge it. But as Emily Style has argued, all students need curricular mirrors as well as windows.

Over three decades of teaching, Paula Alida Roy set as her main goal “the creation of a safe, inclusive classroom community in which any topic [could] be discussed respectfully and in which topics often considered too political or sophisticated for high school students [could] be normalized into the discourse of the subject and the class.” Teachers ready for ideas about an inclusive classroom that takes students seriously as nuanced thinkers (and discussion partners) will appreciate Roy’s 1997 essay “Language in the Classroom: Opening Conversations About Lesbian and Gay Issues in Senior High English.”

[Article copyright 2016 by Peter Horn, Ed.D. Updated 2021. Image from thunderclap.it]