A trial is taking place in southern California right now, troubling a nation that faces a story that hits on so many taboos. Here we have a country that must face an uncomfortable reality that children have sexual desires, murderous rage, and can know right from wrong but still be capable of an act of extraordinary violence. Here we have a story about a "sweet-faced boy" who shoots his classmate because despite being a boy he insists on wearing make-up, dresses, and nail polish. And further fueling the disquiet is the idea that a 14-year-old had access to a gun and was willing to use it to kill someone. Do we think the outcome would have been different in the absence of a gun? I suspect not, in the absence of a gun perhaps he would have sought out a knife or club �" the desire to kill was there.
The trial is that of Brandon McInerney, who is charged with murder in the shooting death of Lawrence King, who was 15 when he was gunned down in a classroom in Oxnard, California in 2008. McInerney, who was 14 at the time of the shooting, is being tried as an adult in Los Angeles County.
What was the driver for this need to kill, to annihilate another human being? It seems from the various reports that McInerney was unsettled by the idea that his classmate might be gay. So at the heart of this is the idea that a boy's sexual orientation could be so threatening he needs to be killed. Where does someone get an idea like that?
Here we face an uncomfortable truth �" that some kids are gay, some kids are transgender and that this awareness is often evident long before they have a label or name for it. Children are raised in a society that places primacy on the idea of achieving a lifelong, monogamous, committed heterosexual relationship and does not offer young people, particularly within schools, the idea that other relationship types exist, that other ways of being exist. Our history is full of famous people who were gay or even transgender but for a long time these aspects of their identities have remained hidden. We might study Shakespeare's sonnets as the greatest love poems ever �" but not discover the homoerotic subtext in many of them until we study English at university. We don't learn that Joan of Ark was killed for her insistence on wearing men's clothing �" academics increasingly see her as a transgender person living in a world that couldn't cope with that.
Children get bullied in schools for just about any reason �" there are hierarchical and status battles endlessly waged and sexual orientation is an easy insult to throw at someone in a society where it is seen as an insult. Our responsibility as adults raising children, be that as parents, as teachers, as significant others in the world of a child, is to help them learn to accept diversity: that others might think and act differently but to see that as an opportunity to learn from rather than something of which to fear. We also have a responsibility to protect vulnerable children by giving them the tools to defend themselves. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is quoted as saying, "right now, right this minute �" [children are] being bullied and beaten in school while adults look the other way." Certainly it's been my experience both as a teacher within secondary education, and as a child, that often teachers saw the bullying and mostly ignored it: dismissed it with "man up, just tough it out" or "everyone gets bullied, it's part of growing up." It may be a part of growing up but a young child doesn't necessarily have the tools or self awareness to know how to handle or deal with it and for me this is the biggest failure in the McInerney case �" that the school saw the problem but acted in ways that allowed the problem to continue.
In this case it has been reported that King connected with teachers but struggled to make peer connections. Hardly surprising if the peer group was not helped to understand his differences and was hostile to his gender identity and sexual orientation. A teacher is reported as saying that "The teachers were upset because [King's appearance] was disruptive to the environment and upsetting the students." Well please �" behavior can be disruptive �" but appearance?
Of course, the inference here is that King's overt homosexuality was the unsettling aspect �" and this I find troubling because schools need to help young people accept and understand same-sex attraction and gender non-conformity to prepare them for the complex world they are entering.
Some kids are gay, some are transgender: we need teachers to understand that and then help young people understand that. Then we would go a long way to making our society a safer place for everyone, not just those of us who don't fit the box. I hope that this case provides the motivation to start creating the necessary changes within schools so that this might never happen again. It is perhaps a vain hope.
Alex Drummond is a transgender psychotherapist based in the United Kingdom and the author of Queering the Tranny: New Perspectives on Male Transvestism and Transsexualism.