By Danielle Woodcock
In health class a few days ago, we were given articles that we were supposed to respond to. I chose to respond to "American Terror", a response to the death of Carl Walker Hoover, a "gender non-conforming" youth who was bullied to death.
I agree with what the girl who wrote the article was saying. LGBTQIAP+ youth are far too often terrorized by cis-heterosexual people that are conditioned to dehumanize people who don't fit in with our heteronormative society. Often times, their only argument is the slogan "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve". Sometimes their arguments aren't even arguments at all - they just call the LGBT community fags or do unmentionable things to them. A simple Google search can give you an idea of those things.
Throughout history, our heroes are thought to be cis and heterosexual, as if the notion that LGBT people exist is a completely new and foreign concept. No one stops to think that maybe George Washington was bisexual, or that James Buchanan could have been gay or asexual, or that Hapshepsut really was trans*. No, according to nearly every history book out there, everyone was cis and straight, there were definitely no identities other than these two, and even if there were, there were laws against that kind of behavior. Because of this ancient ignorance, there are still laws that inhibit LGBT progress.
That's to say nothing of society's apparent obsession with harmful heterosexual relationships. Men often dominate their female partners in the media, their female partners' lives revolve around these men, and women who actually exist are expected to idealize these kinds of relationships. In all honesty, who would rather see the relationship between Bella and Edward, one of the most toxic relationships in the media today, praised, while the relationship between Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka, a loving real couple with two beautiful children, is said to be ruining the sanctity of marriage?
This behavior of homophobia is instilled and put into action as early as elementary school; often times it starts even earlier than that. This is all because blurred gender and sexuality lines cause children to harass their peers, or so we're told. In reality, people's identities don't subject them to harmful behavior from others; people who are unwilling to accept these identities do.
Danielle Woodcock is an eleventh grader at Gardena High School.
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