Early this week USA Today ran a story about last weekend’s Council on Contemporary Families conference in Chicago, during which experts discussed how topics such as sexual orientation, sexual labeling, and gender-bending were no longer “x-rated or adults-only topics, but rather subjects that young people talk about as they figure out how they fit in.” Psychologist Braden Berkey told conference attendees, “Youth are saying they don’t want to be defined by gender or orientation.”
Berkey is founding director of the Sexual Orientation and Gender Institute at the Center on Halsted, which opened in 2007 to offer support services and programming for the area’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. He talked about the evolution of sexual and gender labels and how young people today are trying to dissolve them. He says the terms created in the early days, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, are giving way to other descriptions, such as polygender or multisex. Young people, he says, reject narrow gender definitions and say they don’t want to be defined by their sexuality.
However, a presentation by sociologist Barbara Risman of the University of Illinois at Chicago suggested that for the middle-schoolers she’s studied, attitudes about sexual orientation are less open-minded, especially for boys. She says these boys fear the label “gay.”
More from Barbara Risman…
Among boys, “homophobia in middle school is used to police gender,” she says. In-depth interviews with 43 students at an urban middle school in the Southeast found vast differences between the sexes.
“Today, girls are free to do sports and be competitive. No one thought they had to play dumb to get a boyfriend. The women’s movement has done great things for middle school girls,” she says.
“It’s another story with boys. I feel like we’re in a time warp. We have not dealt with men and masculinity in a serious enough way,” she says.”Boys police each other. There’s no room not to do anything not traditionally masculine.”
Risman says it’s important not to generalize the findings to most American children, but she says the fact that boys are labeled quickly suggests that this is a developmental stage. The study, she adds, was limited by many rules requiring parental permission for contact with minors.
Risman says it’s the stigma of homosexuality that looms among young boys. Being emotional or caring too much about clothes or liking to dance are reasons that boys give for describing someone as “girlish,” she says.
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