Unfortunately, fear of violence silences many of these all-important tales until it is too late. If more voices, youth and adult, spoke about the horrors of bullying against LGBT teens, perhaps the school system would shift to better meet these precious young people's needs. .
Despite the mass shift in legislative and cultural mindset toward LGBT rights, queer teenagers are still harassed in the places where they have the greatest right to feel safety - and often from the very adults expected to provide that security. As a student from Moss Point High school describes, one of her worst experiences of bullying was initiated by a teacher. "The teacher had divided the class into 2 teams -- boys versus girls -- for a trivia game," Holmes said, but the teacher called on the tomboy-looking teen to sit alone in the middle. "She told me since she didn't know what I was, I should be on a team of my own." By placing Dustin on a team of her own, the teacher blatantly excluded her from the rest of the students and therefore created an environment where it was easy for Dustin to be considered "less than" - a level of inequality that is surely the opposite of any desirable morality. Picking up on the teacher's acceptance of ostracizing Dustin because of her gender identity, her peers began mocking her as "it," "queer," "freak," "alien," "dyke" and "he-she." When Dustin went to her principal for help, The principal exacerbated her sense of alienation by flatly declaring, "I don't want a dyke in this school." In a school where a child can't even go to her administration for help, who else could she turn to? Unfortunately, statistics and anecdotal evidence suggest that Moss Point is only one of many high schools where similar incidents happen. Dustin is one of few students brave enough to seek administrative support, but the rebuff she experienced demonstrates how the school system epitomizes Thompson's comment on social structure's inherent resistance to necessary moral revamping.
