Baby Dykes in Danger: The School to Prison Pipeline

By Kelly Cogswell

I'm trying to remember what school was like. Having to beg permission to pee. Grades that seemed almost arbitrary. Hallways where boys regularly grabbed or pinched my ass. I didn't know if they did that to all the girls, or just me, because I never told anyone, or even think about it. Why would you? I was taught girls were always in danger. Always prey. Don't wear short skirts or make-up. Don't call attention to yourself.

I didn't, but walking home from high school, white guys from the neighborhood would still inch along behind me in their cars. Sometimes they'd say something, sometimes they'd just lurk. That's when I started to walk like the black guys, with a confident, "don't fuck with me" stride.

My classmates, anyway, were okay. I wasn't actually bullied for being a dyke, which was good, because I didn't know I was one yet. That was in the Seventies and Eighties, and I had no role models. Not one student or teacher was out-- though rumors burned hot. He's a faggot. She's a lezzzzzz.

I didn't see myself in the hiss, but try to imagine myself in school now that things have changed, kind of. Having a woman teacher I know for a fact is a dyke. Wondering whether or not to go to a meeting of the Gay and Straight Alliance. A 2015 study found that LGBT youth were 91 percent more likely to be bullied than kids perceived as straight. I wonder if it was always like that, or if the problem is worse now that kids like me can put a name to their difference—and so can the other kids. I don't think I would have dared. It would have gotten back to my mother whom I can't imagine as anything other than a panicky homophobe even in her dementia, afraid someone might think she is gay, because she used the word girlfriend.

We don't talk enough about how vulnerable young queers still are. We especially don't talk about lesbian and bi girls. Earlier this year, Joel Mittleman, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Princeton crunched the numbers in their ongoing "Fragile Families and Childhood Wellbeing Study," and discovered that LGBT teens were 29 percent more likely to be suspended or expelled than their straight peers. But when he broke it down by sex, he found that there was almost no additional risk for boys. It was queer girls who skewed the numbers, being 95, NINETY-FIVE! percent more likely to be disciplined at school than their straight peers.

I don't know how to fathom that. Not just that it happens, but that I didn't know. Or that the school to prison pipeline isn't just for young black men. Mittleman noted that “…sexual minority girls are dramatically overrepresented in the juvenile justice system in a way that sexual minority boys are not.” Become known as a "disciplinary" problem, pretty soon they just call the cops. No matter that half the times young dykes get in fights it's because they finally decided to fight back against their tormenting bullies.

I'd known that dykes were overrepresented in prison, but I thought it happened during sentencing. Didn't realize it went as far back as this. And that our lost lives were in the hands of teachers and administrators who destroyed our futures just for liking other girls. Or for being a little masculine, a little butch.

Mittleman blamed them for 62 percent of the cases, noting that parents reported behavioral problems for 38 percent of the other girls. I'm suspicious of that figure, suspicious that some of those parents were like my Southern Baptist mother who, if I had come out, or been caught with a girl, would have drug me to the preacher, then the shrink. Maybe I would have ended up in one of those conversion camps. I would certainly have rebelled. Been labeled a "disciplinary problem." All for kissing a girl, refusing to giggle coyly at the sight of pimply faced boys.

Why didn't we know? Does anybody care?

These are not idle questions. The fact is we almost never hear about the problems of young lesbians, and bi girls. Even queers, even lesbians, who rage against the prison industrial complex which gobbles up black men by the millions are largely mute when it comes to the dykes of all races that represent almost 42 percent of the rapidly expanding population of women's prison. Feminists are silent, too.

https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/02/20/lesbian-and-bisexual-girls-greater-risk-school-discipline

Long Live the Lezzie--In the Post-Label Era

By Kelly Cogswell

Every couple of months, I read an article in HuffPost or Buzzfeed or some other hipster rag about how all these actresses and singers and whatnot have come out as… nothing, really… because they're so fucking cool, they're post-label, as fluid as their $129 lip gloss, which is perfectly applied, no matter how gender neutral. Do I even need to say that they're all stinking rich, and nearly always white? It's easiest to believe you're above "labels", which other people just call "words", when you're not even in the 1, but the top .05 percent.

I'd like to announce for the record that "lesbian" is just a label in the sense that all words are. This one is offered to us by the English language to describe female types primarily attracted to other female types. There are no political qualifications, no sports certificates you must have, or clothes in your closet, or sexual acts you must engage in. Your hair can be of any length and degree of cleanliness. You can identify wherever you like on the gender spectrum. And better yet, lesbian works nicely as both an adjective or a noun.

When people say they don't need or don't like labels, they're really saying, they don't want labels. And why? They accept a great many other labels like singer, for instance, or actress, or even writer, which serve the useful purposes of distinguishing them from plumbers so we don't call them to fix the drip under the kitchen sink.

Neither do most dispute the word white, even though skin color is actually quite changeable depending on the season, and if they tried to wiggle out of that category like the unfortunate Rachel Dolezal, or Tiger Woods, everybody would come down on them like a ton of gold bricks. You are white, they say. You are black. Get used to it.

But "lesbian," no. That's a label you can draw the line at to general applause, pretending like it's a totally different case, because, "Like, you know, female sexuality is so fluid that we shouldn't try to contain it at all." I'd like to officially announce that there's a word to describe that, too. We call it "bisexual" or pansexual, if you want to be fancy. No shame in those "labels" either. We can even change the words we use to describe ourselves anytime we want, in the same way that "actors" can become "directors", though in most cases, they don't, not permanently.

I'm even okay with changing language itself. Why not? I'd take an axe to it if I could. But as limited as it is, it is how we communicate, share information. I suspect that the real reason the cool crowd of queer women don't like lesbian, isn't because they don't accept labels, or that they want new or better ones, it's because this particular one scares them shitless. It has a whole history of hatred behind it, and was once synonymous for sicko, degenerate, perv. More importantly, "lesbian" slams shut the door of heterosexual privilege and access to men, and lumps them in a terribly female category with all us dykes of the hoi polloi.

Including every woman who's ever lost her children in a homophobic court, every dyke that was ever bashed, every girl that got dragged to the preacher or kicked out of her house for kissing another girl, those dykes from New Jersey that finally fought back when they got harassed and landed in jail themselves.

Some of us, like most Americans, really could stand to lose a few pounds, and refuse to swipe on a little mascara to bring out our best features which are always our eyes. I myself could use a haircut. And sometimes my personality could use a make-over, shrill and strident and so often angry I have nothing in common with these incredibly privileged females whose desire to sleep with women has never brought them anything but joy.

But there's more than grief. If you're looking for exceptional lives, you're tied as well to our histories of resistance, and radical experiments in sex and gender and literature and art. We have outlaw lesbians, utopians, and activists. A garde much more avant than yours. You can't imagine you're the first, after all, to think you're so progressive, so post-everything by announcing the demise of labels and of lesbians. Lesbophobes have been doing it for as long as I've been paying attention, which is a very good twenty-five years.

The lesbian is dead! Long live the lesbian!