The School-to-Coffin Pipeline: Queer Youth,Suicide,and Living the In-Between

Abstract

Written from the perspectives of a tenured high school teacher/researcher, an out bisexual sophomore, and a transgender senior, this article discusses the challenges of being and becoming an out lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (LGBTQ) student in a large, Midwestern high school. Through counternarratives, the authors explore what they call the school-to-coffin pipeline, a system that (un)intentionally positions LGBTQ teens in what has become a horrific, yet normalized, epidemic of queer youth suicide. The authors use the framework of this pipeline to examine what it means to live with/in the in-between of school rhetoric and a dearth of enacted school policy that could literally be life-saving for queer youth. Through an examination of the everyday challenges queer youth encounter, the authors argue that all adults involved in schooling—including teachers, teacher educators, administrators, counselors, and school psychologist—are necessarily (un)knowing participants in the school-to-coffin pipeline, contributing to institutional homophobia and, by extension, LGBTQ youth suicide. The authors argue that by attending to the school-to-coffin pipeline, those who contribute to it can begin to interrupt the current, and possibly continuing, cycle of self-inflicted violence on queer youth bodies.

Keywords

queer youth suicide counternarratives school-to-coffin pipeline homophobia

Swinging bodies,

Cut bodies,

Hanging by a thread.

Sad eyes,

Glazed eyes,

Holding on to hope.

Tired souls,

Tried souls,

Happening in-between

—Boni Wozolek

The indelible knowledge that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) teens are far more likely than their straight peers to attempt suicide or engage in acts of self-harm is well documented in queer and youth studies (Hershberger, Pilkington, & D’Augelli, 1997; Quinn & Meiners, 2009; Sedgwick, 1993; Wozolek, Varndell, & Speer, 2015). Furthermore, thoughts of self-harm and suicide do not develop within an isolated vacuum that begins and ends at home (Rishel, 2007). These thoughts often produce events that permeate the classrooms and the corridors daily in schools (Boske & Onsanloo, 2015; Hershberger et al., 1997; Olsen, Kann, Vivolio-Kantor, Kinchen, & McManus, 2014). In addition to more frequently contemplating self-harm or suicide, LGBTQ youth often experience anxiety and fear for their physical and emotional safety at school (Friedman, Koeske, Silvestre, Korr, & Sites, 2006; Kosciw, Greytak, Bartkiewicz, Boesen, & Palmer, 2010). Unfortunately, encounters with cruelty for queer youth are firmly rooted in sociocultural values that allow homophobia to continue as an acceptable norm of bias and hatred in schools and communities (Grace & Wells, 2015; Quinn & Meiners, 2009). In light of these and other such factors, the physical cuts and emotional scars that tend to pervade LGBTQ students’ ways of being often begin in the spaces and places they should feel most safe at school.

This article is primarily comprised of three narratives—a tenured high school teacher/ researcher, an out bisexual high school sophomore, and an equally out transgender high school senior. I have had the pleasure of knowing Lindsey and Aaron for several years as both students in my Spanish classroom and as part of the Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) that I started and remain a coadvisor. After writing an article on Queer Battle Fatigue, a construct I coined to describe the effects that queer youth and their allies experience from daily encounters with homophobia, I began to think about the numerous attempts and completed suicides by queer youth, attempts and deaths that are skyrocketing both at my school and across the nation. As my classroom is a safe space for marginalized youth because of my role as a GSA advisor, and because they were willing to share their stories with me, I was aware that both Lindsey and Aaron have struggled with suicide. After hearing of the work I had done for the Queer Battle Fatigue publication from one of the student authors, my coauthors informed me that they too would like their voices to be heard on questions of suicide and the school-to-coffin pipeline. What follows is not only their narratives that serve to counter dominant understandings of the everyday life of queer youth in schools but also an enactment of agency as they openly discuss the difficult topic of student suicide and schooling. To these ends, while student narratives in scholarly publications are often positioned as those of participants, here these youth are not participants but coauthors.

These narratives are intended to present the pressures of being an out LGBTQ student as it relates to notions of being and becoming in school. Our argument is twofold. First, we contend that LGBTQ student narratives are central to dialogues about intersectionality and counternarratives. We argue that as students experience being and living an existence of “in-between,” adults should be most attentive as these are often the moments where queer youth frequently experience thoughts of self-harm and suicide. Second, we argue that counternarratives based on sexual orientation, in this case from female bisexual and male transgender youth positionalities, serve to deepen understandings about the possibilities and challenges regarding gender, gender identity, and its expressions for female/male identified youth. The counternarratives we present here show how the challenges encountered in relation to questions of gender (in all its forms of expression and identity) are significant to questions of resistance and resilience (Grace & Wells, 2015; Helfenbein, 2010), and student agency at the intersection of schooling and suicide. To begin with, the following section attends to questions of gender and sexual orientation in scholarly dialogues as they relate to the daily experiences of queer youth in schools. The purpose of this following section is to contextualize historical and contemporary scholarship into ongoing sociocultural understandings that have normalized suicide in the LGBTQ youth community.

Gender, Sexuality, Schooling, and Suicide

Scholarship and dialogue about gender inequities in schools are not new¹ and are as deeply rooted in historical perspectives (e.g., Bethune, 1938; Cooper, 1892; Truth, 1851) as they are in contemporary conversations about gender equity and access (e.g., Gilbert, 2014; Hendry, 2011; hooks, 1999; Lather, 1987; Miller, 2005). For example, as the Black feminist educator and scholar Anna Julia Cooper (1892) argued, schooling is socioculturally ordered in ways that have ignored the “deeper, richer, nobler and grander meanings of the word ‘womanly’” and has maintained the “one-sided masculine definitions of . . . women who can think as well as feel, and feel none the less because they think” (p. 51). Cooper continues her argument by explaining that schooling positions girls of color to “retire [from school] as the shaft of wit and ridicule,” teaching them to “be, act and flirt pretty rather than be well informed” (p. 64). Recent dialogues on gender and schooling echo the depths of Cooper’s prophetic perspectives about the significance of schools’ complicity in engendering and maintaining sexist sociocultural perspectives that continue to do great harm to young girls of color.

From historical to contemporary scholarship, questions of femininity are most often contextualized by patriotically normalizing values (Addams, 1912; Hendry, 2011; hooks, 1999). In the same way, queerness is always contextualized by heteronormative understandings of Self (Gilbert, 2014; Quinn & Meiners, 2009). For these reasons, there are parallels between the work of scholars such as Cooper and the ways in which queer youth are negotiating and renegotiating what it means to be female/male. Just as ideals of femininity are often negotiated through the cultural lens of masculinity, queer identities are frequently created within the double bind of normalized gender ideals and within heteronormative understandings of sexual orientation. In addition, it is important to remember that at the complex nexus of sexual orientation and gender, with its multiple expressions and identities, LGBTQ students are also negotiating questions of race, class, ability, language, or religion.

Everyday experiences with people and institutions become a part of one’s way of being and knowing, a point that Queer scholar Jasbir Puar² (2013) drives home in her discussion of assemblages and intersectionality to enunciate the multiplicity and fluidity of experiences and identities that affect how people are and what they know. For example, an African American lesbian student’s sexual orientation is always necessarily intertwined with her gender expression, race, and abilities.

From this perspective, the sociopolitics of schooling simultaneously affects one’s ways of knowing and being in school. Other facets—such as interactions with other students, which are often located in heteronormative, Anglo sociocultural norms and values—also become a part of who she is and how she moves in the world. In addition, a female student’s complex, intertwined sense of Self may be in tension with dominant ideas and ideals. For example, ideals of femininity are often in tension with the image of the butch lesbian (Butler, 1990; Clark, 1993; Paechter, 2006). This is important because queer youth are simultaneously affected by everyday marginalization (i.e., bullying) as it exists outside and inside their complex senses of Self.

The literature on LGBTQ youth suicide tends to focus on bullying (Ahuja et al., 2015) and family acceptance of the child’s sexual orientation or gender identity (Hershberger et al., 1997; Ryan, Russell, Huebner, Diaz, & Sanchez, 2010). Furthermore, there is a history of strong scholarship that focuses on sociocultural marginalization of the LGBTQ youth and in schools (McCready, 2004). However, there remains a dearth of literature that attends to queer youth suicide as a potential consequence for homophobia that is maintained and engendered through schooling. Similar to many arguments about how racism is perpetuated through the everydayness of schooling (Bethune, 1938; Castagno, 2008; Hyland, 2005), here we argue that homophobia is often (un)intentionally perpetuated by local actors in schools (Butler, 1990; Gilbert, 2014; Sedgwick, 1993).

To this end, all adults involved in education—including teachers, teacher educators, administrators, counselors, and school psychologist—are necessarily (un)knowing participants who actively contribute to ongoing homophobia and, by extension, LGBTQ youth suicide. Complicating matters in ways that are professionally and personally difficult for me (Wozolek, 2015), my work as a coadvisor of a high school GSA and an outspoken queer youth advocate does not absolve me from the perpetuation of these damaging norms and values. This inescapable tension between advocacy and the dissemination of harmful ideas and ideals similarly extends to all educational actors involved in schools, complicatedly including the queer students themselves. Toward this last point, there is growing evidence of the negative impacts of internalized homophobia on queer youth and adults in a wide variety of fields (Gibbs & Goldbach, 2015; Igartua, Gill, & Montoro, 2009) that remains largely underexplored in contemporary literature on LGBTQ youth and education. This is a topic of deep significance that requires its own exploration, a topic to which I intend to return in the near future.

Although GSAs work to create inclusive environments in schools and are generally helpful for LGBTQ students and their allies, it should be noted that the very act of holding GSA meetings can unintentionally out students’ sexual orientation. From this perspective, for any positive affect a GSA might have for students, it can also be harmful. The argument here is not to dismiss GSAs or the difficult work that their advisors face. Rather, it is to attend to the imbricated facets that are often a contributing factor but rarely discussed in scholarship about queer youth suicides.

Suicide rates among LGBTQ youth are therefore as much about the everyday experiences with sociocultural norms and values as they are about the daily aggressions students encounter at school. Queer Battle Fatigue (Wozolek et al., 2015) is one way to understand the daily exhaustion that LGBTQ people and their allies experience in the face of consistent homophobia. The normalization of homophobia and aggressions toward LGBTQ people frames queer youth suicides as disturbingly everyday outcomes of Queer Battle Fatigue. In teen suicide tragedies such as A. J. Betts Jr., Trae Schumaker, Leelah Alcorn, and Melonie Rose, the public gaze often rests on the events leading up to their deaths and ignores the sociocultural understandings that legitimized homophobia. To this end, we argue that bullying directly results from heteronormative ideals. These norms and values often engender Queer Battle Fatigue and an exhaustion that some LGBTQ youth feel can only be escaped through suicidal actions.

In addition, Racial Battle Fatigue often overlooks daily interactions that place marginalized youth at risk of potential outcomes such as prison or suicide. For example, scholarship on the school-to-prison pipeline (Christle, Jolivette, & Nelson, 2005) often focuses on race and masculinity as strongly contributing factors. However, dialogue about this pipeline often misses the fatigue a student feels when he is stopped in the hall more times than his Anglo peers or is called the “N” word at school every day (Wozolek, 2015).

In a parallel fashion, it is the daily fatigue of being in school and with/against sociocultural norms and values that funnel queer youth into what we call the school-to-coffin pipeline. Although the school-to-coffin pipeline is similar to the school-to-prison pipeline in that it involves schools and othering, there are marked differences between them, not the least of which are questions of race, privilege, and gender. While students of color cannot hide their race in ways that often force LGBTQ teens to live in the ontological closet (Sedgwick, 1993), it is often the actions of queer youth that put them at greater risk of homophobic bullying and therefore on the school-to-coffin pipeline.

The counternarratives in the section below are examples of teens who have harmed themselves physically and attempted suicide, examples of how the school-to-coffin pipeline is an immediate concern in their young lives. Much like normalized understandings of students of color being funneled into the school-to-prison pipeline as matters of fact (Christle et al., 2005), the following narratives function as examples of the normalization of LGBTQ youth suicide and iterations of what I (Wozolek) call the school-to-coffin pipeline.

Narratives of Self-Harm, Suicide, and Becoming

The narratives below were written in the vein of collaborative dissensus, a concept described by Gershon (2009) as an “ethical act, providing the space for all collaborators’ voices, ideas and ideals” (p. xxiv). While consensus can be (un)intentionally marginalizing, the authors here acknowledge the possible dissensus of their values, interests, and experiences. As seen within these examples, the narratives are told in first person, and Lindsey and Aaron were treated as authors rather than participants. As such, each of the coauthors were given the chance to work on their narratives and as the lead author, besides grammatical errors, I included the narratives as is, with careful consideration to the author’s thoughts and ideas. This is important because the inclusion of these narratives as an act of collaborative dissensus not only creates the scholarly space for traditionally marginalized youth to critique the foundations of heteronormative constructions but also provides those often relegated to the role of participant the authority and voice of full authors.

Lindsey’s Narrative: Bi-living and Be-ing in School

Since the third grade, I have felt that something was strange about me compared with my peers when I felt attracted to girls more than boys. I had ignored these feelings until I privately came out to my boyfriend and our best friend as bisexual in the eighth grade. Fortunately, they accepted my sexual orientation without question. A couple months later when the relationship ended, I publicly came out when I started dating a girl. Without asking, everybody assumed I was a lesbian rather than recognizing my bisexuality, which hurt. Equally as painful was the immediate loss of longstanding friends who did not want to be associated with a lesbian. They were afraid that I was going to hit on them, or “make a move” because they could not understand or respect the idea of an attraction to two genders. This loss of trust from my friends made me feel uncomfortable in my own skin, like some kind of pedophile or criminal for liking girls.

Being an out female bisexual teenager in a mostly straight population often feels difficult to just “be” myself and often makes me feel embarrassed to be proud of who I am and who I love. Being a high school girl compounds the pressure I already feel as a bisexual female. Other girls are normally quick to judge each other but their cruelty against bisexuals is consistently intense. I can no longer be a friend, I am a threat. For example, I have received inappropriate messages on social media questioning my sexual orientation as I find both girls and boys attractive. I have been called a liar and a fake because of my orientation. My twitter feed has been filled with comments like explaining that I am “downgrading” and “disgusting” as my fluid orientation has shifted between genders. I feel like the difficulty of being female becomes more complex because of an orientation that people regard as different and therefore think they have a right to comment about my life.

In seventh grade, the pressure of my peers’ comments became too great and I began to starve myself and then cut myself until I felt the only relief would be suicide. I was lucky to have a friend who noticed and got involved in finding me help. However, even with this assistance, other peers continued to tell me that I should consider cutting or killing myself. For instance, I was once told to drink bleach and was once offered a rope and a noose.

At the high school, we have a GSA, and I generally feel supported by my teachers. However, finding help as I continued to deal with an eating disorder and suicidal thoughts has been difficult. For example, a guidance counselor that I trusted told me that she did not “deal with sexual orientation problems,” and she referred me to a “special counselor” for gays. I have also had trouble feeling supported by principals. Once another student called me a “carpet muncher,” I told my principal and nothing happened. How can we say that there is an antibullying policy, but do nothing when LGBTQ students are bullied?

I guess for me, I would tell people that no one should be treated this way. That there is never an excuse to act that way toward anyone. It does not matter if you are bi or straight or gay, you are still a person who deserves respect and to be treated with kindness.

Aaron’s Narrative: Transitions in Female/Male Identities

Ever since I was little, I have always identified with typically “male” things. I have always felt like I was male, and I would feel confused and angry when I was expected to wear “female” clothing and fit a female stereotype with long hair and painted nails. As a child, I could not understand why I could not go swimming shirtless and would often throw a fit when I was forced to wear girls’ clothing.

At a young age, I quickly learned how society separates gender and the consequences for breaking gender norms. My lack of desire to conform to these norms became increasingly difficult and, from fifth grade to eighth grade, I found myself in an emotionally dark place. I was afraid to tell anyone that I wanted to be a boy because I did not want to be seen as weird or different. Mostly, I was afraid of rejection and bullying by my peers.

As a child, I identified so strongly as male in my mind that I simply assumed I would eventually grow up to be a cisgender man, even though I was aware of my female body and other’s perception of my gender. The notion of growing up cisgender made puberty a devastating time in my life. I found myself wrestling with questions of religion and my Catholic upbringing, constantly wondering why God would do this to me, if He hated me and if I was going to hell.

The further into puberty I got, I become more mentally distraught. I cut my hair short right before eighth grade which helped me feel more like myself but something was still missing. In addition, this in-between stage meant that people saw me as a typical butch lesbian. People did not respect me as much, and I had few friends. That is when I started cutting myself to help deal with the emotional damage of my dysphoria. I had no words to label how I was feeling. I did not even know what the term “transgender” meant. I thought no one else in the world felt the way I felt, and I resented God for doing this to me.

My freshman year, I attempted suicide twice. I missed about 2 months of school while I was in various hospitals. I failed math and a semester of history. To this day, the depression, dysphoria, and my attempts at suicide stay with me in scars on my body and damage to my grade point average. In school I often feel alone in my experience. Teachers often do not know how to treat me, so they fail to acknowledge my presence to avoid dealing with my gender identity. While I am settled now, no longer living in an identifiable state of in-between, the past hangs with me in my everyday experiences at school, in my life, and on my body through unmistakable markers of living in dysphoria.

The Nexus of Suicide and Agency

Although Lindsey and Aaron’s narratives are divergent in their sexual orientation as well as their gender expression and identity, they share several common boundaries that they traverse in their daily lives. To begin with, both Lindsey and Aaron clearly articulate the difficulties of feeling “in-between” bodies, norms, and values. In Aaron’s narrative, he discusses the difficulty of living between standardized images of femininity and masculinity, or being perceived as a butch lesbian versus the young man he was becoming. Lindsey similarly explains the sociocultural interstices of sexual orientation through her lens of bisexuality. In addition, both narratives speak to the intersections of school policy and school rhetoric. For example, where Lindsey describes an absence of administrative action against the bullying she receives, Aaron speaks of his absence from classroom discussions because his teachers refuse to use his name and identifying pronouns. Finally, there is a unifying theme of gender inequities between these two narratives. While Lindsey struggled with sociocultural norms at the intersection of gender and sexual orientation, Aaron expressed the tension of dysphoria in a female body as he experienced sociocultural expectations of being female.

It is important to remember that these narratives are written during a historical moment in schooling that is often foregrounded by schools’ antibullying policies (Fields, Mamo, Gilbert, & Lesko, 2014; Newman & Fantus, 2015) and rhetoric about diversity and acceptance (Mayo, 2013). The in-between of Lindsey and Aaron’s narratives is therefore situated in a neither/nor binary positioned by sociocultural norms that is often harmful for queer youth as they negotiate rhetoric and daily experiences. My coauthors are neither gay nor straight (Lindsey), neither male nor female (Aaron), and neither protected by broader school policies nor aided by ideals of public school classrooms as spaces of equity and access for all.

The everyday experiences for queer youth living neither/nor, of existing in-between personal and political intersections, have become normal in and out of schools. Rather than noticing a population that has “slipped through the cracks” of schooling, we are attending to cracks that are sociopolitically designed for the failure of queer youth (Halberstam, 2011) in schools. Although there are factors outside schooling that contribute to Lindsey and Aaron’s narratives, their stories demonstrate a particular absence of care at school that is sustained by their peers, teachers, and administrators. It is this absence of care often demonstrated by (in)action against injustices and the maintenance of school policies that allow the school-to-coffin pipeline to thrive.

Finally, Lindsey and Aaron share two key points about their experiences with suicide. First, there is a sense of agency that should be acknowledged at the intersection of suicide or life. Even during moments of despair, when both narratives discussed the multiple ingresses that funneled them into the school-to-coffin pipeline, they had agency to choose life or death. In choosing self-harm (e.g., cutting) over suicide, there is an element of resistance to the school-to-coffin pipeline and resilience of spirit.

Second, they both express recovering from their suicidal attempts as a process and an experience that becomes a part of how they move in the world. That a suicidal attempt becomes a central part of their ways of being is significant. On one hand, it demonstrates the ongoing, ontological damage of the school-to-coffin pipeline. On the other hand, it illuminates another state of neither/nor for students with suicidal attempts. They are neither suicidal nor have completely recovered from the experience. As both narratives describe, there is often significant emotional damage that lingers well after a suicide attempt that is, in many cases, exacerbated by continuing negative experiences in school.

Conclusion

As explained in the previous section, the school-to-coffin pipeline is shaped and maintained within heteronormativity that positions LGBTQ students at the nexus school rhetoric, a system that is sociopolitically designed to fail at-risk youth, and normalized homophobia. As suicide rates continue to skyrocket among queer youth, acknowledging and attending to the school-to-coffin pipeline are critical to children’s ontological and physical safety. The points raised here are all the more horrifying precisely because they are so mundane—It is next to impossible to stop everyday violence that is accepted as normal. Until we do, the school-to-coffin pipeline is not only an unfortunate reality but something in which we are all unwitting participants. Its acceptance is inexcusable. However, it will take more than hypervigilant attention and talk to interrupt the perpetuation of the self-fulfilling process that is the school-to-coffin pipeline.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Boni Wozolek, PhD, is an independent scholar whose work focuses on questions of equity and access for marginalized peoples. In general, with an emphasis on race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity and expression. In specific, her forthcoming projects include edited works on the intersection of Black Lives Matter in Education, and Queer Battle Fatigue, a term she coined to describe the exhaustion experienced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (LGBTQ) individuals, groups, and their allies.

Lindey Wootton is a junior at Medina Senior High School. She is currently involved in several LGBTQ rights projects at the high school level, including her work with the local Gay-Straight Alliance.

Aaron Demlow is a senior at Medina Senior High School where he is involved in fights for providing trans-students with a path that is safe and inclusive for their journey.

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