Explaining the "F" word

"Mommy, what's a faggot?" he asked as he walked alongside me, wearing his backpack, holding my hand, crossing the street towards home. My heart sunk as I asked a question I feared I already knew the answer to, "Why?" "Because someone called me one." I am finding that the biggest struggle of being a mom to gay kid is the reality that I so frequently am faced with questions that I don't know how to answer. Questions that I haven't anticipated, sometimes, or more often questions that I wasn't entirely ready for at that moment. And so often it feels like I am put between a rock and a hard place in being true to my parenting style of honesty and openness, of not hiding my kids from the real world, while still protecting this little child who I know faces an uphill battle, and may not be developmentally ready to process truths that I cannot fully comprehend myself. Statistically, I know gay kids are at greater risk for depression and suicide. Mental illness runs in my family. My son already struggles with legit obsessive compulsive disorder (and no, I don't mean he is tidy, I mean OCD, for real, like occasionally requiring a therapist to navigate the anxiety associated with it). I worry about his mental state. I watch him change his behaviors, his friendships, his clothing choices, etc., all the time to try to attract less attention from his male peers. I just want my kid to grow up to be himself. Is that so much to ask? "It's a cruel, derogatory term used for gay people," I responded honestly. "Oh. Yeah, I thought so," he said. "It is never, ever okay for someone to call you that," I continued, "What did you do? Did you tell someone? Where did this happen?" "On the playground during PE, and yes, I told the teacher." "What did she do?" "She talked to him about it. He said sorry." "What did she say?" "I don't know, I couldn't hear her. But I think she just told him he couldn't say that and that he had to say sorry." I really didn't know what to do with this in my head. In all truth, I don't remember entirely what I said to my son in the moment, other than that it was absolutely not okay, and that it was a serious word that deserved serious discipline, and that I wouldn't stand for anyone calling him that and getting away with a "go say sorry." My forgiving and accepting little man told me that he thought the kid really meant it when he said he was sorry, and that he didn't think the kid even knew what it meant. I half agree. I am a highly educated person, and I know enough about child development and youth culture to know that for some reason, friendly male athleticism, particularly in youth, involves an element of "psyching out" one's opponents, and that it has become popular among teenagers to do so with trash talk and name calling. I sort of understand the trash talk, but I don't understand the trend of name calling, especially using terms that can relate deeply and negatively to a person's identity. I also know that the term "faggot", among young men anyhow, has little to do with same sex relationships and more to do with belittling a boy's masculinity. But really, that isn't okay either. My son does not have gender dysmorphia. He feels comfortable in the boy skin he is in, but he doesn't define "male" in the way our society has come to socially define men. I need that to be okay for him. I need him to know that he doesn't have to live someone else's view of life. I need him to be okay with living his own. Of course, when I told friends, there was an outpouring of support, even from unlikely sources. No one, not even the Christian conservatives, like to hear about little kids using hate speech to make other little kids feel bad. And you have to wonder where the kid who spoke it heard it. My children, especially my daughter, have unfortunately picked up a handful of curse words, and I know exactly where they got them from: Me. Because I curse when I am angry. But not words like that. Not words meant to belittle a person based on any portion of their identity. No, not those. I thought, I hoped, that we had moved past that as a society. But apparently we have not. Because I'm guessing that seven-year-old kids don't pick up words like "fag" from television. In the end, I think what matters most is that the adults in the scene do everything they can to be allies. And my son's teacher forced a private apology. But what about the other 30 kids who just heard the word used on the playground? How will they learn that this is not okay? Ultimately, I made the ironic decision to pull my son out of this public school to put him where we felt he'd be safe, which was ironically, in a Christian school. The local Lutheran school proved to be a strong safe place for my son. A few months later, during a class activity, a kid pointed out to my son that he was drawing his self-portrait too "girly" for a boy, and my son took issue with this. After we discussed the issue with the teacher, she took the issue on and spoke to all of the kids about being accepting of everyone's choices in their art work and how they see themselves. She handled it with the dignity, grace, and attention that it desrved. It didn't become a huge issue, but it set the tone, and that is too be appreciated.