Teachers Are People First

Article: Teacher suicide after media hounding

Reading this posting from GayWrites, I was enraged to hear about the tragic result of the media involving itself in the private life of a British school teacher.

The comment which angered me most was when the school teacher was criticized for exposing students to "...complex gender problems at such a vulnerable young age..." (as paraphrased by the Daily Mail).

While I have no first hand information about the teacher referred to in the article, and no way to accurately speak to her teaching methods or abilities, I am going to work on the assumption that this was a person who did their job and did it reasonably well. Regardless, the bottom line is transgender people are people first. Teachers are also people first.

Western society needs to take a good hard look at what it values. An educator’s sexuality/gender identity doesn't determine their value to a class, school or school community. That said, an educator's sexuality/gender identity does have an impact on the person they are in the classroom, but it's because they have the potential to role model a particular brand of strength and courage.

Many people go through life without having to question who they are or where they fit in the world. Imagine being taught by someone who didn’t have this experience. Imagine being taught by someone who had to take some time to really work out who they are and consider how they could best live with themselves, within they life they had been given.
Imagine them then coming to work everyday and trying to inject a little of that self motivation and understanding of self worth into the lives of the kids in that classroom. Being taught art by an artist has a little more value than being taught art by someone who enjoys looking at paintings. Being taught about resilience and acceptance by someone who has had to constantly weigh these up also has more value than being taught the same by someone who has never had to question what they are fed by society.
Many queer teachers would, likely, be more aware of the impact of bullying/discrimination than a number of their straight counterparts. For this reason there is also a high chance that they would have the understanding and the desire to take action to help put a stop to it.
What happens, though, when it is the teacher who is the victim of such treatment? We need to measure the value of a teacher by the impact they have on children in their care. Teaching is about opening a person's eyes to the world, to possibility and to themselves. Who better to do this than someone who has seen the world through a different lens, has dreamed and who knows who they truly are.