Texas School Outs Lesbian Student to Her Parents

We have read so many stories about LGBT bullying in 2010. Too many. And as the year rolls to a close, the stories are not getting any nicer or any less frequent.

This story, however, is a bit different, because it is not about a student being bullied by another student. We are heading into adult-on-youth bullying, which is an even more disturbing trend. These are the people that we hire to protect our kids. For one lesbian teen, it was the exact opposite.

And now she is suing. The teen  filed a lawsuit against Kilgore School District in East Texas after being outed and harassed by two female coaches. The suit has been filed in conjunction with the Texas Civil Rights Project and details the bullying that the student suffered at the hands of her softball coach, stating that the teen dealt with "severe mental and emotion anguish," "social isolation" and losing the "freedom to deal with her sexuality privately."

"[The student] is remarkably strong and resilient," said Jim Harrington, a lawyer with the Civil Rights Project. "Who knows what would've happened if that wasn't the case, and that's actually what motivated [the girl and her mother] to come forward."

Here's how the situation unfolded according to the lawsuit.

After a team meeting last March, the sophomore student was told to stay behind. Two coaches locked the door to the locker room, asked the girl if she was gay and accused her of having a sexual relationship with another girl. They accused her of spreading rumors and threatened to tell the teen's mother that she was involved with a female. Before letting her go, they told the student that she could not play in the softball game that night until she outed herself to her mother.

The coaches then called the teen's mother, asked her come to the softball field and then told her that her daughter was gay. To add insult to the invasion of privacy injury, the coaches also kicked her off the softball team.

When the mother took up her issue with the principal, she got no remedy for the situation. Same goes for the superintendent and the Board of Trustees for the district, who went on record last week saying that "We feel confident that everything the district did was right.”

So now the teenager and her mother are asking the courts to decide what comes next. Because, really, this goes beyond bullying. It's about human dignity. It's about privacy. And it's about the complete misuse of adult authority.

Instead of owning up to the fact that Kilgore coaches acted way beyond any sense of the appropriate, the school defends the actions and says Yeah, it's our job to tell parents if their child is gay. What a dangerous precedent to set, and an unfortunate message to every LGBT student in the Kilgore District. Send the school a message urging them to hold these coaches accountable for bullying a student and invading the student's private life. There's simply no excuse for educators to decide when a student should come out of the closet to her/his parents.

Photo Credit: Kilgore Independent School District