That Trump judge can say what he likes about bullying being normal, but the data shows LGBTQ kids in school are facing steeply rising rates of bullying compared to their cis/straight peers. I spoke to GLSEN's research director after the report you referenced came out, and while their latest survey is not designed to probe causes of slurs and physical attacks, he noted that the surge corresponds almost exactly to rising levels of political attacks on the public stage.
After Eli died (the child in Tennessee committed suicide) died, I spent a couple days analyzing what local media stories his peers would have been exposed to in the prior few months. I published an article showing that they would have seen a constant stream of news items positioning gay and transgender people as scandalous threats whom political leaders need to fight against to keep society healthy.
Is it any wonder that children in his school emulated respected adults?
Lately, I've been interviewing families served by the Rainbow Youth Project, who provide free mental health crisis counseling and other direct services to LGBTQ youth.
Like the Trevor Project and GLSEN, Rainbow Youth are seeing a surge in demand for their crisis hotline that's overwhelming their capacity – mostly from Red states where attacking LGBTQ people is now politically normalized.
I'm talking about States like Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho, etc.
I even wrote a story about a teacher in Oklahoma who calls children fags in class, and faces no consequences for it.
Of course rates of bullying are up. Of course suicide rates are up. Of course rates of physical attacks against LGBTQ children in school are up.
Those are the predictable consequences of political villainization. And they're relatively easy to measure.
Far less easy to measure is the harm kids suffer when it doesn't rise to the level of a crisis call or a hospitalization.
That's another thing GLSEN's research director told me he is worried about. It's his job to design metrics and survey questions, but he knows he's not capturing the full extent of the problem, because doing so is probably not possible.
