From invisibility to visibility: a policy archaeology of the introduction of anti-transphobic and anti-homophobic bullying guidelines into the Irish primary education system

Abstract

In September 2013, the Department of Education and Skills introduced revised anti-bullying guidelines which made it compulsory for all schools to ensure that their individual anti-bullying policies include a clause on identity-based bullying, specifically referencing transphobic and homophobic bullying. The introduction of these guidelines would appear to represent an anomaly within the context of the Irish primary education system, which is 96% denominational. This paper considers the possibilities of the co-existence of guidelines which aim to counter homophobic and transphobic bullying and a school ethos which views homosexuality and transsexuality as sinful. Employing Scheurich’s policy archaeology methodology, this paper presents some of the discursive practices which were at play in permitting the bullying of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender children to emerge as an educational problem for which the revised anti-bullying guidelines were constructed as the policy solution.

Keywords:

• transphobic and homophobic bullying
• anti-bullying policy
• Scheurich’s policy archaeology methodology

Notes on contributor

Susan Bailey works as a primary school teacher in Dublin’s north inner-city, and is currently completing an Ed.D. in St. Patrick’s College, Dublin City University.

Notes

1. The abbreviated phrase ‘identity clause’ will be used throughout this document to refer to the anti-transphobic and anti-homophobic clause of the Anti-bullying Procedures for Primary and Post-primary Schools (DES 2013).

2. There is a profound dearth of research into transphobia and transphobic bullying in Ireland. Due to this fact, the analysis that follows concentrates primarily on homophobia and homophobic bullying. However, to not include transphobic bullying in this paper would represent a wilful ignoring of its existence in the guidelines and would further feed into the invisibility of trans issues in the field of primary education in Ireland.

3. It should be mentioned that while homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973, ego-dystonic homosexuality remained as a listed mental disorder on the DSM until 1987.

4. The World Health Organization’s (2015) ICD-10 continues to list ‘egodystonic sexual orientation’ as a disorder.

5. While the Employment Equality Acts (1998–2011) gave certain safeguards to people based on their gender and sexual orientation, the caveat of Section 37(1) blurred these rights somewhat as it allowed religious institutions the right to differentiate in their recruitment processes based on safeguarding the ethos of their schools and hospitals. While this could feed into and maintain school cultures which are intolerant of sexual difference, this is not the focus of this paper. Discussions on this issue can be found in Fahie (2014), Gowran (2004), McNamara and Norman (2010), Neary (2013, 2014), Norman (2004), and O’Higgins-Norman (2008).

6. In April 1997, Dr Lydia Foy began a protracted legal battle with the Irish state to have her gender recognized on her birth certificate. In October 2007, Justice McKechnie found that the Irish government was in breach of its obligations to Dr Foy under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Irish government appealed this ruling, but withdrew its appeal in 2010. In 2013, Dr Foy began legal proceedings against the Irish government for their failure to produce any legislation with regard to gender recognition. In July 2015, the Gender Recognition Act was signed into Irish law.

7. While many earlier government reports on the issue refer to LGB rights without the T., the anti-bullying policy includes transgender. This was perhaps due to the presence of BeLonG To and GLEN on the DES’s anti-bullying working group. BeLonG To is a national LGBT youth organization; and, although its nomenclature does not include transgender, GLEN (the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network) advocates for transgender equality rights as well as those of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals.

8. In their 2012 article, Bryan and Mayock offer a counter-narrative to what they see as the increasingly dominant narratives which reduce the identities of LGBT people to one of disempowered, ‘at risk’ victims. Discussing the findings of a previous research project (Mayock et al. 2008), they emphasize that while the research found that some LGBT people are at risk for self-harm, depression, and suicidality, this fact should not be simplistically employed to reduce LGBT identity to an ‘at risk’ identity. As their article notes, ‘a majority of on-line survey respondents had rarely or never seriously contemplated suicide’ (2012, 13). This current paper in no way wishes to conflate LGBT identity and victimhood or feed into the victim trope (Marshall 2010) which dominates some LGBT narratives.

9. In addition to other factors, the inclusion of the anti-transphobic bullying clause in the final document may have been influenced by the fact that members of the DES were sitting on the interdepartmental Gender Recognition Working Group at that time.

10. Examples of such research include: the bullying of ethnic minorities in Norway (Hansen et al. 2008; Hansen and Sorlie 2012), the bulling of those with disabilities on the island of Ireland (Purdy and McGuckin 2011); cyber-bullying (O’Moore and Minton 2011); the bullying of ‘minorities’ (Minton 2014b); and the bullying of those who belong to alternative sub-cultures (Minton 2014a).

11. While many liberal Catholics look to Pope Francis as heralding a new and tolerant chapter in the Catholic Church, his ambiguous remarks with regard to homosexuality (Spardo 2013) are not being favourably received by all church leaders. Cardinal Raymond Burke, a leading Vatican cardinal, for instance, has called on the pope to clarify his stance in relation to homosexuality (RTE 2014).

12. Echoing Levinas ([1961] 2011), Other with a capital ‘O’ refers to ‘the personal other’ as opposed to ‘otherness or alterity in general’ (Biesta 2013, 19).

13. Gert Biesta, Carl Anders Säfström, and Sharon Todd offer interesting and engaging perspectives in their reading of Levinas’s philosophies of the Other through an educational lens. See, for example, Biesta’s ‘trilogy’ (2006, 2010, 2013), Biesta and Säfström’s ‘manifesto’ (2011), Todd’s consideration of Levinas and education (2003), and Säfström’s contemplation on teaching otherwise (2003).

14. See, for example, Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference 2014a, 2014b for the official Irish Catholic response to marriage equality; or Lodge and Lynch (2004) and O’Carroll and Szalacha (2000) with regard to the Catholic Church’s insistence on a narrow definition of sexuality within Catholic schools’ RSE programmes.

15. It should be stressed that, to date, the patronage of only three denominational schools has been divested to non-denominational patrons – two from Church of Ireland patronage and one from Catholic patronage (Rowe 2015).