I recently spent some time on sexuality, consent, and puberty education with some older elementary school students, one of many schools I work with. We talked about consent and bodily autonomy every single day. There was a particular day focused on sexual harassment and assault. The news about the behavior of famous people and #MeToo has made it impossible not to talk about this with 4th graders. Or rather, it was always necessary, but now it’s nearly impossible for adults to deny that reality.
They had been working on the music from Horton Hears a Who to present to the younger students, so I tied it into the lesson. It’s not what problematic fave Dr. Seuss meant when he wrote it, but that’s why I love reinterpreting material in new contexts. The students sang the song through, and certain segments of the song several times through the lesson. I used it to break up the anxiety and difficulty of the lesson, to engage their vagus nerves to help calm and ground everyone, and made Horton into a giant ongoing metaphor.
(If you are unfamiliar, or don’t remember it, here are two options for experiencing this work. A narrated abridged version with music and the pictures on youtube, a version that is a read version of the whole text with audio but no pictures on youtube here, and a text only version here.)
We talked about how the Whos in Whoville told and told until someone heard and helped them. We talked about Horton, the elephant who heard the Whos and carefully bore witness to them, tried to rescue them and keep them safe — he tried and tried to help them until he figured out how. They told and told and told.
The students asked things like, “But why would someone *do* that?” about sexual harassment and assault. They were mystified. Elementary students I work with aren’t always as mystified as this group was, sometimes that question comes more from hurt than surprised confusion.
This group believed me when I said to “tell and tell until someone helps you, because the grownups will want to help.” All of the students I work with don’t always believe this. They have not always experienced grownups helping, and have all too often experienced grownups being the ones doing the hurting.
Last week someone said, “What does domestic violence have to do with trans issues?” The question is often asked the other way. “What do trans people have to do with domestic violence?”
One answer is that violence against any women, trans or cis, (in fact violence against anyone) is a trans issue because we oppose a world that is made up of systems and structures, of powers and principalities that say that there is always and only one right way to be or do and the punishment for noncompliance with that one right way is death.
One answer is because we oppose world views that identify power as something that should be wielded for coercion and control, rather than shared and nurtured for community well-being.
We understand that the impulse to spit over someone’s non-traditional gender presentation is on the same playing field as sexual harassment of an employee is on the same field with the impulse to strike a child who talks back is on the same field with the impulse to injure someone because of a lack of compliance over the dishes or laundry or sex or gender identity.
Another answer is that relationship violence, intimate partner violence, domestic violence have to do with trans issues and vice versa because research clearly shows that transgender people are disproportionately affected by the violence in intimate partner relationships, and if they report, they are disproportionately not served or are even harmed by those who should help.
The press is reporting about their identities in inconsistent ways, but local members of their community indicate they both identified as trans.]
Street harassment, domestic violence, intimate partner violence, sexual harassment, sexual assault. It’s all about the same stuff. It’s about a system of power and control that makes some 
people believe they can and should decide what other people should do with their lives and bodies, and that these people can and should replace the will of others with their own, by force if necessary. A system of power and control that makes some people believe that if others won’t indicate compliance by forcing their own identity or behavior or gender into rigid scripts and boxes that have been defined by that person who has more power, then that powerful person ultimately has the right to harm them and even take their life.
Whether those powerful people in any given situation are adults, or men, or cis people, or wealthy partners, or white people, or generic high-powered bosses with all or some of these intersections of privilege might vary circumstantially but the underlying problem is entitlement to decide that their desires and ideas are more important than someone else’s and that they have the right to impose their will to enforce that.
And some of us are Horton, and some of us are the uncaring, disbelieving neighbors. We might not mean to be, and it might be because we did not understand, but our behavior has too often been underwhelming or even outright harmful. We get to make a change now.
What we have to do – what I am calling us to – is refuse those impulses to exert power over others when those impulses appear in ourselves, and resist and oppose them when they appear in others. It’s simple but not easy. We can bear witness to people’s lives, and deaths. We can bear witness to the collective grief of a people who are targeted both within and without their homes. And we can interrupt beliefs and behavior that contribute to that vulnerabilty and violence.
Horton did not know the Whos. He did not understand the ways their lives were both similar to and different from his. He did not need to fully understand them to help them. He only needed to decide that they were worth helping, and that he himself was worth being a person who helps.
Let me say that again, k?
We can take a deep breath and recognize that none of these things stop happening if we don’t talk about them. In fact, adult sexual, intimate partner, and domestic violence, (as well as child abuse,) these are all forms of interpersonal violence that thrive in silence, in pretense. These gain power in the brief but clear thought many readers had a few paragraphs ago that it must have been in [a “bad” neighborhood] that someone spit because of my gender presentation, that it wouldn’t have happened in [my “good” neighborhood.] They lose power every time we tell the truth and believe survivors. And we can intervene in many different ways in situations where control and violence are harming someone near us. We can make these choices.
We are all going to be like Horton, the elephant who heard the Whos and carefully bore witness to them and kept them safe and tried to rescue them — he tried and tried and tried to help them until he figured out how.
