Sexual orientation and sexual labels. Gender crossing and gender bending. These aren’t X-rated or adults-only topics but rather subjects that young people talk about as they figure out where they fit in, said a panel of experts at a weekend conference of the Council on Contemporary Families here.
“Youth are saying they don’t want to be defined by gender or orientation,” Chicago psychologist Braden Berkey told those attending a panel on “Gender in the Next Generation” on the final day of the conference Saturday.
Berkey is founding director of the Sexual Orientation and Gender Institute at the Center on Halsted, which opened in 2007 to offer support services and programming for the area’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. He talked about the evolution of sexual and gender labels and how young people today are trying to dissolve them. He says the terms created in the early days, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, are giving way to other descriptions, such as polygender or multisex. Young people, he says, reject narrow gender definitions and say they don’t want to be defined by their sexuality.
However, a presentation by sociologist Barbara Risman of the University of Illinois at Chicago suggested that for the middle-schoolers she’s studied, attitudes about sexual orientation are less open-minded, especially for boys. She says these boys fear the label “gay.”
