How Worried Should We Be When Kids Use Slurs?

Illustration: Hannah Buckman

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To hear MAGA people tell it, the thought police have been on patrol for the past eight years, rooting out unwoke behavior. But try telling that to anyone who spends time around teenage boys and you’ll be corrected. Whether or not they follow manosphere influencers, preteen- and teen-boy culture is steeped in the language of casual discrimination; they compulsively call one another “gay” and use the word retard. Boys from progressive families, boys who attend schools with robust cultures of inclusivity — you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d time-traveled back to the mid-’90s, hearing them talk. The F-slur, while still taboo, is nonchalantly thrown around.

For parents who remember just a few decades ago when homophobia and ableism were defining features of mainstream culture, this comes as a painful shock. Didn’t we leave this stuff behind? As schools have worked to be more affirming for children’s identities, many parents have nurtured hopes that they will grow up in a post-bullying world. What happened? Some of us might wonder if Donald Trump has anything to do with this, given the enthusiasm about the possibility of using slurs at work again.

But it’s ironic how many of us who are very comfortable rejecting binaries in other areas of social life seem to have trouble letting go of them when it comes to assessing the behavior of teens. Are they tender sweethearts, or are they crueler than ever? Or is it that the girls are all militant wokesters, the boys are all hopelessly red-pilled, and the nonbinary kids are the only ones with a grasp on reality? Like any population facing uncertainty, parents of teens crave a formula, a cheat code. But when you talk to teens themselves, the picture quickly blurs. God love ’em — they really do defy everything, including characterization.

I’ve found that the use of these slurs could be a symptom of cultural backsliding, and that may be part of the story, but it also may be part of a larger story, awkward and dissonant as it might seem, of progress.

A group of ninth-grade public-school boys, all of whom identify as straight, agreed to speak to me on condition of anonymity. They told me that calling one another “gay” had started years ago in elementary school. It had become a habit; they didn’t notice any increase in the use of gay in recent months, suggesting to me that Trump might not be the one to blame for a change. According to them, both girls and boys use it, in mostly the same ways. But most significant, they consider it a word to be used only among friends — almost as a sign of intimacy when teasing one another.

“It doesn’t actually mean gay,” one boy explained. “It means weird, kind of. It’s a way to insult your friends but not meaningfully. More like teasing.”

Their use of retard works the same way, although the boys I spoke to use it less frequently and seemed more aware of its ability to hurt: “You don’t mean it as disabled. It’s a way of calling someone ‘stupid’ but without calling them ‘stupid.’ It’s more indirect.” Did they understand how that implies stupidity on the part of disabled people? They nodded — I could tell they’d heard this point raised before.

In the company of someone with a visible disability, do they refrain from saying it, knowing it would be insulting?

“Most people know it’s wrong, but they just say it because it’s a habit,” one boy said. “But some people don’t even know it’s wrong.”

“You only use these words with people you’re really close with,” another said. “Because if you said it to someone you didn’t know, they might not understand that you’re joking.”

Were they glazing me (as they would put it), telling me what I wanted to hear? Probably — teenagers are masterful managers of adults. But I do wonder to what extent they even grasp the moral heft of discrimination itself. And that’s where the problem, as I see it, truly lies: not as much in the words themselves but in the possibility that kids are growing up taking inclusivity and tolerance for granted, which allows them to be casual and playful with discriminatory words whose power they have been warned about but don’t truly understand.

It’s impossible to define the context in which teens use the word gay without considering the progress made by the LGBTQ+ movement over the past 30 years. It’s obvious that their use of gay is rooted in homophobia, but for many teenage boys, homophobia itself is an abstract concept. My elder son recently asked me, somewhat incredulously, if there was ever a time when Elton John “wasn’t allowed to be gay.” (John didn’t identify as gay to the press until he was 40.)

Those of us who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s might recall that gender binaries were obsessively policed to a degree that would seem absurd to many of today’s teens. A straight male friend of mine who is 50 remembers vividly the fear that boys had in high school of being called “gay”: “We were homophobic — not in the sense that we feared gay people but in that we feared being called ‘gay’ ourselves.”

For high-school boys like the ones I spoke to, being called “gay” doesn’t mean what it meant for my friend. They don’t necessarily have the same gender-based paranoia that defined adolescence for him. Sleeping in the same bed as your friends during a sleepover, for example, was unheard of for boys I knew growing up, but the boys I spoke to thought nothing at all of that kind of physical closeness. And every boy I spoke to knows, or is friends with, kids who are nonbinary or queer.

At one point, I asked the group of boys for a clarification: Would they ever call someone who is gay “gay”? The group was silent for a moment, almost as though my question were so dumb they didn’t know where to begin. “No,” one boy finally said. “Because they identify as gay.”

One way to explain some of this use of slurs is the theory of “honest signaling,” which evolutionary biologists use to illustrate how sometimes species put themselves at physical risk to communicate something really important to other members of their group. (This theory is used to demontrate, for example, why a lion’s roar is much louder than it needs to be for any practical purpose and, indeed, so loud that it would scare off prey for miles around.)

People use honest signaling too when they need to communicate something that feels life-or-death. For teenagers, social belonging can often feel this urgent. Teens are compelled to create honest signals within their groups to affirm to one another that they really, truly belong. Using slurs can be a form of honest signaling precisely because of the risk posed by using these words: the risk of hurting someone or of getting in trouble. Slurs wouldn’t work as honest signals if they weren’t taboo.

But honest signaling within a friend group is far from the only way slurs are used. A 15-year-old girl who identifies as queer, and who attends a different school than the group of boys I spoke to, told me that she hears the F-slur often, directed at her. “When I was in a relationship with a girl in eighth grade and we didn’t hide it, we were called that constantly,” she said. I asked her what she thought compelled people to call her that.

“It’s just ignorance, for sure. It’s all about how you were raised and your parents’ beliefs,” she told me. “I think they outgrow it when they’re exposed to different people. Otherwise, I think people who keep using these words in college, they don’t make it as far in life.”

Maybe there is hope that most of them do grow out of it. “I’m not gonna lie: I was pretty stupid,” a 17-year-old told me, reflecting on his behavior only two years earlier. (It bears noting that, for a teenager, two years can feel like a lifetime.) “I once said something like ‘That’s so retarded’ around someone on the spectrum, and they said to me, ‘Hey, can you not say that? It’s offensive toward me.’ It wasn’t at that moment that I stopped saying it, but I’ve stopped saying it now … The truth is when something feels good to say, you’re going to say it more. And those words, when you’re a stupid teen boy, they just feel good to say.”

Maybe the best medicine is feedback from peers — firm, direct feedback rather than reputation-ruining smear campaigns, the threat of which the manosphere has weaponized. Social norms truly change only when certain behaviors are rewarded with a feeling of belonging, not just punished by shaming.

It’s tempting to link teen boys’ use of these words to the rise of MAGA, but it’s nothing new. So much of being a teenager is looking for a sense of belonging outside your family and building feelings of intimacy through which you ultimately come to know yourself. This intimacy is what we want for our teens, the screen-free negotiation of self that we all recall as having been awkward and sometimes awesome. It’s a bulwark against a grim future of Male Loneliness™. But ultimately we’ve made our bed by teaching them, partly through years of annual anti-bullying workshops all through elementary and high school, about the power of words. We’ve taught them that words can be transgressive and dangerous. For teenagers, transgression is usually part of the point.