When Your Middle Schooler Asks “Will I Get Bullied? Do I Look Like a Girl?”: Practical Parenting Tips
I pushed open my 12-year-old son Javi’s bedroom door 10 minutes before bedtime last month, holding a plate of leftover chocolate chip cookies I’d baked that afternoon. The room smelled like the new lavender body wash he’d picked out at Target, and his new denim shorts were laid out straight on the comforter, ironed (I’d done it, he yelled at me for it but left them where they were). He was scrolling TikTok on his phone, but locked it the second I stepped in, which is never a casual thing. After a second of silence, he leaned forward and said, “Mom. Do you think I’m gonna get bullied? Also… do I look like a girl?”
I froze mid-step, the edge of the ceramic plate digging into my palm. I’d had a quiet, unspoken worry rolling around in my head all summer. We’d moved to a new town for my husband’s job, so Javi was starting 7th grade at a brand-new middle school where he knew exactly one person: the 10-year-old daughter of our neighbor, who he’d played frisbee with once. He’d wanted to grow his hair out since he was 8, after seeing a pro skateboarder with waist-length hair in a YouTube documentary, and I’d let him. He’s got soft cheekbones, likes his pink platform Vans he saved three months of allowance to buy, and couldn’t care less that his hair brushes the collar of his hoodie most days. I’d seen the way old ladies at the grocery store called him “young lady” when he held the door, and I’d wondered if it bothered him. But I never expected him to lay the whole fear out like that, plain and raw.
I almost said the first thing that popped into my head: Of course not, don’t be silly, you don’t look like anything but Javi. But I caught myself, because I knew that wasn’t what he was really asking. He wasn’t asking for a compliment. He was asking if he was safe. I sat down on the edge of the bed next to him, moved the shorts out of the way, and put the cookie plate down between us. I said, “That makes total sense to worry about that. Middle school is weird, and kids are mean for stupid reasons sometimes. I’d probably worry too if I was starting over with a whole new group of people. What made you think about this today?”
That’s the first concrete thing I’d tell any parent in this spot: don’t rush to fix the fear before you hear it. Javi told me that the 13-year-old kid down the street had messed up his gender when they were playing basketball a few days before, laughed and said “Wait, you’re a guy? No way,” then ran off to get a soda without waiting for a response. Then he’d seen a TikTok the night before of a teen with long hair getting cornered and bullied in a school bathroom, and he’d been turning the question over in his head ever since, too embarrassed to say anything until that night.
When he got back to the “do I look like a girl” part, I didn’t jump to deny it or act like that’s a bad thing. I said, “What people see when they look at you isn’t really about you, it’s about what they expect. If someone wants to call you a girl before they even know you, that’s their mistake, not yours. But I get why that would feel scary. It sucks when people get you wrong before you even get to say hi.” I didn’t offer to make an appointment to cut his hair. That’s the second thing: don’t suggest changing your kid’s body to fit other people’s ideas to avoid bullying. When he asked me if I thought he should cut it, I just said “This is your hair. You like it, right? If you want to cut it, we can go tomorrow. If you don’t, we don’t cut it just because some kid might be an idiot. It’s your call.” He thought for a second and said “I like it. I don’t wanna cut it.” That was that.
Next, we made a plan, not a vague “just tell a teacher” plan. Javi hates making a big deal out of small things, so we came up with three different responses for three different scenarios, all things he was comfortable with. If someone misgenders him by accident, he just says “I’m Javi, I’m a guy” and moves on. If someone teases him about looking like a girl, he can say “Okay?” and walk away—he picked that line because it doesn’t give the teaser the reaction they want. If someone keeps bothering him or gets physical, he’ll go straight to his homeroom teacher, who we met at orientation. Before school started, I sent that teacher a 2-sentence email: Javi’s been a little nervous about starting here, he’s gotten some comments about his hair already, would you mind just checking in with him once a week the first month? It’s not a big ask, it doesn’t make you an overbearing parent. She wrote back 10 minutes later saying she was glad I told her, she deals with this all the time, and she’d keep an eye out.
School started three days ago. Javi’s come home every day with the usual middle school updates: the lunch line is too long, his math teacher assigns 20 minutes of homework every night, the AC in his science room is broken. He sat with a group of kids who skate at the local park on the weekend, and one of them has the same Vans in blue. No one’s bullied him yet. He still pauses at the mirror by the front door most mornings, sometimes pulling his hair back into a tiny ponytail, sometimes shaking it loose, depending on how he feels that day.
I still have that quiet knot of worry in my chest some mornings. I know it’s middle school—someone will probably say something stupid eventually. I can’t stop every bad thing from happening to him. But I know that if I’d brushed off his question, told him he was being silly or offered to cut his hair to fix the problem, I would’ve taught him that his comfort doesn’t matter as much as other people’s opinions. Right now, this is working. We’ll see how it goes.
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