BEING DIFFERENT AND BEING BULLIED:  IS IT LEARNED?
Perhaps the answer is yes.  And perhaps in some cases it is learned from...parents.  See for example this interesting story, in which a 5-year old boy's Halloween costume caused a great deal of rather ridiculous parental angst--and a link to the original blog post that started all the controversy can be found in the story I link to:
"A year ago I made the seemingly mundane choice to let my son choose his costume for Halloween. He chose Daphne from Scooby Doo. A few parents at his preschool disapproved, I wrote a blog post about it, and in the blink of an eye, the post set off a national discussion about gender identity, bullying and a parent’s role in both issues.
It seemed everywhere I turned someone was reposting my article or writing a commentary on my parenting. CNN called for an interview. Even the Well blog wrote a piece on the subject. My original article still gets a couple of hundred views each day and has about 47,000 comments. Isn’t that insane? I had no idea it would strike such a chord.
A year later, looking back on the events before and after Halloween, I still struggle to understand what all the fuss was about. The silly thing is that everybody else put far more thought into the costume than my son did. He loved Scooby Doo the cartoon, but he had already dressed as Scooby Doo, the dog, for a past Halloween. He looks just like the Scooby Doo character Fred in real life, so he didn’t see a lot of costume potential there. The obvious choice, to him at least, was Daphne — orange wig, purple outfit — can’t get much more fun than that.
But the rest of the world, starting with some of the mothers at his preschool, saw things differently. The moms were upset I’d let him wear the costume to school, and so were many people who read about it. I received some pretty terrible comments and name-calling about my 5-year-old that I couldn’t reprint. Someone tweeted the police department where my husband works and said they should take my children away. All because of a costume.
A lot was made about the cross-dressing aspect of my son’s choice, but in my writing about it, the message I intended to send was that bullying is a cycle, often learned at home. A few readers and parents I knew suggested I had set my son up for bullying by letting him wear the costume in the first place. But none of my son’s friends teased him about his costume. Once he made it past a few disapproving mothers, my son had a blast at the party. The only people who were upset about it were adults.
I think what became so clear to me from this experience was that children are not born hating anything just because it’s different. They learn it. And with the ever increasing list of child suicides tied to bullying, it is a cycle that must end.
It is our job as rational human beings to teach our children and those around us that it is O.K. to be different. It’s O.K. to not conform to every single thing. It’s O.K. to be who we are. We can’t bow to that lowest common denominator.
This year, my son made the bold decision to dress up as…Indiana Jones.
Does my son understand the interest and controversy his costume decision generated last year? No. He’s only 6, so he doesn’t quite grasp the concept of “millions,” though he does know that his picture was all over the Internet and TV.
He still loves Scooby Doo and the gang. He loves the picture of him dressed as Daphne and tells the story of dressing like Daphne for Halloween pretty regularly. If someone comments that it is a “girl” costume, his usual response is: “What do you care? It’s a costume. Not for a boy or a girl. Just a costume.”

"The soul is made for action, and cannot rest till it be employed.
Idleness is its rust." -Thomas Traherne