Florida’s newly enacted Parental Rights in Education bill — dubbed by critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — has catapulted LGBTQ rights to the center of political discourse in recent months.
Leaders of global corporations, editorial boards of major newspapers and the White House have all weighed in on the new law, with some calling it “deeply disturbing” and others “noncontroversial.” The cast of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” has repeatedly ripped into the bill in several of its most recent episodes. At last month’s Oscars, co-host Wanda Sykes took a jab at the measure in the Academy Awards’ opening monologue. And last week, officials in New York City and Chicago launched ad campaigns in Florida to persuade LGBTQ Floridians to pack their bags and move north.
While Florida has been ground zero for this nationwide debate, 19 other states have introduced similar legislation that would prohibit how educators can talk about or teach LGBTQ issues in school this year, according to the Movement Advancement Project, or MAP, an LGBTQ think tank that has been tracking the bills.
“The truth is, this has never been about Florida,” said Brandon Wolf, the press secretary for the LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Florida, which sued DeSantis over the law last month. “It’s never been about one state but rather a policy objective from the furthest right wing of the Republican Party to try to roll back civil liberties and progress through fear and manipulation of their base.”
He added, “You can, I think, imagine that we’re staring down a national ‘Don’t Say Gay’ debate if we’re not successful in pushing back against it here in Florida.”
Lawmakers in Indiana are weighing legislation that would require any student under the age of 18 to “obtain written consent” from a parent before participating “in any instruction on human sexuality.” In Arizona, House lawmakers introduced legislation in January that would prohibit schools from allowing students to participate in school clubs or student groups “involving sexuality, gender or gender identity unless the student’s parent provides written permission for the student to participate.”
And legislators in Tennessee proposed a measure in February that reads: “The promotion of LGBT issues and lifestyles in public schools offends a significant portion of students, parents, and Tennessee residents with Christian values.” The bill, HB 800, seeks to ban textbooks or classroom materials that “promote, normalize, support, or address” LGBTQ “lifestyles,” and subject LGBTQ issues to the same limitations religious teachings face in the state’s public schools.
“They vary quite a bit, but the thing that they have in common is that they restrict the ability of teachers and schools to provide students with an honest and accurate education that they deserve, that helps them to learn from our past and reflect the diversity of the world around them and prepare them for the future,” Logan Casey, a senior policy researcher and adviser at MAP, said.
Proponents of the measures disagree and contend that they would give parents more discretion over what their children learn in school and say LGBTQ issues are “not age appropriate” for young students.
At the Florida bill’s signing ceremony, DeSantis, who is widely believed to be considering a run for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, said that the law would ensure “that parents can send their kids to school to get an education, not an indoctrination.”
Tiffany Justice, a mother of four school-age children and the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a national network of about 80,000 parents that says its mission is to defend parental rights in schools, previously told NBC News that Florida’s Parental Rights in Education and similar measures amount to “parents pushing back.”
“They’ve had enough. We’ve seen enough nonsense,” she said. “The kids are not learning to read in schools, and what I have said before is ‘Before you activate our children into social justice warriors, could you just teach them how to read?’”
Since DeSantis signed the Florida legislation into law on March 28, other conservative lawmakers have signaled that they would step up efforts to advance similar versions of the law in their states.
In a campaign email last Monday, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick vowed to make a rendering of the law a “top priority” in his state’s next legislative session. That same day, Ohio state Reps. Jean Schmidt and Mike Loychik introduced their own version of the legislation.
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Loychik and Schmidt did not respond to NBC News’ requests for comment. On Tuesday, Schmidt refused to answer reporters’ questions about the bill while walking through the state capitol building in Columbus.https://iframe.nbcnews.com/YY8G0Ez?_showcaption=true&app=1
At the federal level — absent majorities in Congress or at the White House — Republican lawmakers have largely stayed out of the fray concerning a nationwide version of the legislation. But last month, while speaking with Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist and AM radio personality Alex Jones, Georgia Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene vowed to introduce a federal version of the law.
“I will meet with my team right after this interview, and we will work on it,” Greene told the radio host, “because I will do anything I can to protect kids.”
LGBTQ advocates note that the new crop of LGBTQ curriculum bills are not totally new. They say the measures resemble legislation from the 1980s and ‘90s that activists dubbed “no promo homo” laws, which explicitly prohibited the positive portrayal of homosexuality in schools. The majority of those laws have since been struck down, but they remain in place in four states in the South, according to national LGBTQ youth advocacy group GLSEN.
Casey said that unlike today’s bills, the “no promo homo” laws were more “narrowly” focused on restricting what educators could or could not say in health classes.
“They at least had this pretense of limiting the censorship to classes about sex-ed specifically,” Casey said. “The bills today have removed all pretense. They are just saying flat out: ‘You cannot talk about these issues in any classroom, in any instructional materials full stop.’”
Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of GLSEN, said another differentiator is that these present-day measures — despite being dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” bills — are aimed at preventing gender identity and transgender issues from being taught, and in some cases even discussed, at school.
“What we’re seeing now is that because it’s no longer politically feasible to discredit someone because of their sexuality, the most isolated, the most marginalized, the most impacted part of the LGBTQ+ community, which are trans and nonbinary people, are being hit with the same political playbook,” Willingham-Jaggers, who is nonbinary, said. “It’s absurd, this idea that trans folks are a threat.”
Supporters of these education bills have also suggested that they are meant to target trans Americans. Justice previously told NBC Newsthat the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws are needed to fight a “transgender contagion” sweeping the country.
The share of anti-LGBTQ state bills that specifically target transgender people have noticeably ticked upward over the past several years, an NBC News analysis of data from the American Civil Liberties Union and the LGBTQ advocacy group Freedom for All Americans found.
For example, 22 of the 60 anti-LGBTQ proposed bills in 2019, or 37 percent, were anti-trans bills, compared with 153, or 80 percent, of 191 anti-LGBTQ bills in 2021. This year, about 65 percent of the anti-LGBTQ bills filed as of March 15 — 154 — targeted transgender people.https://iframe.nbcnews.com/j2EQSqk?_showcaption=true&app=1
While most, if not all, of these measures have been introduced by Republicans, not all GOP lawmakers are on board. At least five Republican governors have vetoed anti-trans bills in their states since last year (although some of those vetoes were overridden), and on Sunday, Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, dismissed the Florida LGBTQ curriculum law, calling it “absurd.”
“I didn’t really actually see the details of the legislation, but the whole thing seems like just a crazy fight,” Hogan told CNN.
The national war of words over whether students should learn about LGBTQ issues in school — ignited by a recently enacted Florida law that critics dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — has taken a charged, and some say dangerous, turn over the last several weeks.
In early March, the press secretary for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tweeted that anyone who opposes the bill “is probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.” Several days later, Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked her millions of viewers, “When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender identity radicals?”
On Wednesday, Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., took things a step further, tweeting that “Democrats are the party of killing babies, grooming and transitioning children, and pro-pedophile politics,” in reference to the legislation. That same day, in a since-deleted tweetaccessed by NBC News through the Wayback Machine Internet Archive, the conservative podcast host Jack Posobiec urged his 1.7 million followers to buy T-shirts that say “Boycott Groomers, bring ammo” and incorporate the famous Disney castle logo and signature font. (The company, which has a large footprint in Florida, has become a frequent target of conservative politicians and pundits for denouncing the state’s legislation.)
Disney parody T-shirt.Bring Ammo LLC
This type of language — which had, at least in the past decade, appeared to be relegated to the margins of the far-right movement — has even made its way beyond politicians and political pundits. During a Fox News interview on Sunday, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet saidthat children are “not only being indoctrinated but groomed” and that “teachers are inclined, particularly men because men are predators, to pedophilia.”
Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law’s Cyber Law Clinic and a transgender-rights advocate, said using such language is “an attempt at the dehumanization and delegitimization of queer people’s identities by associating them with pedophilia and child grooming.”
“What terrifies me is that when you start labeling groups with that, the calls for violence are inevitable,” she said.
The recent rhetoric mirrors that of a QAnon conspiracy theory — known as “pizzagate” — which claimed that a Washington, D.C., pizzeria was harboring a child sex-trafficking ring with connections to Hillary Clinton. The conspiracy theory, which was debunked by the FBI and Washington police, prompted a North Carolina manto fire a rifle in the pizzeria. He was ultimately sentenced to four years behind bars.
The word “grooming” — which has long beenassociated with mischaracterizing LGBTQ people, particularly gay men and transgender women, as child sex abusers — was mentioned on Twitter 7,959 times on March 29, the day after Florida’s education bill was signed into law, compared with just 40 times on the first day of this year, Caraballo found through data she pulled from Twitter.
The legislation,officially titled the Parental Rights in Education bill, bans teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity “in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
Proponents of the measure have contended that it gives parents more discretion over what their children learn in school and say LGBTQ issues are “not age-appropriate” for young students.
At the Florida bill-signing ceremony, DeSantis, who is widely believed to be considering a run for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, said that opponents of the measure “support sexualizing kids in kindergarten” and “camouflage their true intentions.” He added that the law would ensure “that parents can send their kids to school to get an education, not an indoctrination.”
Tiffany Justice, an ardent supporter of the measures limiting LGBTQ instruction in schools and the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a national network of about 80,000 parents whose mission is to defend parental rights in schools, said that the LGBTQ community is “a part of the fabric of America.”
Simultaneously, she said that “we have reached a point now where we need to call this what this is,” referring to the rhetoric surrounding the law.
“If you want to talk to my first grader about sex and sexual identity and gender identity and sexual orientation, and I don’t want you to and you’re doing it anyway, you’re grooming my child without my permission,” Justice, who is also a mother of four school-age children, said to NBC News. “And if anyone says that they don’t like that label, then I say stop messing with our kids.”
Scott Hadland, the chief of adolescent and young adult medicine at MassGeneral Hospital for Children and Harvard Medical School, called the law and the recent rhetoric surrounding it “fear-based.”
“I’ve cared for, in my more than a decade of clinical practice, hundreds of kids who identify as LGBTQ and the number of times that somebody has shared with me that they came to understand their development because they were convinced to become LGBTQ by a teacher, or another community member, or a physician is exactly zero,” Hadland said. “This does not happen. This is not how young people establish their identities.”
The tactic of labeling one’s political adversaries as “groomers,” or insinuating that they are trying to prime children for sexual abuse, is nothing new, said Michael Bronski, a professor of women and gender studies at Harvard University and author of “A Queer History of the United States for Young People.”
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“There’s a long tradition of making accusations against a minority group, potentially an unpopular one, using the notion of violating childhood innocence, which is seen as the worst possible thing that you could do — to abuse the child sexually,” Bronski said.
“Overwhelmingly, they were never about the children,” he added, referring to the accusations. “They were about mobilizing power within the culture and doing political organizing around it.”
Bronski recalled former beauty queen Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign in 1977, which painted gays and lesbians as a threat to the country’s youth. That year, her campaign was successful in overturning a newly passed Miami-Dade County law that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation in housing, employment and public services.
“Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit. And to freshen their ranks, they must recruit the youth of America,” Bryant famously declared.
Decades after Bryant fortified a reputation as one of the countries most notorious anti-LGBTQ activists, her granddaughter came out as a lesbian during an episode of Slate’s “One Year” podcast and revealed that she was engaged to a woman.
Singer turned political activist Anita Bryant speaks during a press event in Miami Beach, Fla. on Jun. 7, 1977.Bettmann via Getty Images file
When asked why these old tropes, popular in Bryant’s day, have resurfaced now, Bronski pointedto several LGBTQ policy wins in recent years — most notably the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, and the 2020 Supreme Court decision that won LGBTQ people nationwide protection from workplace discrimination — and greater numbers of Americans identifying as part of the LGBTQ community.
The percent of U.S. adults who identify as something other than heterosexual has doubled over the last 10 years, from 3.5 percent in 2012 to 7.1 percent, according to a Gallup poll released in February.
“If you have visibility for anything, whether it be for Black Lives Matter, whether it be for feminism, whether it be for LGBTQ identities, you are in fact creating a cultural space for people to learn about it and consider it,” Bronski said. “Any form of social progress engenders backlash.”
The backlash is what worries Caraballo. She notes that June 12 will be the sixth anniversary of the mass shooting that killed 49 at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
Hate crimes against LGBTQ people across the country are down overall, according to FBI data released last year, but have risen for incidents motivated by gender identity within the past two years. Late last year, LGBTQ Americans were spooked when federal prosecutors arrested a man who they said threatened to attack this year’s New York City Pride March with “firepower” that would “make the 2016 Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting look like a cakewalk.” And this month, a man walked into a New York City gay bar, Rash Bar, with a bottle of flammable liquid, poured it on the bar’s floor, lit a match and set the venue on fire.
Caraballo said that social media companies like Twitter have a responsibility to curtail the rhetoric from proliferating online and thus stem the threats of violence.
“What worries me is that it’s going to take people getting killed for them to finally crack down,” Caraballo said. “I fear we’re going to end up with another Pulse.”
“My message to social media companies is,” she added, “‘Don’t wait till you have blood on your hands.’”
Twitter did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment concerning several of the more high-profile tweets mentioning the word “grooming” in association with the new law.
One of the tweets came from DeSantis’ press secretary, Christina Pushaw, on March 4: “The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill.”
In an email to NBC News, Pushaw elaborated, saying that “the assumption that criticism of grooming is criticism of the LGBTQ community equates LGBTQ people to groomers, which is both bigoted and inaccurate.”
In a first, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has been ordered to secure gender-affirming surgery for a transgender prisoner.
A federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois ordered the bureau on Monday to undergo a nationwide search for a qualified surgeon to perform the surgery for the inmate, Cristina Nichole Iglesias.
The directive will bring Iglesias — who has been imprisoned since 1994 for threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction — a step closer to receiving the procedure, which she has been fighting to get for six years, the last three in the courts.
“I am hopeful that I will finally get the care I need to live my life fully as the woman I am,” Iglesias said in a statement provided to NBC News by her legal representative, the American Civil Liberties Union. “BOP has denied me gender-affirming surgery for years — and keeps raising new excuses and putting new obstacles in my way. I am grateful that the court recognized the urgency of my case and ordered BOP to act.”
Monday’s court order could pave the way for othertransgender prisoners to receive gender-affirming surgeries as well. LGBTQ advocates have called these procedures “life-saving,” and Monday’s decision could bolster the Biden administration’s goal of improving the lives of incarcerated transgender people.
A 2015 report by the Justice Department estimated that 35 percent of trans prisoners surveyed had reported being sexually assaulted behind bars within the last year. Under the Trump administration, the Bureau of Prisons was required to “use biological sex as the initial determination” for housing trans prisoners.
A 2020 NBC News investigation that tracked 45 states and Washington, D.C., found that out of 4,890 transgender inmates in state prisons, only 15 were confirmed to being housed according to their lived gender.
In January, the Biden administration restored Obama-era guidelines for federal prisons to house transgender inmates by their gender identity “when appropriate.” The guidelines also require prison staff to refer to trans inmates by their lived name and pronouns.
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The ACLU estimates that the Federal Bureau of Prisons has more than 1,200 transgender people currently in its custody.
Iglesias has been in federal prison for roughly 28 years and currently lives in a bureau-run residential re-entry center in Florida, according to the ACLU.
Although she identified herself as a woman upon her incarceration, she has been housed in men’s facilities for over two decades, and during that time has experienced physical and sexual violence, the ACLU said. In May, her lawsuit to seek gender-affirming surgery resulted in her being one of the few transgender federal prisoners moved to a facility that corresponds with her gender identity.
Iglesias then became the first transgender prisoner to be evaluated for gender-affirming surgery, which the Bureau of Prisons recommended in January. However, the ACLU said in a statement that the bureau had “sought to postpone any referral to a surgeon for months.”
In Monday’s ruling, Judge Nancy Rosenstengel slammed the prison bureau’s handling of Iglesias’ case and compared its “tactics” to a game of “whack-a-mole.” Rosenstengel also ordered the bureau to provide the court with weekly updates and a detailed plan to ensure that Iglesias gets the surgery before her release in December.
The Bureau of Prisons told NBC News in a statement that it does not comment on “pending litigation or matters subject to legal proceedings,” nor on “the conditions of confinement for any individual or group of inmates.”
“For years, Cristina has fought to receive the health care the Constitution requires,” Joshua Blecher-Cohen, an ACLU of Illinois staff attorney who represents Ms. Iglesias, said in a statement.
“The court’s order makes clear that she needs gender-affirming surgery now and that BOP cannot justify its failure to provide this medically necessary care,” he said. “We hope this landmark decision will help secure long-overdue health care for Cristina — and for the many other transgender people in federal custody who have been denied gender-affirming care.”
Last month, a group of parents in Orlando, Florida, demanded “consequences” against sixth grade science teacher Robert Thollander. His crime? Thollander acknowledged his marriage at school.
“He married a man. This alone is not an issue. Sharing the details … with all his 6th grade students is the issue,” the parents wrote in a letter sent to their children’s school board, which was shared with NBC News. “It was not appropriate. Many of these students felt very uncomfortable with the conversations and shared this with their families.”
Had Thollander just “said he will be out for a few days because he was getting married, no problem,” the letter continued, “but to discuss the details and create an uncomfortable situation for the students with no benefit to teaching his subject matter is inappropriate.”
Sixth grade science teacher Robert Thollander.Courtesy Robert Thollander
Thollander denied having discussed his marriage since he and his husband tied the knot in March of last year, aside from acknowledging it when he was asked. No action was taken against him by school leaders, who defended him several days later with a letter of their own, he said.
Nevertheless, the incident prompted Thollander to make this school year his last after 11 years of working in Florida as a teacher.
“A lot of trust is given to teachers, and it made it seem like I wasn’t trusted because there’s something wrong with me for being gay,” he said. “It makes it seem like being gay is something vile or disturbing or disgusting when it’s described as making children uncomfortable knowing that I’m married to a man. It hurt.”
While the Orlando parents did not succeed in having Thollander disciplined or ousted, he and other LGBTQ teachers in the state worry that newly signed state law — titled Parental Rights in Education but dubbed by critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” law — will galvanize parents to take similar action against them. In fact, Thollander said he believes the parents who complained about him were emboldened by the bill even before it was signed into law.
With the new law in place, teachers fear that in talking about their families or LGBTQ issues more broadly, pointed letters will be the least of their worries.
The law, HB 1557, bans “instruction” about sexual orientation or gender identity “in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law Monday. Parents will be able to sue school districts for alleged violations, damages or attorney’s fees when the law goes into effect July 1.
Lawmakers who support the law have repeatedly stressed that it would not prohibit teachers and students from talking about their LGBTQ families or bar classroom discussions about LGBTQ history, including events like the 2016 attack at the Pulse nightclub, a gay club in Orlando. Instead, they argue, it is about giving parents more jurisdiction over their children’s education.
But legal experts have said the broad language of the law could open districts and teachers to lawsuits from parents who believe any conversation about LGBTQ people or issues is “inappropriate.”
Nicolette Solomon said Florida’s new education bill was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.Courtesy Nicolette Solomon
Nicolette Solomon, 28, taught fourth grade in Miami-Dade County for more than four years. As HB 1557 passed through the Legislature, she quit. Solomon, a lesbian, said that after months of having taught virtually through the coronavirus pandemic, the law was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“The law would erase me as an LGBTQ teacher,” she said. “Nobody would be able to know, which then puts me in the closet, and I’m there seven hours a day, if not more, five days a week. I wouldn’t be able to be who I am.”
“And I don’t think I can bear to see the students struggle and want to ask me about these things and then have to deny them that knowledge,” she added. “That’s not who I am as a teacher.”
Some Florida teachers also worry that the law will worsen the disproportionate rates of bullying, harassment and mental health issues plaguing their LGBTQ students.
A survey last year by The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ youth suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization, found that 42 percent of the nearly 35,000 LGBTQ youths who were surveyed seriously considered suicide within the previous year. More than half of transgender and nonbinary youths who were surveyed seriously considered suicide, it also found.
“Will other students interpret that as ‘Hey, now I have a pass to bully or mistreat certain students?’” asked Brian Kerekes, who teaches math at a high school in Osceola County, referring to the law. “It’s not out of the realm of imagination that that could now be an issue.”
A separate survey conducted by The Trevor Project last year found that LGBTQ youths who reported having at least one LGBTQ-affirming space reported lower rates of attempting suicide.
With that in mind, he said, Kerekes asks his students for their preferred pronouns at the beginning of every school year. He also places other LGBTQ-affirming symbols in his classroom, including a rainbow Pride flag and a sign that says “safe space.”
“Our students need to see that the educators in their community are as diverse as the rest of that community. They need educators that look and resemble them,” said Kerekes, who is gay. “We want them to know that we see them and respect them so that they can focus on what it is that they’re learning in class and not have to worry about how they’re going to be treated because of who they are.”
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Building successful teacher-to-student relationships has become increasingly important in recent years, Kerekes said, in light of remote learning during coronavirus lockdowns and the rise in school shootings nationally.
With the passage of the new Florida law, Kerekes worries that most teachers will now “hesitate to be the advocates and the mentors” for LGBTQ kids who may confide in them.
Supporters of the measure say exposing kids to LGBTQ symbols and identities is part of the problem.
DeSantis, who is widely seen as considering a run for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, said Monday that the law will ensure “that parents can send their kids to school to get an education, not an indoctrination.”
Tiffany Justice.Leah Voss / TCPALM / USA Today Network file
Tiffany Justice, who served on a Florida school board for four years and co-founded a national network of about 80,000 parents, Moms for Liberty, agreed, saying the law is needed to fight a “transgender contagion” sweeping the country.
“This is parents pushing back,” Justice, a mom of four school-aged children, said. “They’ve had enough. We’ve seen enough nonsense. The kids are not learning to read in schools, and what I have said before is ‘Before you activate our children into social justice warriors, could you just teach them how to read?’”
She added, “Teachers really need to get back and focus on what they’re supposed to be teaching in schools.”
Michael Woods, a special education teacher in Palm Beach County, said legislators and parents are looking for a “solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.”
“Teachers do not go out of their way to create these moments where we’re ‘indoctrinating’ students,” said Woods, who is gay. “If I could indoctrinate a student, it would be to bring a pencil and a piece of paper, and if I was really good at ‘indoctrinating,’ I would be able to get them to do their homework.”
Some educators are also concerned about a section in the law that will require them to notify parents of a child’s “mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being … unless a reasonably prudent person would believe that such disclosure would result in abuse, abandonment, or neglect.”
Michael Woods is a special education teacher in Palm Beach County, Florida.Courtesy Michael Woods
Critics have said the provision will force teachers to “out” their LGBTQ students to their parents, potentially leaving them vulnerable to rejection at home.
From her first week on the job, Solomon said, “so many kids” throughout her elementary school — even those she did not teach directly — came out to her.
“They want to go to someone like a teacher who they might not know for the rest of their lives or someone who they know won’t judge them or won’t tell anybody,” she said. “They’re kids. They can’t just call a therapist and make an appointment.
“I don’t want to be in that situation where, instead of helping the students, I’m going to be hurting them,” she added.
On Monday, the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second largest teachers labor union, slammed the measure, calling it an “assault” on students and teachers.
“Make no mistake, this bill will have devastating real-world consequences—especially for LGBTQIA+ youth who already experience higher rates of bullying and suicide,” Randi Weingarten, the group’s president, said in a statement. “And for teachers and school staff who work tirelessly to support and care for their students, this bill is just another gross political attack on their professionalism.”
U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona met in private with LGBTQ students and their family members Thursday to discuss the impacts of the law.
Earlier in the week, Cardona issued a statement saying the Education Department would “monitor” the law upon its implementation and “evaluate whether it violates federal civil rights law.”
In the meantime, Thollander will be putting his new real estate license to work, and Solomon will be working on her newly launched LGBTQ family-focused podcast, “Flying the Coop.”
“I would teach in another state, but I cannot teach in Florida,” Solomon said. “It’s just so horrible.”
Beyond Florida, legislators in several other states — including Georgia, Tennessee, Kansas and Indiana — are weighing measures similar to the Florida law, which Justice said was “just the beginning.”
“We’re not stopping here,” Justice said. “If they think they have a problem with HB 1557 in Florida, wait until it’s in all 50 states. And we won’t stop until it is.”
Biden administration officials held a closed-door meeting Thursday with several Florida LGBTQ students and their families about the state’s so-called Don’t Say Gay bill, the Education Department said.
The legislation — officially named the Parental Rights in Education Act — would prohibit “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” in Florida primary schools. Its passage in Florida’s House and Senate in recent weeks sparked national debate.
At Thursday’s virtual roundtable, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and the assistant secretary of health and human services for health, Dr. Rachel Levine, the first openly transgender Senate-confirmed federal official, reaffirmed support for LGBTQ youths and their families.
“Laws around the country, including in Florida, have targeted and sought to bully some of our most vulnerable students and families and create division in our schools,” Cardona said, according to a readout of the meeting. “My message to you is that this administration won’t stand for bullying or discrimination of any kind, and we will use our authorities to protect, support, and provide opportunities for LGBTQI+ students and all students.”
Proponents of the measure contend that it would give parents more discretion over what their children learn in school and say LGBTQ issues are “not age-appropriate” for young students.
Critics say the legislation would prevent youths and teachers from openly talking about themselves and their families.
“Being an LGBTQ student in Florida is already incredibly difficult due to bullying from fellow students and peers,” Miami high school student Javier Gomez said Thursday. “This legislation will compound this problem and make life even more difficult for LGBTQ students.”
The legislation would go into effect July 1 if it is signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is widely seen as considering a run for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination and has signaled his support for the measure several times.
Debate over state legislation that affects the LGBTQ community rarely leaves the halls of state capitols. But Florida’s Parental Rights in Education act — which critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — has suddenly sparked a national war of words.
In recent weeks, leaders of global corporations, editorial boards of major newspapers and Hollywood actors have all weighed in on the proposed legislation, with some calling it “deeply disturbing” and others “noncontroversial.” Kate McKinnon ripped into the bill during a recent “Weekend Update” segment on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” The hosts of the ABC talk show “The View” mulled over the policy for more than seven minutes on air last month. And Bravo’s Andy Cohen dedicated a closing segment of “Watch What Happens Live” last week to slam the measure.
The bill has even prompted President Joe Biden — who has seldom weighed in on the recent slate of state bills concerning LGBTQ people — to use the bully pulpit of the White House to rebuke the Florida measure and its sponsors. The bill even appears to have caused a rift between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has said he supports the bill but hasn’t signed it yet, and Disney CEO Bob Chapek.
Supporters of HB 1557 say it would give parents greater control over their children’s education, vindicating their “parental authority.” Conversely, opponents say it would unfairly target the LGBTQ community — particularly gay and trans students — and is “pretending to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”
So, which is it?
For starters, criticism that the “Don’t Say Gay” bill does not in fact say “gay” anywhere in its text is true. The bill, which passedFlorida’s Senate last week and the state’s House of Representatives in February, does, however, contain the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” each twice.
But legal experts say that whether the bill prohibits the word “gay” itself is a “distraction.”
“In the same way that critical race theory isn’t being taught in schools, that hasn’t stopped people like the governor of Florida from deploying the term ‘critical race theory’ in efforts to engage in certain kinds of political maneuverings,” said Charlton Copeland, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law who writes about sexual orientation and gender identity. “The ‘Don’t Say Gay’ moniker is a moniker about a certain political framing of this situation.”https://iframe.nbcnews.com/OGojlsF?_showcaption=true
Beyond branding, a core argument over the bill centers around whether it would prohibit the “instruction” or “discussion” of sexual orientation.
The bill’s sponsors have emphatically stated that the bill would not prohibit students from talking about their LGBTQ families or bar classroom discussions about LGBTQ history, including events like the 2016 deadly attack on the Pulse nightclub, a gay club in Orlando. Instead, they argue that the bill would bar the “instruction” of sexual orientation or gender identity.
But the text says both.
In its preamble, the bill’s authors write that their aim is to prohibit “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity.” But later, the actual bill states that “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur.”
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“I could see why people are confused by that,” said Clay Calvert, a professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law who specializes in freedom of speech.
“I have no idea why that’s still left up there, but that’s not part of the binding legislation that DeSantis would sign,” Calvert added, referring to the word “discussion” in the bill’s preamble.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando on Feb. 26, 2021.Joe Raedle / Getty Images file
“Basically, all of that language is just telling us what the bill is about,” Calvert said, contending that the text in the bill’s preamble would have no real-life consequences.
Copeland disagreed.
“One of the things I would have told my students in the fall, when I taught them statutory interpretation, and one of the things that courts certainly do, is to look at the preamble to assess, ‘Well, what’s the scope of that term called ‘instruction?’” Copeland said. “And the preamble seems to have a conception of what is prohibited that is much broader when we might think of a cramped conception of ‘instruction.’”
He added, “A good lawyer in a local school district, a good lawyer in the state department of education is going to do exactly that.”
Regardless, it remains unclear what the “instruction” of sexual orientation or gender identity entails. A definition of that type of lesson is not in the bill’s text.
Without a clearer description, Calvert said, “teachers may legitimately fear being sued” for a wide variety of classroom instruction, including lessons concerning same-sex marriage or the history of the AIDS epidemic.
“If a student raises a question that is not part of the lesson plan or the instructional plan of a teacher, but that question ties to sexual orientation or gender identity, then what may the teacher say at that point?” Calvert said.
Calvert raised the prospect of answering a student’s question about how same-sex couples marry each other.
“Am I teaching about what the Constitution says in that case, or am I teaching about sexual orientation?” he asked.
The bill’s sponsors did not directly answer repeated queries to provide examples of “instruction” of sexual orientation or gender identity during House and Senate debate. When asked by a Democratic lawmaker to explain what the instruction of sexual orientation or gender identity would look like, Republican state Rep. Joe Harding, one of the bill’s sponsors, read the definition of the word “instruction” from what appeared to be a dictionary.
Florida Rep. Joe Harding during a legislative session on Jan. 13 in Tallahassee.Phelan M. Ebenhack / AP file
“Vagueness is deployed for certain purposes. People aren’t vague just because they’re ignorant; they’re not vague because they’re sloppy; they’re not vague because they’re lazy,” Copeland said. “Sometimes they’re intentionally vague to move the site of where the political fight is going to take place.”
Which age groups the bill would apply to has also sparked fierce debate in recent weeks.
The text states that teachings on sexual orientation or gender identity would be banned “in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
Critics have said the language of this provision could open districts and educators to lawsuits from parents who believe any conversation about LGBTQ people or issues to be inappropriate, regardless of their child’s age.
Legal experts agree, but dispute that a parent’s interpretation of what is or isn’t “age appropriate” would hold up in court.
Nonetheless, Calvert said, “it remains to be seen what ‘age appropriate’ or ‘developmentally appropriate’ means,” according to the state.
A clause on the final page of the bill would require the Florida Department of Education to update state standards “in accordance with the requirements of this act” by June 30, 2023.
“The Department of Education has some leeway here to update and review its own standards about what is age appropriate, and then those will influence how this bill is actually implemented,” Calvert said. “In other words, it could stretch higher than third grade.”
Copeland added that the mere threat of lawsuits would complete the bill’s “work.”
“This kind of ever-present possibility of having to defend oneself, of a school district having to spend resources, will have its own chilling effects,” he said.
If signed by DeSantis, who is widely seen as eyeing a run for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination and has signaled his support for the measure several times, the legislation will go into effect July 1.
An organization that provides suicide prevention and crisis intervention services to thousands of young LGBTQ people in the United States announced on Wednesday that it is expanding its services to Mexico.
The Trevor Project — named after “Trevor,” an Academy Award-winning short film about a gay teenager who attempts suicide — estimates that more than 745,000 Mexico-based LGBTQ youths ages 13 to 24 are in crisis each year, though it notes that figure is a rough approximation due to the “severe lack of data.” It also estimates that over 40 million queer youths worldwide seriously consider suicide annually.
To counter the harrowing numbers, the group said that it will offer its round-the-clock digital services — including text and online chat suicide prevention and crisis services — for LGBTQ youths in Mexico by the end of 2022. The expansion into the U.S.’s southern neighbor is the first time the group will offer its services abroad since its founding in 1998.
“LGBTQ young people everywhere deserve not just to survive, but to thrive,” The Trevor Project CEO Amit Paley said. “We don’t think that just because you happen to have been born in one country that means you are more or less deserving of critical, lifesaving services and affirmation.”
The nonprofit has been pivotal in providing LGBTQ youths in the U.S. with mental health services, where it estimates 42 percent of LGBTQ youths and more than half of trans youth seriously considered suicide last year.
It hopes to replicate its efforts in Mexico, where its services will be available in Spanish, in addition to English. The group also said in a statement that it will be collaborating with local organizations throughout the country “to build on the progress they’ve already made.”
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LGBTQ rights have had several advancements in Mexico within the last two decades.
In 2009, Mexico City became the first city in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage. Since then, same-sex marriage has been legalized in at least a dozen of Mexico’s 32 states, according to the international advocacy group Human Rights Watch.
And beyond same-sex marriage, 19 Mexican states also have legal gender recognition procedures, allowing individuals to change their gender identity on their official documents, according to the advocacy organization.
However, Cristian González Cabrera, who researches LGBTQ rights in Latin America for Human Rights Watch, said there’s still “a lot to be done” and that The Trevor Project’s expansion in Mexico will be “very welcome.”
“Legal advances don’t always translate to social or lived progress for LGBTQ people in the region,” Cabrera said. “Mexico remains a conservative country in certain aspects and regions, and LGBTQ people continue to experience all sorts of discrimination in all sectors of life, whether that’s education, health care, in the job market, et cetera.”
Research has also shown that LGBTQ people living in Mexico are more prone to violence.
At least 79 LGBTQ people were killed in Mexico in 2020, more than six a month, according to the Mexican LGBTQ rights group Letra Ese.
Through its research in the United States, The Trevor Project has also found that LGBTQ youths who reported having at least one LGBTQ-affirming space had lower rates of suicide attempts.
The group hopes that by expanding its services to Mexico, it can help to create supportive spaces for the country’s LGBTQ youths and save lives as a result, Paley said.
“Mexico is going to be the first country we’re launching in, but it will not be the last,” he said.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., laid out a conservative blueprint this week for a GOP takeover of Congress, and included in his “11-Point Plan to Rescue America” are a number of proposals that would limit the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.
The document outlines Republican policy objectives on everything from the economy to abortion, but the point that caused the most alarm to LGBTQ advocates was in a section titled “Gender, Life, Science.”
“Men and women are biologically different, ‘male and female He created them,'” Scott wrote. “Facts are facts, the earth is round, the sun is hot, there are two genders, and abortion stops a beating heart. To say otherwise is to deny science.”
In this section, Scott — who served as Florida’s governor from2011 to 2019 — called for nationwide bans on government forms that “include questions about ‘gender identity’ or ‘sexual preference’”; gender-affirming procedures on minors; and transgender women and girls participating on female sports teams.
“We will protect women’s sports by banning biological males from competing,” the policy outline states. “It is hugely unfair and would erase many of the gains women have made in athletics over the last 50 years.”
Scott’s proposals echo the ongoing nationwide push of anti-LGBTQ legislation by state lawmakers.
So far this year, conservative state lawmakers have filed more than 170 anti-LGBTQ bills — already surpassing last year’s 139 total — according to Freedom for All Americans. The majority of the bills target transgender minors’ ability to receive gender-affirming health care or participate in sports.
In the eighth point of Scott’s plan, labeled simply “Family,” he called out the “radical left” for seeking to “devalue and redefine the traditional family,” using language associated with activists opposed to same-sex marriage.
LGBTQ advocates slammed Scott’s proposals.
Brandon Wolf, the press secretary for advocacy group Equality Florida, said that Scott’s manifesto was “affirmation of what we’ve been trying to warn folks about.”
“What is happening in Florida isn’t isolated,” Wolf told NBC News. “It’s a test market for a national strategy by the extreme right to legislate this country back to 1960, mire us in culture wars and decimate the progress we’ve won.”
Scott, a first-term senator who is chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, is not the only Republican to preview how the GOP would pursue anti-LGBTQ legislation should it regain power in Washington.
Last month, former President Donald Trump said he would ban transgender women from participating in women’s sports nationwide if he were re-elected.
“We will ban men from participating in women’s sports,” Trump said during a rally in Conroe, Texas. “So ridiculous.”
Aside from how the GOP should navigate LGBTQ rights, Scott’s manifesto called for Republicans to “eliminate racial politics in America,” finish building a southern border wall and name it after Trump, and battle “the new religion of wokeness.”
Students have repeatedly vandalized Pride posters at Spencer Lyst’s high school in Williamson County, Tennessee. Teachers have skipped over LGBTQ issues in class textbooks. Trans kids in his state have been legally barred from competing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity. Parents have called on school officials to remove books about sexual orientation and gender identity from the county’s elementary curriculum. And while leading hisschool’s Pride club at a September homecoming parade, Lyst and other LGBTQ students were booed by a group of parents.
“I’m so used to it, but it shouldn’t be something I have to think about,” Lyst, 16, said of the near-constant feeling of being attacked at school because of his identity.
He even said it’s “difficult” to walk into the school bathroom for fear of what or who “might be in there.”
“Like, can I go to the bathroom or am I going to get hate for just existing?” he said.
Lyst’s school experience is a far cry from an isolated case.
Spencer LystCourtesy Spencer Lyst
Since the start of the school year, school officials in states across the country have banned books about gay and trans experiences, removed LGBTQ-affirming posters and flags and disbanded gay-straight alliance clubs. In school districts throughout the nation, students have attacked their queer classmates, while state lawmakers have filed hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills with many seeking to redefine lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer students’ places in U.S. schools.
“There is no separating any of these things,” Mary Emily O’Hara, the rapid response manager at LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD, said at a media briefing on Monday. “What we’re seeing here is anti-LGBTQ groups, on a national level, making schools the new battleground across the board, across various kinds of school policies and various forms of legislation. Schools are the target right now for the anti-LGBTQ movement.”
In the majority of cases, conservative school officials, lawmakers and parents say LGBTQ issues do not belong in school because they are “political” and “not age-appropriate” for students. Conversely, queer youth and their families, along with LGBTQ and ally teachers, say they feel they are being “erased” from the U.S. education system.
‘I’m not going back in the closet’
South Florida mom Jennifer Solomon, 50, has four children. Her eldest child, Nicolette, 28, is a lesbian who teaches fourth grade in Miami-Dade County. Her youngest, Cooper, 11, identifies as male, but Solomon said his “expression is female.” Cooper “never wanted to be a girl,” his mom explained, but he prefers to wear his school’s girls uniform and enjoys dressing up like a fairy-tale princess for fun.
“An easy way to describe it is that he’s the opposite of a tomboy,” she told NBC News.
Despite how hard she works to protect her children, Solomon — who leads her local chapter of PFLAG, an LGBTQ family advocacy group — said the slew of anti-LGBTQ school policies “keeps me up at night.”
Nicolette, Cooper and Jennifer Solomon.Courtesy Jennifer Solomon
On Monday, Solomon’s governor, Republican Ron DeSantis, signaledthat he would support a new piece of state legislation — titled the Parental Rights in Education bill, but dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — that would prohibit the discussion of sexuality and gender identity in schools.
Speaking at a news event in Miami, DeSantis said it is “entirely inappropriate” for teachers to be having conversations with students about gender identity, citing alleged instances of them telling children, “Don’t worry, don’t pick your gender yet,” and “hiding” classroom lessons from parents.
“Parental rights? Whose parental rights? Only parental rights if you’re raising a child according to DeSantis?” Solomon, who is a nurse manager at a health care company, said of DeSantis’ concerns. “DeSantis tries to paint this picture that every family is this 1950s mom and dad with two kids and a cat and dog. That is not what Florida looks like; that is not what the country looks like.”
“DeSantis has found a weak spot, and that weak spot is children,” she added, suggesting that DeSantis is supporting the measure for political gain.
Nicolette Solomon said she is already hesitant to mention her wife — and by default her sexuality — at school, but she said passage of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill would be “the straw that breaks the camel’s back” and vowed to quit if it becomes law.
Nicolette Solomon and her wifeCourtesy Nicolette Solomon
“If I can’t be myself, seven hours a day, five days a week, then I’m going back in the closet, and I can’t do that. It’s not good for my own mental health,” she said. “And I don’t think I can bear to see the students struggle and want to ask me about these things and then have to deny them that knowledge. That’s not who I am as a teacher.”
In less than two months since the start of the year, conservative state lawmakers have filed more than 170 anti-LGBTQ bills — already surpassing last year’s 139 total — with at least 69 of them centered on school policies, according to Freedom for All Americans. The nonprofit group, which advocates for LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections nationwide, said in an email that it didn’t track LGBTQ school policy bills last year, as it was not as much of a “sweeping trend” as it is now.
Three states — including Lyst’s home state of Tennessee — passed bills last year that allow parents to opt students out of any lessons or coursework that mention sexual orientation or gender identity, according to GLSEN, an advocacy group that aims to end LGBTQ discrimination in education. In addition to the “Don’t Say Gay” bill advancing in Florida, there are 15 bills under consideration in eight states that would silence speech about LGBTQ identities in classrooms, according to free speech nonprofit organization PEN America.
But perhaps the biggest trend in state bills targeting LGBTQ youths are those focused on transgender students.
Last year, legislators in at least 30 states weighed legislation that would bar trans students from competing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity, according to LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign. Nine of those states enacted the bills into law. So far this year, 27 states have proposed similar bills, with South Dakota enacting its version of the legislation into law this month.
While not school related, there has also been a slew of bills that seek to prevent transgender youths from accessing gender-affirming health care. At least 20 states have proposed such measures since early 2021, with two states — Arkansas and Tennessee — enacting these bills into law. However, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Arkansas law in July after the American Civil Liberties Union challenged it in court on behalf of trans youths and their families.
Cooper Solomon said he thinks lawmakers are pushing anti-LGBTQ legislation “because they were born in another time.”
“I guess back then, a long time ago, they didn’t accept this, and they thought it was really bad,” the fifth grader said. “I would just like them to know that it’s OK to be like this, and it’s not going to hurt anyone.”
Legislation aside, the last straw for Jack Petocz, 17, was when his high school in Flagler County, Florida, removed a young adult memoir detailing the trials of being a Black queer boy: George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue.”
In November, a school board member filed a criminal complaint against school officials for allowing copies of the book— which has been challenged in at least 19 states —to remain in two of the county’s high schools. The complaint was dismissed, but the superintendent decided to keep the book off of shelves until new policies are drafted to give parents more control over the library’s collection.
“I felt that my community was under attack, that they were trying to silence LGBTQ+ experiences and voices within our community,” Petocz, who is gay and led a student protest in response to the book’s removal, said. “We’re already a minority. Why are you trying to suppress this critical information within our libraries, you know? These books are critical to providing a sense of identity.”
Books about race, sexual orientation and gender identity have historically been challenged in schools, but over the last several months, school libraries have seen a surge of opposition.
In the fall, as book bans started to take off in counties across the country, national groups — including No Left Turn in Education and Moms for Liberty — began circulating lists of school library books that they said were “indoctrinating kids to a dangerous ideology” to rally support.
The bans then became a talking point in the contentious Virginia governor’s race, where the Republican candidate, former private equity executive and political newcomer Glenn Youngkin, made education a central issue of his campaign and swept to victory.
Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin speaks at an election night party in Chantilly, Va., on Nov. 3, 2021.Andrew Harnik / AP file
Youngkin’s victory prompted other politicians to jump onto the issue, with the governors of Texas and South Carolina urging state school officials in November to ban several books, deriding them as “pornography” and “obscene” content.
School board members in Virginia’s Spotsylvania County made national headlines after calling for LGBTQ books with “sexually explicit” material to be incinerated.
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom, said in November that while challenges to books with LGBTQ- and race-related content have historically been “constant,” the association has recently seen a “chilling” uptick.
“I’ve worked at ALA for two decades now, and I’ve never seen this volume of challenges come in,” she said.“The impact will fall to those students who desperately want and need books that reflect their lives, that answer questions about their identity, about their experiences that they always desperately need and often feel that they can’t talk to adults about.”
To counter LGBTQ book bans — and school bans on race-related texts — a group of more than 600 writers, including bestselling children’s author Judy Blume; publishers; bookstore owners; and advocacy groups signed a joint statement in December condemning the trend, arguing it “threatens the education of America’s children.”
Setting a ‘different tone’
While state bills and book bans have garnered the most media attention, advocates say there are a host of other troubling trends adding to the distress that many queer students are feeling: removals of Pride flags and other LGBTQ-affirming symbols from classrooms, disbandments of gay-straight alliance clubs and resignations of teachers in protest of anti-LGBTQ policies.
In the fall, for example, rainbow stickers were ordered to be scraped off classroom doors at MacArthur High School near Dallas.
“While we appreciate the sentiment of reaching out to students who may not previously always had such support, we want to set a different tone this year,” an email from a school official addressed to school staff read. NBC News obtained the email from a MacArthur High School teacher.
The sticker removals prompted a protest from the student body, but the pushback did not successfully encourage school officials to change their stance on the policy.
School board members in Newberg, Oregon, made national headlines in the fall for taking similar actions. In September, the school board banned educators from displaying Pride and Black Lives Matter flags and other symbols it considered “political” in school.
“We don’t pay our teachers to push their political views on our students. That’s not their place,” the school board member who authored the policy, Brian Shannon, said at a recorded board meeting.
The policy prompted town protests that attracted some members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group that has endorsed violence, who counterprotested the efforts. An attempt to recall Shannon and another school board member over the flag removals failed last month.
Some teachers have resigned in school districts over similar measures, like a Missouri teacher who resigned in September after his district mandated that he take down his Pride flag and not discuss human sexuality or “sexual preference” at school. In December, parents accused teachers at a middle school in Tennessee of trying to “indoctrinate” kids into being gay after helping students start a gay-straight alliance club.
In addition to parents, school officials and lawmakers, classmates are among those targeting LGBTQ students, according to advocacy groups and local news reports.
A national survey of LGBTQ students published in 2020 by GLSEN found that 69 percent of respondents reported experiencing verbal harassment at school based on their sexual orientation, 57 percent based on their gender expression or outward appearance, and 54 percent based on their gender identity.
Last year, more than a dozen local news articles —from California to Florida — reported on trans students being harassed or attacked by other students, some of them in bathrooms. However, advocates say it is unclear whether the attacks have increased or whether local outlets are reporting them at greater rates.
Impact of affirmation
Advocates have long been warning educators about the mental health risks plaguing LGBTQ youths and how anti-LGBTQ policies can exacerbate them.
A survey last year by The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ youth suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization, found that 42 percent of the nearly 35,000 LGBTQ youths who were surveyed — and over half of trans and nonbinary youths — seriously considered suicide within the prior year. Separately, two-thirds of LGBTQ youths said debates about anti-trans legislation have impacted their mental health negatively, according to a small survey The Trevor Project conducted in the fall.
However, researchers at The Trevor Project have also found that LGBTQ youths who reported having at least one LGBTQ-affirming space — such as a school, home or workplace — were significantly less likely to attempt suicide.
With that in mind, Lizette Trujillo drives three hours a day back and forth to her 14-year-old transgender son’s school in Tucson, Arizona. From the time when he socially transitioned in 2015, Daniel’s school was open to the idea of letting him use the bathroom that corresponded with his gender identity — which Trujillo said was not a given in Arizona — and already had experience teaching trans youth.
Daniel Trujillo.Courtesy Rachel Marie Photography
Trujillo said while the commute “is not without its challenges,” sending Daniel to a school where he is “not ‘othered’” has made him happier.
“The biggest difference at my school is that I’m supported by all my teachers and the principal and staff; I have access to sports and the bathrooms,” Daniel said. “It makes learning easier.”
It also freed up space for his mother to focus on securing her son gender-affirming health care, filing for new identification documents and working through emotional hardships.
“What people don’t realize is that you’re not just worried about school when your child socially transitions,” Trujillo said. “As you start this gender journey, you start to hit walls, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize I needed that,’ or, ‘I didn’t realize that was going to be a problem. I didn’t realize we were going to lose family.’”
In response to the slew of challenges plaguing LGBTQ students and teachers, President Joe Biden has vowed to lend his support. Earlier this month, the White House issued a rebuke of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, while connecting the legislation to the disputes happening nationally.
“Make no mistake — this is not an isolated action. Across the country, we’re seeing Republican leaders take actions to regulate what students can or cannot read, what they can or cannot learn, and most troubling, who they can or cannot be,” a White House spokesperson said in a statement to NBC News. “This is politics at its worse, cynically using our students as pawns in political warfare.”
Students ‘fighting for their basic rights’
There are a number of examples across the U.S. of students getting proactive and successfully turning around anti-LGBTQ policies.
Aaryan Rawal, 17, was one of more than 400 students in Fairfax County, Virginia, who successfully urged their school officials to reinstate two LGBTQ books in November. Rawal, who is gay, said he was relieved when school board members heeded students’ demands, but he lamented that the organizing efforts forced him to miss class and lose sleep.
“No student in any county in this country wants to go to school fighting for their basic rights,” Rawal said. “Instead of doing statistics homework or hanging out with friends, we were expected to go to school board meetings and lobby school board members for stuff that really shouldn’t be up for debate.”
Last month, a group of students in Palm Beach, Florida, met with their newly hired superintendent to describe their experience being LGBTQ in their county’s schools. They went around, one by one, and relayed stories of harassment and assault from students and bullying from teachers, according to two students who attended the meeting.
“Students have just gotten a collective consciousness that, ‘School sucks and because I’m LGBT this is to be expected,’ and that’s not normal,” Marcel Whyne, a nonbinary high school student who attended the meeting, said. “That shouldn’t be the level of standard that we have for LGBT kids. You’re entitled to be treated like your peers and go to school and, you know, just be bored at school like a normal student, not terrified that you’re going to be harassed and have photos taken of you and be embarrassed and assaulted just because you’re trying to be who you are.”
As for Spencer Lyst, in Tennessee, he set out to start his high school’s Pride club, Indy Pride, last fall with the goal of spreading awareness about the school’s LGBTQ community and providing “a place for people who may feel like they don’t have one.” While being booed by adults at his school’s homecoming was a “difficult” experience, he said he remains undeterred.
“People should know that no matter what bill they try to pass or book they try to ban or thing they try to ban teachers or students from talking about in schools, it doesn’t change who people are, and it doesn’t change who we’re going to continue to be,” Lyst said. “So trying to take a legal route to ‘protect your kids’ doesn’t work. They are who they are, and if you can’t accept that, maybe it’s you who has some work to do.”
A business coalition that is urging the passage of landmark LGBTQ rights legislation grew to more than 500 companies Tuesday.
Launched in 2016 by LGBTQ advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign, the Business Coalition for the Equality Act is a group of U.S. corporations that have pledged their support for a bill that would federally ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, known as the Equality Act.
As of Tuesday, the group was composed of 503 corporations — including 160 Fortune 500 companies — making it the largest business coalition to pledge support for LGBTQ equality, the HRC said. Corporations new to the coalition include McDonald’s, Harley-Davidson, Sony, REI, Honeywell, Edward Jones and Stop & Shop.
“Today’s announcement reinforces the breadth and depth of support for the Equality Act among America’s business leaders, who are joining a majority of Americans, hundreds of members of Congress, hundreds of advocacy organizations, and more than 60 business associations — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers — in endorsing the federal legislation,” the HRC said in a statement.https://iframe.nbcnews.com/JijNweL?_showcaption=true&app=1
As it stands, LGBTQ people in 29 states lack explicit nondiscrimination protections in employment, housing, loan applications, education, public accommodations and other areas.
To ensure protections nationwide, the House passed the Equality Act in February, largely along party lines, with only three Republicans throwing their support behind the bill.
The legislation faced Republican opposition again, stalling in the Senate in May. Republican senators argued that the bill would undermine women’s rights by allowing transgender girls and women to play on girls sports teams and would limit religious freedoms, among other things. Their argument echoed the nationwide push by conservative state lawmakers to restrict trans students’ athletic participation.
If the Equality Act were to pass in the Senate, President Joe Biden has repeatedly vowed to sign it into law. However, if he gets the opportunity to do so, he would still fall short of his campaign pledgeto sign the bill into law within his first 100 days in office.
While Congress is split on the matter, a large majority of Americans, 82 percent, favor laws that protect LGBTQ people from discrimination, according to a poll published in October by the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute.
The HRC cited the protections’ bipartisan backing among the American people as it lauded Tuesday’s milestone of corporate support for the Equality Act.
But as the HRC celebrated, some critics called its business coalition a form of “pinkwashing,” a term used to describe corporate exploitation of LGBTQ people.
“It’s a way for HRC to, like, ‘play with the big boys’ as it were, as well as to bring in money,” said Jay W. Walker, an organizer with the Reclaim Pride Coalition, the group behind New York City’s alternative LGBTQ Pride march. “For the corporations, it’s a way for them to pinkwash their images and to make LGBTQ people who don’t pay attention to the details think: ‘Oh great, they’re wonderful. They’re great corporate citizens.’”
Walker also noted that some of the same companies that publicly backed the passage of the Equality Act are funding the politicians who are standing in its way.
For example, AT&T, American Airlines and Southwest Airlines — which are member companies of the coalition — have each donated at least $48,000 to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, since 2017, according to campaign finance nonprofit organization OpenSecrets. Cruz was one of the Senate’s lead proponents against the Equality Act, calling it “dangerous.”
“We live in a society where you have to ferret out information in order to get the whole picture,” Walker said.
The business community’s support of the Equality Act is not the first time corporate America has tried to leverage its power to enact change for LGBTQ Americans. But the results have been mixed.
In support of same-sex marriage in 2015, 379 companies filed anamicus brief in the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court case, which resulted in the nationwide legalization of same-sex unions.
Conversely, as of Jan. 21, 2021, more than 150 companies had signed on to a pledge criticizing the slew of anti-trans bills proposed around the country. Hundreds of similar bills have been filed since then, with roughly 10 enacted into law last year.
