The Associated Press

In fifth grade, Stella Gage’s class watched a video about puberty. In ninth grade, a few sessions of her health class were dedicated to the risks of sexual behaviors.

That was the extent of her sex education in school. At no point was there any content that felt especially relevant to her identity as a queer teenager. To fill the gaps, she turned mostly to social media.

“My parents were mostly absent, my peers were not mature enough, and I didn’t have anyone else to turn to,” said Gage, who is now a sophomore at Wichita State University in Kansas.

Many LGBTQ students say they have not felt represented in sex education classes. To learn about their identities and how to build healthy, safe relationships, they often have had to look elsewhere.

As lawmakers in some states limit what can be taught about sex and gender, it will be that much more difficult for those students to come by inclusive material in classrooms.

New laws targeting LGBTQ people have been proliferating in GOP-led states. Some elected officials, including candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, have been pushing to remove LGBTQ content from classrooms.

Sex education curriculum varies widely. Some groups including Planned Parenthood have called for sex education to be inclusive of LGBTQ students, but some states outright forbid such an approach.

The penal code in Texas, for one, still says curriculum developed by the Department of State Health Services must say homosexuality is not acceptable and is a criminal offense, even though such language was deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003. Attempts in the Legislature to remove that line from state law have failed.

In practice, LGBTQ students say they have looked elsewhere for sex education. Some described watching their peers turn to pornography, and others said they watched videos on YouTube about how to tell if someone is gay and how to flirt with people of the same sex.

Gage grew up in Oklahoma before her military family relocated and she spent her eighth and ninth grade years in a U.S. Department of Defense school in the Netherlands. She then finished high school in Kansas, where she began to recognize she wasn’t attracted only to men.

Not seeing a safe outlet at her high school to explore who she was, she went online to research for herself the history of the LGBTQ community in the U.S.

“I started to realize there is a huge portion of our history that is conveniently left out. But that history is important to queer youth,” she said. She never really questioned gender or social norms, she said, until she started to learn about discrimination others have faced throughout history. “We have such rigid boxes that we expect people to fit into. If you didn’t fit, you were called slurs. I wasn’t really aware that if you strayed from those norms that people would feel you were attacking their way of life.”

Still, the internet contains vast amounts of false information. Some advocates worry students turning to the internet to fill gaps in sex education will struggle to find their way through the morass.

“Any time you have a political controversy, there is a greater potential for a lot more disinformation to be generated,” said Peter Adams, senior vice president of research and design at the News Literacy Project.

When schools address sexuality, it is often in the context of disease prevention or anti-bullying programs. School can be a difficult place if your identity is seen only in such negative ways, said Tim’m West, a former teacher and now executive director of the LGBTQ Institute at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. West can relate: He grew up in Arkansas as a queer Black kid and preacher’s son and was constantly made to feel ashamed.

“What if you are a boy in high school that knows you like boys, and you sit in a divided room and listen to a teacher explain how not to have sex with girls. You would be sitting there rolling your eyes, because that is not your issue. But you also haven’t been given any instructions on how to protect yourself should you experiment with a person of the same gender,” West said.

Students need more applicable sex education regardless of their gender identity or expression, said Gage, who volunteers with a youth justice advocacy group and is also president of the Planned Parenthood Generation Action Chapter at Wichita State.

“We all have to make large decisions for ourselves about our sexuality and reproductive health. Those decisions should be grounded in knowledge,” she said.

Growing up in Washington, D.C., Ashton Gerber had more sex education classes than most. But Gerber, who is transgender, said the lessons weren’t all that applicable to their experience.

“Even if you can have sex education every day of the year, there is always going to be something that gets left out,” said Gerber, who is a student at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Gerber said educators should point students to trusted online resources so they can do their own research.

Not knowing who you are is a horrible feeling many LGBTQ students wrestle with, Gage said. But equally horrible is not feeling accepted once you do understand your sexual identity.

“Had I known then what I know now, I would have felt safe and confident coming out sooner,” Gage said. “No one should feel like they don’t understand themselves because we are forced to conformity in a world that doesn’t care. We can all be inclusive.”

On the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington this summer, a few Black queer advocates spoke passionately before the main program about the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ rights. As some of them got up to speak, the crowd was still noticeably small.

Hope Giselle, a speaker who is Black and trans, said she felt the event’s programming echoed the historical marginalization and erasure of Black queer activists in the Civil Rights Movement. However, she was buoyed by the fact that prominent speakers drew attention to recent efforts to turn back the clock on LGBTQ rights, like the attacks on gender-affirming care for minors.

And despite valid concerns around the visibility of Black queer advocates in activist movements, progress is being made in elected office. This month, Sen. Laphonza Butler made history as the first Black and openly lesbian senator in Congress, when California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed her to fill the seat held by the late Dianne Feinstein.

Rectifying the erasure of Black queer civil rights giants requires a full-throated acknowledgment of their legacies, and an increase of Black LGBTQ representation in advocacy and politics, several activists and lawmakers told The Associated Press.

“One of the things that I need for people to understand is that the Black queer community is still Black,” and face anti-Black racism as well as homophobia and transphobia, said Giselle, communications director for the GSA Network, a nonprofit that helps students form gay-straight alliance clubs in schools.

“On top of being Black and queer, we have to also then distinguish what it means to be queer in a world that thinks that queerness is adjacent to whiteness — and that queerness saves you from racism. It does not,” she said.

In an interview with the AP, Butler said she hopes that her appointment points toward progress in the larger cause of representation.

“It’s too early to tell. But what I know is that history will be recorded in our National Archives, the representation that I bring to the United States Senate,” she said last week. “I am not shy or bashful about who I am and who my family is. So, my hope is that I have lived out loud enough to overcome the tactics of today.”

“But we don’t know yet what the tactics of erasure are for tomorrow,” Butler said.

Butler is a bellwether of increased visibility of queer communities in politics in recent years. In fact Black LGBTQ political representation has grown by 186% since 2019, according to a 2023 report by the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute. That included the election of now-former New York Representatives Mondaire Jones and Ritchie Torres, who were the first openly gay Black and Afro-Latino congressmen after the 2020 election, as well as former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

These leaders stand on the shoulders of civil rights heroes such as Bayard Rustin, Pauli Murray, and Audre Lorde. In accounts of their contributions to the Civil Rights and feminist movements, their Blackness is typically amplified while their queer identities are often minimized or even erased, said David Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, a LGBTQ civil rights group.

Rustin, who was an adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a pivotal architect of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, is a glaring example. The march he helped lead tilled the ground for the passage of federal civil rights and voting rights legislation in the next few years.

But the fact that he was gay is often reduced to a footnote rather than treated as a key part of his involvement, Johns said.

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“We need to teach our public school students history, herstory, our beautifully diverse ways of being, without censorship,” he said.

An upcoming biopic of Rustin’s life will undoubtedly help thrust the topic of Black LGBTQ political representation into the public conversation, said Shay Franco-Clausen, a commissioner of Alameda County in California.

“I didn’t even learn about those same leaders, Black leaders, Black queer leaders until I got to college,” she said.

The film, titled “Rustin,” debuts in select theaters Nov. 3 and Netflix on Nov. 17.

Some believe the erasure of Black LGBTQ leaders stems from respectability politics, a strategy in some marginalized communities of ostracizing or punishing members who don’t assimilate into the dominant culture.

White supremacist ideology in Christianity, which has been used more broadly to justify racism and systemic oppression, has also promoted the erasure of Black queer history. The Black Christian church was integral to the success of the Civil Rights Movement, but it is also “theologically hostile” to LGBTQ communities, said Don Abram, executive director of Pride in the Pews.

“I think it’s the co-optation of religious practices by white supremacists to actually subjugate Black, queer, and trans folk,” Abram said. “They are largely using moralistic language, theological language, religious language to justify them oppressing queer and trans folk.”

Not all queer advocacy communities have been welcoming to Black LGBTQ voices. Minneapolis City Council President Andrea Jenkins said she is just as intentional in amplifying queer visibility in Black spaces as she is amplifying Blackness in majority white, queer spaces.

“We need to have more Black, queer, transgender, nonconforming identified people in these political spaces to aid and bridge those gaps,” Jenkins said. “It’s important to be able to create the kinds of awareness on both sides of the issue that can bring people together and that can ensure that we do have full participation from our community.”

Black LGBTQ leaders are also using their platforms to create awareness about groundbreaking historical figures, especially Rustin. Maryland Delegate Gabriel Acevero and several LGBTQ advocates fought to get the only elementary school in his district named after Rustin in 2018. He has also urged Congress to pass legislation to create a U.S. Postal Service stamp depicting Rustin.

“Black queer folks have contributed to so many movements that we do not get acknowledgment for,” Acevero said. “And this is why we should not only ensure that our elders get their flowers, but we should push to have their names and statues built … so that they are not forgotten.”

Associated Press

Nebraska is requiring transgender youth seeking transition-related care to wait seven days to start puberty blocking medications or hormone treatments under emergency regulations announced Sunday by the state health department.

The regulations also require transgender minors to undergo at least 40 hours of “gender-identity-focused” therapy that are “clinically neutral” before receiving any medical treatments meant to affirm their gender identities. A new law that took effect Sunday bans transition-related surgeries for trans youth under 19 and also required the state’s chief medical officer to spell out when and how those youth can receive other care.

The state Department of Health and Human Services announcement that Republican Gov. Jim Pillen had approved the emergency regulations came after families, doctors and even lawmakers said they had largely gotten no response from the department on when the regulations would be in place. They worried that Pillen’s administration was slow-walking them to block treatments for transgender youth who hadn’t already started them.

“The law went into effect today, which is when the emergency regulations were put in place,” department spokesperson Jeff Powell said in an email Sunday to The Associated Press. “Nothing was slow-walked.”

The new regulations remain in effect while the department takes public comments on a permanent set of rules. The agency said it plans to release a proposed final version by the end of October and then have a public hearing on Nov. 28 in Lincoln, the state capital.

Grant Friedman, a legal fellow for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska, said it’s helpful to have the rules in place so that new transgender patients can get care. However, he said, medical professionals already follow international standards for treating trans youth, making the Legislature’s intervention unnecessary.

“These are decisions to be made between patients, parents, providers,” he said after a transgender rights rally Sunday at the Nebraska State Capitol.

Nebraska’s ban on gender-affirming surgeries for minors and its restrictions on other gender-affirming care were part of a wave of measures rolling back transgender rights in Republican-controlled statehouse across the U.S.

At least 22 states have enacted laws restricting or banning transition-related medical care for transgender minors, and most of those states face lawsuits. An Arkansas ban mirroring Nebraska’s was struck down by a federal judge in June as unconstitutional and will be appealed to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court, which also handles Nebraska cases.

During the signing ceremony for the new Nebraska law, Pillen suggested that children and their parents who seek gender-affirming treatment are being “duped,” adding, “that is absolutely Lucifer at its finest.” The state’s chief medical officer, Dr. Timothy Tesmer, is a Pillen appointee.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends gender-affirming care for people under 18, citing an increased risk of suicide for transgender teens.

Nebraska’s new regulations require that a patient’s parents or legal guardians be involved in any treatment, including the 40 required hours of therapy. It also requires at least one hour of therapy every three months after that care starts “to evaluate ongoing effects on a patient’s mental health.”

The seven-day waiting period for puberty blockers or hormone treatments would start when a doctor receives a signed consent form from a parent or legal guardian. Patients who are emancipated minors also could sign off on their own.

The department said in an online document meant to answer frequently asked questions that the waiting period would give patients and their families “enough time to weigh the risks and benefits of treatment.” Friedman said it’s not yet clear what the practical effect will be on patients getting care.

The same state health department document says that the required 40 hours of therapy would allow doctors “to develop a thorough understanding of a patient’s needs.”

But Friedman said the requirement is problematic because of a lack of mental health providers able to provide the therapy.

“It just adds an additional barrier to existing care barriers that already exist in our health care system,” he said.