Schools are a powerful place to begin building an LGBTQ-affirming culture, as an antidote to fear and bigotry.
Hundreds of anti-LGBTQ laws and proposed legislation have swept across the United States in recent years. Although the majority of this legislation is defeated each year, the sheer number of bills targeting queer people, and specifically trans people, is unprecedented.
Cultural queerphobia is nothing new. In many ways, this recent wave of legislation is an overt escalation of the long-standing and long-normalized homophobia and transphobia in U.S. culture, not unlike the “Lavender Scare” of the 1950s.
Queer and trans people are deeply familiar with the myriad, relentless ways they experience daily discrimination, erasure, and misrepresentation interpersonally, institutionally, and through dominant beliefs and values. The cultural platforming of these values creates an environment for bigoted, discriminatory…