The family of Nigel Shelby, a 14-year-old Huntsville, Alabama teenager, has launched a lawsuit against Huntsville City Schools for civil rights violations and wrongful death. Shelby, a gay youth, took his own life in 2019 following extensive bullying at school over his sexual orientation.
“Fourteen-year-old Nigel Shelby was bullied by his peers for his race and sexual orientation, and when he sought help from school administrators, was told that his sexuality was his choice,” the family said in a statement, according to Alabama.com. “School administrators did not alert Nigel’s parents of his struggles in school so that he could receive help from a licensed mental health professional. On April 18, 2019, Nigel Shelby died by suicide. Following his death, school administrators alerted Nigel’s mother to look for a suicide note in his backpack, revealing that they were aware of his plans to take his own life.”
Huntsville City Schools released a statement of their own last month, apparently anticipating the lawsuit. The district reiterated that it does not support bullying, and has resources available for LGBTQ students to receive counseling as well.
“The district wishes to remind students, families, and staff members of the longstanding resources in place to support students,” the statement read in part. “At the district level, pillar two of the district’s strategic plan is Whole Student Development. This pillar includes resources dedicated to supporting the social and emotional needs of students. These include feeder-pattern social workers, licensed mental health professionals, and frequent professional development for staff on topics including culturally responsive instruction; equity and inclusion; and suicide prevention.”“Consistent with the district’s Core Values, HHS has a strong Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) in place to provide support to LGBTQ+ students, and the district has partnered with GLSEN and the Anti-Defamation League to support its schools and students,” the district also added.Despite advances in legal standing, civil rights and cultural visibility, LGBTQ youth continue to have much higher rates of depression, suicide and self-harm which experts attribute to cultural stigma and hostility. Anti-suicide charity The Trevor Project reports that gay and bisexual youth are five times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual counterparts.
President Joe Biden has nominated the police chief who is believed to be the first gay police chief to get married in the U.S. to lead Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Tuscon, Arizona Police Chief Chris Magnus made national headlines for his support for the Black Lives Matter movement and for his criticisms of former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Biden choice of Magnus to be the next Commissioner of CBP signals his intent on changing the culture of the sprawling agency charged with enforcing trade, customs, and immigration laws.
Magnus was police chief in Richmond, California from 2006 to 2015. During his tenure, he was credited with hiring more women and minorities, increasing communication between the police and the community, and increasing police accountability.
By the time he went on to be the police chief of Tuscon, 60 percent of the Richmond Police Department’s active police officers were non-white, and almost all the officers who were there when he started had left.
“It’s easier to get new people in a department than it is to get a new culture in a department,” Magnus said at the time.
He also made headlines a few times when he was in Richmond. He married Terrance Cheung, the chief of staff to the mayor of Richmond in 2014, and the two were dubbed “the city’s power couple.”
Magnus was the first known police chief to take advantage of marriage equality, and he and Cheung moved to Tuscon together in 2016.
Magnus also got attention for a picture of him holding a Black Lives Matter sign in 2014 during the protests of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
“We support people’s rights to peacefully protest. We have a lot of respect for all lives in our community, Black, brown, everyone,” he told Richmond Confidential at the time. “Our goal is to promote and build the strongest relationships possible between the police and the community.”
But it’s his time as Tuscon Police Chief that is drawing the most attention now. Richmond, California is in the Bay Area and is far from the border, but Tuscon is much closer, putting him at odds with the Trump administration on immigration law.
In March 2017, the Tuscon Police Department refused to help Border Patrol capture an escaped detainee who allegedly crossed the border illegally, and they even evicted a task force set up to find the suspect from the police department.
The Observer reported that this led to bad blood between the law enforcement agencies and “homophobic language in their private comments” from Border Patrol officers on an online forum.
Later that year, he wrote a New York Times op-ed denouncing the Trump administration’s efforts to increase deportations, saying that it made it harder to enforce the law when witnesses and victims are afraid to talk to police.
“The harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric and [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions’s reckless policies ignore a basic reality known by most good cops and prosecutors,” he wrote. “If people are afraid of the police, if they fear they may become separated from their families or harshly interrogated based on their immigration status, they won’t report crimes or come forward as witnesses.”
“It’s a simple formula. When crimes go unreported and unsolved, criminals are empowered.”
The Biden administration mentioned his time in Tuscon in their brief announcement of his appointment.
“In Tucson, Magnus implemented de-escalation training, sentinel event review processes, and programs to promote officer health and wellness,” the White House said in a statement. “Because of Tucson’s proximity to the border, he has extensive experience in addressing immigration issues.”
Just after his nomination was announced, Magnus said that he wants to talk to senators and border patrol agents before he discusses policy changes for the border.
“Sometimes it’s frustrating how hyperpartisan all these issues can become, but I want to say from the very start, I am no ideologue and I do want to make a difference on things,” he told the New York Times on Monday.
Last year, Magnus offered his resignation following the in-custody death of a 27-year-old man, Carlos Ingram-Lopez. The Tuscon City Manager refused Magnus’s resignation.
Three officers also resigned in connection to Ingram-Lopez’s death, and Magnus said that he would have fired them if they didn’t resign.
An ISIS recruiter who stabbed a gayman to death and critically injured another because they were holding hands has gone on trial Tuesday (13 April).
The streets of Dresden, Germany, were seized by fear and violence after 21-year-old Abdullah AHH, wielding a large kitchen knife, stabbed two tourists who visited the eastern town on 4 October 2020.
AHH, a Syrian refugee, is facing one count of murder for fatally stabbing Thomas L, 55, and one count of attempted murder for wounding Thomas’s partner Oliver L, 53, according to the MailOnline.
His only regret, AHH told court psychologists, was not killing Oliver. He said the couple “committed a grave sin” by holding hands in public, Dresden Higher Regional Court heard.
Arrested two weeks after the Dresden knife attack, federal prosecutors say that AHH worked for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, a sprawling terrorist and ultra-radical Islamist group.
It was a vacation that slipped into disarray after the couple journeyed from the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia to Dresden to unwind and relax.
Out and about on a mild Autumn day in Saxony’s capital, Thomas and Oliver were both punctured with a 21-centimetre kitchen knife by AHH.
Thomas died of his injuries while Oliver survived, being badly wounded.
The attack deeply alarmed government officials, with it reportedly being the first known Islamist-motivated killing of a gay person in the country.
“Investigations have shown that the dreadful killing in Dresden had an Islamist background,” justice minister Christine Lambrecht said of the incident at the time.
“Islamist terror is a major, enduring threat to our society that we have to tackle determinedly.”
Prosecutors have claimed that the horrific killing was fuelled by radical Islamist ideology.
AHH’s biography is one of plots to carry out shuddering acts of violence onto others in the name of the Islamic State.
He was granted refugee status in May 2016 in Germany after travelling from Aleppo.
According to Bild, a German newspaper, AHH sought to recruit more to ISIS while threatening to “cut out” the tongues of Christian civilians when he lived in asylum.
“I will slaughter you today,” he wrote in a letter. “You have a big mouth and I’ll cut off your tongue, you Christian.”
In 2018, AHH was sentenced to spend two years and nine months in jail for allegedly planning a suicide bomb attack with the help of other militants.
His Facebook profile at the time was covered in ISIS symbols, retooling the social media platform to recruit more to the militant group while searching online for how to build an explosives belt. One that, the court heard, would have been detonated during a high-profile film festival.
AHH had been released from a juvenile detention centre only days before the attack.
He had been arrested once before in 2017, with the authorities wary that, if released, it would be likely that AHH would attack as he was categorised as likely to pose a threat to public safety by police.
Indeed, prosecutors have alleged that AHH did plan to kill again after stabbing the gay couple – but they did not provide further details at the time.
He was tied to the murder after investigators found DNA traces on the weapon, which was left at the scene – AHH had purchased a knife just two days before the incident.
The Michigan Court of Appeals has overturned a decision to remove a lesbian mother’s name from her children’s birth certificates.
Lanesha Matthews and Kyresha LeFever had a custody battle for their twins, who were born before same-sex marriage was legalised nationwide in the United States.
The couple had their children using LaFever’s egg, fertilised using donor sperm, which Matthews then carried.
When the children were born both mothers’ names were listed on the birth certificates. However, the couple split in 2014 and in the custody battle, a Michigan judge ruled that Matthews’ name be removed from the birth certificates.
The case was brought to the Michigan Court of Appeals where two judges ruled that the law had been “misapplied”, designating Matthews as a legal parent.
The decision was published earlier this month and stipulated that Matthews and LeFever “agreed to create and parent a child together” and “a genetic connection to one’s child is unnecessary to establish maternity”.
ay Kaplan, staff attorney for the ACLU of Michigan’s LGBT+ Project, told Pride Source: “The court was raising the question as to who is considered to be a legal parent.
“The family court judge decided that this relationship was like a surrogacy parenthood agreement. And the gestational mum [Matthews], because she wasn’t related by genetics, that she was not a natural parent.”
Calling the lower court’s decision “outrageous, Kaplan explained: “You have a mom who’s been co-parenting her children, has a relationship with her children for seven years, and the court’s saying, ‘Oh, no, sorry, you’re not a parent because you’re not biologically related to the child and, therefore, I’m going to strip you of your legal status as a parent.’ And the analysis of how she arrived at that result was pretty tortured.”
Kaplan explained the ramifications of the judges’ decision: “It’s a much larger burden for a third party to challenge the other parent’s custody arrangement.
“What was flawed about this in so many ways is that most state courts do not define a parent solely based on being genetically related. We have people who adopt children; we have heterosexual couples who use reproductive technology who might not be able to have children on their own.”
The court echoed Kaplan’s views, stating that under Michigan law a man is still considered to be a “legal parent” of a child his wife bears through reproductive technology if he consented to the procedure, and same-sex couples “should have precisely the same right”.
Despite the country-wide legalisation of same-sex marriage, LGBT+ couples can still face barriers to parenthood in Michigan.
In 2019, several faith-based adoption agencies sued the state argued that not being allowed to refuse LGBT+ people infringed on their rights. Later this year, one Catholic foster agency will go to the Supreme Court after the city of Philadelphia stopped working with them when it found out about its refusal to work with same-sex parents.
LGBT+ youth are being forced into homelessness after sexual abuse from family members, a shocking report confirms, with many having casual sex to keep a roof over their head while homeless.
Almost a fifth (17 per cent) of LGBT+ young people surveyed by LGBT+ youth homelessness charity akt said they felt like they had to have casual sex to find somewhere to stay while they were homeless. A similar number (16 per cent) said they engaged in sex work as a direct result of being made homeless.
The charity asked 161 LGBTQ+ young people about their experiences of homelessness in the last five years in the UK. Almost a quarter (24 per cent) said they experienced being homeless for one to three months, while 21 per cent experienced up to six months of being homeless. Almost three per cent said they had been homeless for over three years.
The damning report found that many LGBT+ young people experienced sexual abuse before being made homeless. One in six (16 per cent) said they were forced by family members to do sexual acts before they became homeless. The same number said they experienced this with a romantic partner.
Sadly, the akt report found abuse was prevalent in other areas. Two-thirds (66 per cent) of LGBT+ young homeless people said they were repeatedly belittled by family members to the point they felt worthless, and a similar number (61 per cent) said they felt frightened or threatened by their family before they became homeless.
Half (50 per cent) said, before they were homeless, they feared expressing their LGBT+ identity to their family would result in them being evicted.
Tim Sigsworth, chief executive of akt, and Terry Stacy, chair, said in a joint statement that the tragic report provided evidence for rethinking how organisations and the UK government support young LGBT+ people at risk of homelessness.
The charity called for the government to introduce “mandatory monitoring of gender and sexuality as a first vital step across housing and homelessness services” which it said would lead to “faster and more responsive interventions”.
akt said there also needed to be a “stronger emphasis on prevention focused intervention” to limit the long-term impacts of homelessness including “poor mental health and perpetual journeys of abuse”.
Rick Henderson, CEO of Homeless Link, said the akt research shows the “abuse many LGBTQ+ young people experience in their family home”. He said the experience of homelessness is “isolating and can inhibit young people’s opportunities to build relationships and communities with their peers”.
“This report shines a light on the experiences of abuse, discrimination and suffering faced by young people who are marginalised due to their sexuality or gender identity,” Henderson said.
“While there is extensive research about how early experiences of adversity impact on health and social welfare, this research provides an explicit picture of how these experiences lead to and sustain young LGBTQ+ people’s homelessness and risk of further abuse and exploitation.”
A South African man is on trial for the brutal murder of a gay man who was butchered and burned in a suspected hate crime.
The mutilated remains of 40-year-old Andile “Lulu” Ntuthela were found in a shallow grave 11 days after his murder. He is believed to have been killed simply because he was gay.
The 28-year-old suspect, who has not yet been named, appeared at the Kwa-Nobuhle Magistrates Court in the Eastern Cape on Tuesday (13 April).
Police spokesperson Col Priscilla Naidu said he was arrested after the man’s family complained to the police that he had burnt bedding at his house.
“On 1 April, the family reported the malicious property damage to police and indicated that they were suspicious that he may have been involved in some other criminal activity,” she said. “Police went to the house and found bloodstains inside his room as well as outside.”
The suspect was hospitalised for a mental health condition between 1 and 9 April. On his discharge from hospital he was arrested and detained for malicious damage to property.
Information about Ntuthela’s murder emerged under questioning, and officers found his remains only a few paces from the alleged killer’s front door.
“The murder is suspected to be LGBTQI linked,” Naidu confirmed.
The gruesome killing in South Africa comes days after another gay manwas stabbed to death and dumped in a ditch near a school.
As Ntuthela’s murder forced South Africans to confront the reality of this mounting death toll, members of KwaNobuhle’s LGBT+ community were left reeling.
“We know we are not safe. We only hang out with people that we know and trust because we know the prejudice we face,” said Sixolile Ndlondlo, Ntuthela close friend, speaking to The Herald.
“Andile knew his [alleged] killer. They were friends. For him to be killed like this … has us questioning who we can trust.”
Sibonelo Ncanana-Trower, spokesperson for Nelson Mandela Bay LGBTI Sector, urged queer South Africans to speak out against the increase in homophobic hate.
“[We are] deeply worried about Lulu’s murder and would like that the heavy might of law be felt by the killer,” Ncanana-Trower said to IOL.
“We call on the community to not be silent on such cases and to speak out. The Sector notes the increase in crimes of hate in the country and calls on government to intervene and work with the sector in engaging the community.
“Hate crimes don’t only affect the victim and family, it affects the whole community in a negative way.”
A candlelit prayer to celebrate Ntuthela’s life will be held on Thursday (15 April), the Sector said.
A chilling new bill in Texas would define the parents of trans kids who consenting to their affirming healthcare as “child abusers”.
Texas Senate Bill 1646 was filed on 11 March, 2021, and is sponsored by 13 Republican state senators.
The bill states that a person will be considered guilty of child abuse by “consenting to or assisting in the administering or supplying of, a puberty suppression prescription drug or cross-sex hormone to a child, other than an intersex child, for the purpose of gender transitioning or gender reassignment” or “performing or consenting to the performance of surgery or another medical procedure on a child, other than an intersex child, for the purpose of gender transitioning or gender reassignment”.
The bill places Texas parents consenting to gender-affirming care for their trans kids alongside those who create child porn, sexually abuse children, give illegal drugs to children and those who facilitate forced child marriages.
Penalties for child abuse in Texas include jail time, fines, and removal of the child.
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) staff attorney Chase Strangio wrote on Twitter: “This bill in Texas, SB1646, would remove trans kids from their homes if a parent affirms their gender. Truly barbaric.”
In response, the Texas charity Doctors For Change wrote an open letter to state senator Bryan Hughes, who chairs the Senate State Affairs Committee, condemning the bill and its implications for both parents and healthcare providers.
It wrote that its “more than 1,000 healthcare provider members… vehemently oppose SB1646”.
The letter continued: “We care for Texans of all ages, including transgender and non-binary children, youth, and adults, and we are appalled by the blatant intention of SB1646 to characterise the provision of our compassionate, evidence-based care as ‘child abuse’ and to levy criminal penalties against providers who are putting the health and wellbeing of patients first, as is our duty to do, as well as parents/ guardians who are properly ensuring their children receive necessary care.”
The group also pointed out that because of mandatory reporting of child abuse, the bill would “mandate any healthcare provider report minors receiving certain care which would irreparably damage the trust and confidentiality of patient-provider relationships”.
The White House is not ruling out any legal action being taken in the future against states in which lawmakers are pushing anti-trans laws, including banning transgender athletes from female sports teams.
Press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday (8 April) that president Joe Bidenwould continue to advocate for LGBT+ rights amid the flurry of new state laws against trans youth. But she stopped short of committing to any legal action against them.
Chris Johnson, the White House correspondent for the Washington Blade, asked Psaki if Biden would “reach out to the attorney general” to begin legal action against states which enacted anti-trans bills. He pointed out that state legislatures had been ‘warned’ that “anti-transgender bills are an illegal form of sex discrimination”.
Johnson specifically cited the actions of the Arkansas legislature, which overrode its governor’s veto to pass an anti-trans healthcare bill. The cruel ban, which passed into law on Tuesday (6 April), makes it illegal for healthcare professionals in Arkansas to offer gender-affirming care like puberty blockers and hormone treatment to trans youth.
Arkansas has also become the second state to ban transgender athletes from female sports teams. Mississippi’s governor has also signed a law banning transgender athletes from girls’ school sports.
Psaki said she can’t “stand here and predict legal action” as the ultimate decision on if action would go forward lies with the Justice Department and attorney general, Merrick Garland. However, she said Joe Biden remains committed to advocating for LGBT+ rights and transgender equality in the US.
“What I can say is that the president’s view is that all persons should receive equal treatment under law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation,” Psaki said.
“That’s fundamental to how he will make laws — advocate for laws, I should say; how he will communicate about his views on the rights of transgender individuals in the country; and certainly, you know, what his view is as it relates to any actions by the government.”
In a follow-up question, Johnson asked if Biden would engage in communication with Garland about the anti-trans legislation. Psaki said the president “certainly can”, but she reiterated: “I don’t have anything to predict for you at this time.”
Garland has said he will advocate for stronger protections for trans Americans. In a hearing before the Senate about his nomination to the office of the attorney general, he promised to combat violence against the trans committee, especially Black, trans women, in the US.
He said it was the “job of the Justice Department to stop” the murders of transgender Americans and protect trans youth. Garland said: “It’s clear to me that this kind of hateful activity has to stop, and yes, we need to put resources into it.”
But in the same hearing, Garland dodged questions about bans on transgender athletes being included in girls’ and women’s sports. He declined to comment on questions, saying he hasn’t had the “chance to consider these kinds of issues” in his career.
The NCAA Board of Governors released a statement Monday that it will not host championships in places that discriminate against transgender athletes.
“The NCAA Board of Governors firmly and unequivocally supports the opportunity for transgender student-athletes to compete in college sports. This commitment is grounded in our values of inclusion and fair competition,” the statement read in part.
A spokesperson said the NCAA has not made decisions about specific championships at this point in time but is monitoring the situation.
Heather Hughes, a music and math teacher at a private school in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, said a 16-year-old student pulled out her phone Monday afternoon and announced that Gov. Asa Hutchinson had vetoed a bill that would have banned transgender minors from accessing gender-affirming medical care.
Hughes said it shows that young people understand the national conversation about trans youth, who are the focus of a wave of state bills that seek to restrict their access to transition-related medical care and sports.
“They get that something’s up, and they understand enough to be like, ‘This is a bad idea,’” Hughes said of her students. “They think it’s asinine. They don’t understand why it’s a big deal in the first place, like why bother making these bills, and so then anytime it’s brought up, they’re mostly infuriated.”
Another student, who is 15, talked to Hughes last week about how they wanted to start testosterone soon. But on Tuesday, the Arkansas Legislature overrode Hutchinson’s veto, and the state is now poised to become the first to ban gender-affirming care for trans minors.
The law bans insurance plans from covering or reimbursing the cost of transition-related care for minors, including puberty blockers and hormones. After it takes effect this summer, Hughes’ student won’t be able to use testosterone unless they pay out of pocket, which Hughes said is “not that likely given their situation.”
Heather Hughes.Courtesy Heather Hughes
Hughes, who is also trans, called the Arkansas law “ridiculous” and said it “opens up the door to more restrictions.” She said her doctor informed her that part of the law will also explicitly allow private insurance companies in the state to refuse to cover gender-affirming care for trans people of any age.
“We’re already getting priced out of so many things and already face enough — why make it worse?”
Hughes is one of 17,300 educators in the U.S. and Canada who signed an open letter to President Joe Biden Monday calling on him to do more to directly address the wave of state bills targeting transgender young people. There are currently 20 states that have introduced bills that would prohibit or restrict transition care for trans minors, according to the ACLU, and more than 30 that have introduced measures that would ban trans student athletes from competing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity. According to the Movement Advancement Project, five states — Arkansas, Idaho, Mississippi, Tennessee and South Dakota — have passed such legislation, though a federal judge stopped Idaho’s law from taking effect last August.
Harper Keenan, an assistant professor in the department of curriculum and pedagogy at the University of British Columbia, helped organize the letter.
Keenan taught elementary students in New York City public schools for five years, and said the bills create a dangerous power dynamic. Legislation that bans transgender student athletes from competing on the sports teams that align with their gender identity, for example, positions transgender girls “as predators invading girls’ spaces,” he said.
Harper Keenan.Courtesy Bonnie Chan
“This is a violation of some of our most fundamental responsibilities as educators, which is to support and protect the young people that we work with,” Keenan said. “When we position young people as predators, especially a particular group of young people as predators, we really put them in danger.”
The letter from educators calls on the Biden administration to protect transgender young people’s access to health care, school facilities and activities, and school records and identification that reflects their self-identified gender.
“Anti-trans bills are merely the tip of a much larger iceberg of anti-trans sentiment, gender misunderstandings, and the scapegoating of trans youth that serves to mobilize a conservative base,” the letter states.
The Biden administration did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment on the letter, but an official did confirm that Biden issued an executive order this month stating that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which protects students at schools receiving public funds from sex-based discrimination, also protects them from discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. The Department of Justice supported Biden’s order in a memo released Monday, which said it interprets Title IX to protect LGBTQ students.
The official also said the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights announced on Tuesday that it will conduct a comprehensive review of Title IX regulations to fulfill Biden’s recent executive order.
Lawmakers who support restrictions on trans student athletes have said these measures are necessary to protect cisgender girls’ opportunities in sports. However, legislators in almost all the states considering bans could not cite any known cases where trans girls’ participation in sports caused a problem in their state or region, according to an Associated Press report published last month.
Still, Hutchinson said the state’s ban on trans athletes in sports, which he signed March 25, “will help promote and maintain fairness in women’s sporting events.”
Supporters of the gender-affirming care restrictions argue that they’re protecting minors who are too young to make medical decisions. The sponsor of Arkansas’ recently passed trans health bill, state Rep. Robin Lundstrum, a Republican, compared it to laws that prevent minors from purchasing alcohol until they’re 21.
“They need to get to be 18 before they make those decisions,” Lundstum said, according to The Associated Press.
Some teachers believe the debate over trans minors’ access to care is really a debate over their existence. Elizabeth-Marie Helms, a trans middle school social studies teacher in Fort Wayne, Indiana, said legislators “don’t really have any interest in science-based medicine.” She noted that lawmakers in Indiana, like those in Arkansas, want to ban trans minors’ access to puberty blockers, even though they have long been used to treat precocious puberty in cisgender youth and wouldn’t be banned for cisgender young people.
“I try to teach my students, ‘Listen to others with empathy. Even if you don’t agree with them, try to understand their points of view,’” Helms said. “In these cases at the state level, it’s just really unclear what a sincere approach to these Republican talking points would even look like, because it just nakedly looks like they’re trying to erase trans people.”
Some cisgender educators like Melissa Tracy, who teaches at a high school in Delaware, said they’re worried about the effects of the bills on trans students at school.
“It’s personal for me, because I think of every trans student who has ever sat in my classroom, and, frankly, they deserve better,” she said. “They are not political pawns.”
Tracy said she participated in a workshop 10 years ago that changed her understanding of the needs of LGBTQ youth. The presenter said that 30 to 40 percent of LGBTQ students will experience suicidal ideation. (That number is higher for trans youth: Fifty-two percent reported that they seriously considered suicide from December 2019 to March 2020, according to the Trevor Project’s 2020 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health.)
“Since then, I’ve tried to really do right by the students that I teach,” Tracy said.
Several states, including Alabama and Iowa, are considering bills that would force state employees, including teachers, to out students to their parents if they believe a student is questioning their gender. Being forced to “out” a student takes away their agency and jeopardizes one of the few places that some trans youth feel safer, according to Tracy.
“Why wouldn’t we want to do whatever we can to create safe spaces for our students, because, frankly, some of the students that I have taught have not been accepted at home, and literally the only place where they might feel accepted is at school,” she said. “And then you remove that space of acceptance, and they can’t be who they want to be, and that’s just not right.”
Some teachers and advocates say they’re already seeing the national conversation affect trans students.
Julia Cuneo, a youth organizer and educator who helps high school students in Detroit with advocacy campaigns, said a few students have reached out to “express fear and concern” after Republican lawmakers in Michigan introduced a trans athlete ban.
“We have some students who are trans and genderqueer and who are really worried about the ways that their school will target them, and the ways that they won’t be able to express themselves in their classes,” Cuneo, who uses gender neutral pronouns, said. Some students fear their identity could be both disrespected and used against them or that they could be outed.
“They don’t know exactly how this will manifest,” Cuneo said. “The legislators write the law but then it’s kind of up to schools how it gets enforced, and so that uncertainty is really really scary.”
Cuneo said the bills put students and teachers against each other. They said they don’t know of any teachers who openly support Michigan’s athlete ban, but “I’ve definitely talked to teachers who feel like, ‘Well, the law is the law, and I have to do it or I’ll get in trouble.’”
Currently, both teachers and students want to create a safe environment for learning, but if the bills become law, their interests would clash, according to Cuneo.
“I think that’s really the end goal of the GOP in this moment, is to try and put that wedge between supporters and allies, people who are in solidarity with queer people, and the young people who are coming out,” they said.
Tracy said she wonders whether the sponsors of the bills know any trans youth or have spoken with any.
“I guarantee you that if they took even just 10 minutes out of their busy schedule to talk to somebody that perhaps their viewpoint might change,” she said. “Ultimately, I think this is just what I want to tell those legislators: It’s not about you. It’s not about you. It’s about the kids of America. It’s about the kids in your state.”
