Source: The Pulse
Republican lawmakers have introduced more anti-LGBTQ+ bills in the past two months than in the last five years combined.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, more than 388 anti-LGBTQ laws have been introduced in states across the country as of March 3. In comparison, Republicans introduced 162 anti-LGBTQ bills last year, with only 19 becoming law.
Between 2018 and 2022, Republican state legislators introduced a total of 361 anti-LGBTQ bills.
In North Carolina, two bills have been introduced by state Republicans: Senate Bill 49 which would require teachers to notify parents if a student questions their own gender — outing many trans youths before they’re ready to tell their families, who might be hostile to their identities. There is also House Bill 43, which would make it illegal for anyone under 18 to receive gender-affirming care, regardless of advice from their doctors and with parental consent.
“The damage that we’re doing by introducing these bills is that it communicates to certain young people that something is fundamentally wrong with them,” State Rep. Marcia Morey (D-Durham) told N.C. Policy Watch. “They’re watching, they’re listening. They’re paying attention as we’re trying to legislate their identities at a very tender time.”
Educators, families, activists, and communities have condemned these harmful bills, with one local educator calling the wave of anti-LGBTQ+ bills “a threat to the embodied classroom.”
In a recent editorial, Dr. Kendra Bryant, an Associate Professor of English and Composition Director at North Carolina A&T State University, underscored the stark realities of imposing measures that blatantly erase LGBTQ+ voices and experiences from the classroom.
From The Pulse:
“DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” bill has made its way to North Carolina through Senate Bill 49, titled, “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” which was passed earlier this month. The revision includes a prohibition of gender identity and sexuality instruction in grades K-4. However, considering sex education usually occurs in 5th grade, and of the 39 state curricula that do include sex education, only ten of them include sexual orientation—while “five states allow only negative information to be shared about homosexuality and place a positive emphasis on heterosexuality”. Senate Bill 49 is not a ban on curriculum and textbook material, but an erasure of the queer teacher and student voice.
To forbid teachers and students from discussing gender and sexual identity in the classroom is to suggest that they, that we, are not subjects in history worth reading, knowing, and cultivating relationship; it’s an absolute annihilation of human beings—a fostering of hate in the classroom. The classroom is a site of resistance where teachers and students have regular opportunity to engage loving-kindness as well as mutual respect and understanding, thereby we have to counter the forces whose initiatives aim to use academic institutions to splinter our country.
Conceding to omit classroom discourse on any one identity is a resistance to America’s humanity.”
Read more at The Pulse
