This article discusses the historical context, contemporary iterations, and policy processes and political actors that produced Florida's House Bill 1557, which criminalizes discourse in schools, including curricular and instructional materials containing any perceived reference to LGBTQIA+ identities. Implementation and considerations of H.B.…

We collected narratives from five undergraduates who identified as either in the process of or had formerly transitioned from one gender to another while enrolled in a postsecondary institution. We used a narrative life story protocol to explore the greater context of participants as individuals. Participant stories focused on: the importance of…

Anti-LGBTQ+ school legislation has proliferated across the United States in recent years, with potential consequences for both students and school counselors. Florida's controversial 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act offers one such example. In this descriptive, phenomenological, qualitative study, we examined the experiences of 10 Florida…

Sonya Stephens, president of Mount Holyoke College, states that a bill in Florida that would prohibit discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through 3rd grade public school classrooms, dubbed the "Don't Say Gay" bill, is less about protecting students than it is about cynically fueling America's political…

LGBTQIA+ choruses in the United States play an important role in the development of queer movement culture by providing safe spaces other than bars and clubs, by emotionally supporting queer people through extended political struggles and the AIDS crisis, and by presenting public counternarratives to anti-gay propaganda. Jon Sims, a music teacher…

Gender-Sexuality Alliances (GSAs) are school clubs for LGBTQ+ youth and peer allies to support one another. This eight-week weekly diary study considered whether a youth's positive and negative affect during a given week could be predicted by experiences in their most recently attended GSA meeting. Ninety-nine GSA members (M[subscript age] =…

We report findings from an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) study of transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) college students' perceptions of their on-campus experiences. Participants reported their lived experiences of campus culture at PWIs Deep South. The data was viewed through a minority stress theory framework. Four major…

Postsecondary institutions are viewed as spaces where students can become exposed to different ways of thinking and "being" beyond their own subjective experiences (Gortmaker & Brown, 2006). Research has suggested that college-going queer women often characterize their universities as places where they can "be themselves"…

Presently, there is a political attack on LGBTQ+ individuals, especially in southern states. In 2022, six southern states (Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas) enacted laws that prohibit discussing LGBTQ+ students or issues within P-12 schools. These laws perpetuate heteronormativity and create intolerant and unsafe…

The recent surge of anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer, intersex, and asexual+ (LGBTQIA+) state legislative bills throughout the United States prompt one to consider the multiple ways Black LGBTQIA + students in historically Black college and university (HBCU) settings will encounter challenges within and outside healthcare settings. Thus,…

There are more than 300 anti-Queer policies that are being proposed and implemented across the nation that impact education, including Tennessee's Senate Bill 1229; Virginia's "2022 Model Policies on the Privacy, Dignity, and Respect for all Students and Parents in Virginia's Public Schools;" and Florida's "Parental Rights in…

The "IDRA Newsletter" serves as a vehicle for communication with educators, school board members, decision-makers, parents, and the general public concerning the educational needs of all children across the United States. The focus of this issue is "Breaking Barriers to Learning." Contents include: (1) The Importance of…

This descriptive exploratory study describes teacher self-efficacy in providing LGBTQ+ support in the implicit and explicit social studies curriculum in the wake of numerous anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in education in Florida. Four high school social studies teachers from three different Florida public school districts were interviewed to answer three…

Professional literature in human development, social foundations, and academic subject area courses function as a major but understudied tool of teacher preparation programs. Through the overlapping lenses of sociocultural and critical theories of child development, this study employs descriptive content analysis to investigate the potential of…

This study used self-administered survey data from seven high schools in Florida with a majority Black and/or Hispanic sample to examine transgender students' perceptions and experiences related to school climate in comparison to cisgender students. Using propensity score matching, a matched analytic sample was created of transgender and cisgender…