In late January, the Florida House of Representatives passed the Parental Rights in Education bill, which has been dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by opponents. The bill is the most recent development in a string of legislation utilized by conservative politicians to issue de-facto bans on learning material associated with minority groups. The bill uses the sue-your-school method the STOP W.O.K.E. Act used before it, modeled after the Texas abortion ban. The bill was introduced by Florida Rep. Joe Harding, who described it as being “about defending the most awesome responsibility a person can have: being a parent.” Although Harding did not explicitly state what he intended to defend this responsibility from with the bill, others have been vocal about the damage it can cause.
Chasten Buttigieg, the husband of the Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, took to Twitter saying, “This will kill kids, you are purposefully making your state a harder place for LGBTQ kids to survive in.”
The bill received thinly veiled support from Gov. Ron DeSantis who said in early February, “I haven’t looked at any particulars of anything but I do think you’ve seen instances in which kids are encouraged to be doing stuff with, like, a gender ideology and I think parents really do need to be involved in that.”
But what have Florida teachers been doing, exactly, regarding LGBTQ+ students?
Dana Mills, associate dean of research and strategic planning at NSU, who has years of experience educating future educators said: Not much.
“We would never work with, nor would it be protocol for a teacher to say, ‘Hey kids today we’re going to talk about gender identity and sexual orientation,” said Mills.
Mills went on to add, regarding any psychological distress a student may be experiencing, related to LGBTQ+ issues or not, “There’s nowhere in teacher preparation programs where we speak specifically on how to deal with an individual that’s experiencing any psychological distress or concerns about anything in their life. Anything where we thought that that wasn’t something that an educator should deal with, we would refer that that kid out to counseling.”
Mills stated that LGBTQ+ topics would only come up where historically accurate and appropriate but despite this, speculated to be in most part due to students’ open-mindedness, schools have become a safe haven for many LGBTQ+ individuals. According to the Trevor Projects National Survey on LGBTQ+ Youth Mental Health in 2021: for both transgender and LGBTQ+ youth, after online spaces, schools were the second top space where they can explore their identities safely.
During a podcast in mid-February, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro quipped that Florida schools should not teach that “heterosexual marriage is in every way morally equivalent to homosexual marriage,” and that teachers should “constantly be feeling like I am looking over their shoulder.”
To Mills, this recent bill is the latest in the attack on educators for teaching politically inconvenient history and facts, perceived or real.
“While it’s not written in the legislation, the obvious reason for this is that there is this feeling that you can ‘turn a kid gay’ and that you could create these confusions and the psychological distress,” said Mills.
President Joe Biden has already disavowed the bill in a statement issued early February but if the bill moves on, the greatest harm it will do is not to educators but to the children they must teach.
“This bill will do nothing but really breed a new generation of ignorance. It just frankly goes against everything that that they’ll encounter later on in life,” said Mills.
