The State Department announced on Monday a new policy that will ban trans employees from using the restroom that matches their gender identity.
Right-wing news site, The Daily Signal, reports that they obtained a memo from the State Department titled “Updates Regarding Biological Sex and Intimate Spaces, Including Restrooms.” The memo says, “ACTION: Post must abide by the President’s directive in E.O. 14168, ensuring intimate spaces are designated by biological sex.”
The memo is designed to update the State Department’s policies in line with Donald Trump’s January 2024 anti-trans executive order, which declared that there were only “two sexes” and that they were immutable. While not a legal action in its own right, an executive order instructs the federal government on how Trump would like laws to be implemented.
Several federal agencies had already implemented an anti-trans bathroom ban, but the State Department had not previously made its own policy.
In July of 2025, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent out a memo instructing all federal agencies to bring themselves in line with the executive order, with the stated goal of “Ending Gender Ideology in the Federal Workplace and Protecting Women.”
That order included a note that all agencies should have “ensured that intimate spaces (such as bathrooms, locker rooms, and lactation rooms) at Federal worksites designated for women, girls, or females (or for men, boys, or males) are designated by biological sex and not gender identity.”
The State Department’s delay in implementing a bathroom ban likely doesn’t stem from Secretary of State Marco Rubio having empathy for the trans community, but rather from a case before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Last summer, a transgender person filed a complaint with the EEOC after being denied access to the appropriate restrooms and “intimate spaces.” A decision was reached by the commission in February, which upheld that “Title VII permits a federal agency employer to maintain single-sex bathrooms and similar intimate spaces,” and “permits a federal agency employer to exclude employees, including trans-identifying employees, from opposite-sex facilities.”
Title VII is the federal law that bans job discrimination on the basis of sex. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton Co. that Title VII’s ban on sex-based discrimination also bans anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, since it’s impossible to discriminate against trans or queer people without taking their sex assigned at birth into account.
The guidance goes against previous recommendations from OSHA, which stated: “The core belief underlying these policies is that all employees should be permitted to use the facilities that correspond with their gender identity. For example, a person who identifies as a man should be permitted to use men’s restrooms, and a person who identifies as a woman should be permitted to use women’s restrooms.”
Those guidelines were removed from the Department of Labor’s website at some point between January 15, 2025, and February 1, 2025.
“Banning transgender people from using facilities in alignment with their gender identity deprives them of the ability to participate in public life,” Advocates for Trans Equality’s website notes. “Without the ability to use a public restroom, trans people are less able to live their lives and travel outside their home. Trans employees need to be able to use the restroom at work to keep their jobs without risking their health and safety.”
“Transgender people cannot safely use the bathroom of the gender they were assigned at birth just because the law requires them to. Trans people are routinely subjected to harassment and assault in bathrooms. Sixty-eight percent of trans people have been verbally harassed, and 9% have been physically assaulted when using a public restroom in the past 12 months. And sadly, 8% of trans people have faced a kidney or urinary tract infection from having to avoid restrooms for their safety.”
Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D) has signed a law to protect trans children by sealing name changes for those who are under 18 when they file for one. The legislation will protect trans children
“Passing this bill is simple, but its impact is profound,” Colorado state Senator Katie Wallace (D), a sponsor of the bill, said in February. “It gives children the safety and dignity they deserve, and it treats their private life with the same care we afford in other sensitive cases.”
Colorado’s Senate Bill 18, “Legal Protections for Dignity of Minors,” simply makes it so that starting July 1, when anyone who is under 18 years old petitions for a name change, the court is required to suppress the record. That means the petition will not be part of the public record and cannot be collected through searches or data harvesting.
The only exception to the process is if the petitioner was previously convicted of a felony.
While the court will keep a record for administrative purposes, it cannot publish the petitioners’ names or their deadnames. The record can only be accessed by the petitioner or by someone who has obtained the petitioner’s verbal consent and submitted an affidavit to that effect.
The bill will easily benefit anyone who might want to change their name as a child, whether to have a name they feel more connected to or to distance themselves from a family name. While the language of the bill itself does not mention trans people, it will have a huge impact for trans kids, which has always been the mission of the legislation.
At a senate committee hearing in February, Z Williams, co-director of Bread and Roses Legal Center, spoke of how a parent thought someone in their child’s class might be trans and was able to search for their name change document online and out the second grader to the school, Colorado Newslinereported.
Williams said the parent “exposed that child is transgender in second grade to the entire school community through flyers and through her own children, not only practicing hate herself, but teaching others how to. That is why we asked the senators and representatives to run this bill.”
At the same hearing, Elsie Fierro, the political and policy director at LGBTQ+ advocacy organization One Colorado, shared the story of a Colorado family who had petitioned for a name change on behalf of their trans child. But when they searched the new name online, a search engine returned results that included the child’s deadname along with identifying information that had been scraped from public court documents. “That family spent months trying to remove it and protect their minor child in an increasingly hostile political climate. This is the reality some families are navigating,” Fierro told the committee.
In the face of Republican opposition, state Sen. Wallace said, “This bill will protect children from AI data-scraping of those public records, the potential of bullying if they should be found and from hostile individuals in the wider world.”
The bill was originally intended to do even more good, but had a section stripped from it in February. It originally sought to instruct family court judges to consider acceptance of a child’s gender identity when determining custody cases. Several studies, including one by The Trevor Project, have linked trans children being connected to accepting adults to lower risk for depression and suicide attempts.
The custody clauses had originally been included in an earlier bill, HB 1312, which passed last year and introduced legal protections for trans people against deadnaming, misgendering, and more. However, they were removed before it passed after LGBTQ+ groups raised concerns that the language could erode existing protections.
For SB 18, the clauses had been reworked, but Polis threatened to veto the bill unless the clauses were removed, claiming to have received word of similar concerns once again. However, state Sen. Wallace and Williams both suggested that Polis’ view of the provisions being “substantially the same” was incorrect and that they had been amended to assuage concerns.
Colorado Republicans have opposed this bill and other pro-trans legislation, pushing anti-trans bills in their place. However, Democrats currently hold a supermajority in the state and have been defending trans rights with new protections.
Texas Tech University System’s chancellor on Friday ordered campuses to phase out academic programs “centered on” sexual orientation and gender identity — a dramatically expanded policy that also places limits on what can be researched and which faculty can be hired.
Chancellor Brandon Creighton’s memo gives provosts until June 15 to identify targeted programs and requires the system’s five universities to freeze admissions and halt students from declaring majors in the phased out programs. Students already enrolled can finish their degrees.
Offerings that appear most likely to be affected include Texas Tech University’s women’s and gender studies undergraduate minor and graduate certificate, as well as women’s and gender studies minors at Midwestern State University and Angelo State University.
The memo also says graduate theses and dissertations may center on gender identity and sexual orientation only as a temporary exception for currently enrolled students and that future faculty hiring will “prioritize recruitment in alignment with this memorandum.”
Faculty, it says, must recognize only “two human sexes” and not teach gender identity as a spectrum or more than two genders as fact — policies Creighton introduced last year.
In core and lower-level undergraduate courses, the memo says instructors generally cannot assign materials that are “centered on” or “include” sexual orientation or gender identity and defined the concepts:
“Centered on” is when course content, readings, assignments or lectures that have sexual orientation or gender identity “as the primary subject, main theoretical framework, central narrative or driving pedagogical purpose.”
“Includes” means “these themes are present, but serve only as secondary background context, demographic data points, or minor components of a broader academic subject.”
If an industry-standard textbook contains such content, the memo says faculty do not have to redact it, but they cannot highlight it, test students on it or spend class time on it.
The memo makes some exceptions for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses, including analysis of active public policy and legal disputes, historical subjects such as the AIDS epidemic where sexual orientation or gender identity is inseparable from the topic, datasets that include those variables and some clinical, counseling or psychology instruction.
The memo also says “currently employed faculty members may continue to research and publish topics of their choosing,” but future faculty will be recruited and hired in accordance with the memo’s priorities.
Jen Shelton, an associate professor of English who has taught at Texas Tech for 25 years, said the provost’s office had repeatedly assured faculty that their research would not be affected. She said this feels like a “betrayal.”
“The good news is I think the whole university has been betrayed. I think even the provost did not expect it to look like this because it’s people from the provost’s office who have been coming to us and saying, ‘Don’t worry. This part is all going to be fine,’” Shelton said in an interview with The Texas Tribune.
Cailyn Green, a Texas Tech junior studying human development with a minor in community, family and addiction science, said the memo left her feeling that the university can no longer provide “an honest education.”
Green said one of her professors would not answer in class whether material about racial disparities in pregnancy outcomes would still be taught, instead asking to discuss it privately.
“At the rate that we’re going, I’m not going to be able to continue learning everything that I need to know in my degree, and I won’t be able to help people,” said Green, who works in Section 8 housing, helping low-income residents connect with food, health care and other assistance.
Paul Ingram, a Texas Tech associate professor of psychological sciences, said students had been calling him all day, some saying they regretted coming to Texas Tech. He said a graduate student had already dropped out because of the earlier memos and another graduate student is writing a dissertation on gender that, under the new policy, could not be proposed again.
He said faculty across the university are openly discussing looking for other jobs.
“Everyone sees that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, but this grass is looking pretty dead,” Ingram said.
Antonio Ingram, a senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said the memo appears to target perspectives involving gender identity and sexual orientation for political reasons, not academic purposes, raising serious constitutional concerns because public universities cannot discriminate based on viewpoint.
Antonio Ingram also questioned the memo’s prohibition against teaching “as absolute truth” that people are inherently racist, sexist or oppressiveand that “individuals bear responsibility or guilt for actions of others of the same race or sex.” Ingram said there is no definition of “absolute truth,” creating vagueness that may deter teaching about systemic racism, reparations and the history of enslavement.
“I think in many ways, this is a doubling down on a political project that is not meant to help students. It is really meant to uphold a political worldview that, you know, Chancellor Creighton couldn’t enact legislatively and is now doing through his role as chancellor,” Ingram said.
In a statement, Creighton said he and the system’s regents are “focused on ensuring our academic programs are rigorous, relevant, and produce degrees of value.”
“That focus is matched by our unwavering support for the First Amendment and the open exchange of ideas that define a public university. Texas Tech will continue to be a national leader on both fronts,” he said.
Some students have supported the system limiting classroom discussion of sex and gender. In an October interview with the Tribune, Preston Parsons, president of the campus Turning Point USA chapter, said he believed the policy protected students and that professors who disagree should speak up outside the classroom.
“There’s a right and a wrong way to do everything, and I don’t believe the classroom is the right place to do that,” said Parsons, who wasn’t available to comment on Friday’s memo.
Creighton served nearly two decades as a Republican state lawmaker and authored major higher education reforms before he became chancellor in November. In December, he ordered faculty to submit for review course content touching on race, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation. If campus leaders wanted to keep the information in a course and it was not required for professional licensure, certification or patient care, they had to forward it to the Board of Regents for final review. Regents were expected to take up the issue publicly at their Feb. 26 meeting but did not, leaving professors in limbo.
Speaking at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s summit in Austin on Thursday, Creighton said Texas Tech had “built an AI algorithm” to help review courses and would release findings within days.
At the summit, Creighton said what some faculty call “academic drift” had left “quite a bit of garbage in curriculum” on university campuses across the country. He said the Texas Tech University System has “a very good plan in place” to address that.
“I believe it will produce the best curriculum in America, and I believe it will be a national model once we’re finished,” he said.
In a news release Friday, the system said that of the 1,403 courses initially identified, only 92 were reviewed by the board of regent’s Academic, Clinical and Student Affairs Committee and fewer than 60 were recommended for modification. Another 299 were “proactively modified” before reaching the committee.
Creighton has framed the push at Texas Tech as a way to steer the university toward degrees that lead to high-paying jobs in high-demand fields. He made the same arguments for bills he wrote in 2023 to ban diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education and in 2025 to expand regents’ control over curriculum.
Shelton said that view misses a central role of college, which is to teach students how to interpret the world around them, ask hard questions and think through unfamiliar problems. This memo, she said, “impoverishes” students “not just as future workers, but as human beings.”
Authorities have charged a Utah transgender woman with kidnapping her own 10-year-old child.
According to an April 21 press release issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Utah, Rose Inessa-Ethington and her partner, Blue Inessa-Ethington, have been charged with International Parental Kidnapping for allegedly taking Rose’s daughter, who is also trans, to Cuba without the consent or knowledge of Rose’s ex-wife, with whom she shared custody.
As the Washington Blade reports, in an affidavit filed on April 16, FBI Special Agent Jennifer Waterfield alleges that the 10-year-old, identified as “Minor Victim 1” (MV 1), traveled to Canada with the Inessa-Ethingtons and Blue’s 3-year-old child on March 28 for a planned camping trip. But, Waterfield’s affidavit alleges, the group never arrived at either their hotel or the campground, and after MV 1 contacted her mother on March 28, the Inessa-Ethingtons were unreachable.
The group allegedly flew from Vancouver to Mexico City on March 29, and from there to Havana, Cuba, on April 1, which was confirmed by Mexican immigration authorities, according to the affidavit.
Rose Inessa-Ethington’s custody agreement with her former spouse, identified in the affidavit as “LB,” stipulated that MV 1 would be returned to LB on April 3. According to Waterfield, this never happened. According to Waterfield’s affidavit, “Interviews of MV 1’s family members provided significant concerns for MV 1’s well-being, as MV 1 was born a male, however, identifies as a female child, which is largely believed to be due to manipulation by Rose Inessa-Ethington. Concerns exist that MV 1 was transported to Cuba for gender reassignment surgery prior to puberty.”
Cuba’s national healthcare system has provided free gender-affirming surgeries since 2008, but the AP notes that gender-affirming surgery is banned for minors in the Caribbean nation. Gender-affirming surgery is difficult for adults to access in Cuba.
Upon searching the Inessa-Ethingtons’ home, authorities found “to-do” lists that included items like “Confirm Cuba limit- 100lb/50lb/1 bag/ 2 bags,” and “empty USU bank.” They also found a note that allegedly included instructions from a Washington, D.C., mental health therapist “on gender affirming medical care for children.” The affidavit does not specify whether this note included any information about gender-affirming surgeries, and it is unclear whether MV 1 was already receiving gender-affirming medical care.
A 2023 Utah law banned gender-affirming surgeries for minors — despite such surgeries being exceptionally rare — and instituted an indefinite moratorium on providing puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to minors for the purposes of gender-affirming care.
In her affidavit, Waterfield said that she believed that “due to the extensive planning and preparation exhibited by both Rose Inessa-Ethington and Blue Inessa-Ethington to isolate MV 1 and take MV 1 to Havana, Cuba, without notifying or requesting permission from MV 1’s mother indicates they are likely not planning to return to the United States with MV 1,” and requested an arrest warrant for both parties.
As the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Utah notes, a judge in Utah ordered MV 1 returned to LB and granted her sole custody on April 13. Authorities in Cuba located the Inessa-Ethingtons on April 16, and they were later deported back to Richmond, Virginia, on a Department of Justice plane, where they were arraigned.
The number of reports of violence and discrimination against people from the LGBTQIA+ community has nearly doubled since 2022. Reports of discrimination against transgender people specifically jumped 51 percent in a year, interest organizations COC and Transgender Netwerk reported based on police figures released on Wednesday.
Last year, the authorities received 4,800 reports of discrimination or violence against LGBTQIA+ individuals. That is a 7.5 percent increase compared to 2024. Compared to 2022, the number of reports nearly doubled, jumping 81 percent from 2,654.
COC spoke of an “extremely worrying development,” pointing to a recent report by the Public Prosecution Service (OM) showing that only six people were convicted of discriminating against LGBTQIA+ individuals last year.
Data from the Transgender Network shows that the number of reports specifically about discrimination against transgender people rose 51 percent, from 264 unique reports in 2024 to 399 unique reports last year. These are reports to the regional anti-discrimination offices and Transgender Network itself.
That is a terrible development, said Remke Verdegem, chairman of the Transgender Netwerk. “Transgender people who no one cared about ten years ago are now being verbally abused and threatened constantly.”
“We want to be a country where everyone can be visibly themselves, whoever you are and whoever you love,” a COC spokesperson said. “We call on the Jetten Cabinet to take action against discrimination against the rainbow community and other minorities.”
The total number of discrimination reports also increased explosively, jumping 54 percent from 26,078 in 2024 to 40,077 last year. The bulk of the increase was due to over 14,000 discrimination reports filed against PVV leader Geert Wilders about a post he made on X.
“We decided to call her ‘Amada’ because she came into our home to be cherished,” said Lorena Bonilla, whose transgender daughter was recently authorized to change her identity documents under a ruling by Ecuador’s Constitutional Court.
Her case — alongside another decided in March — has opened the door for Ecuadorian adolescents seeking to modify their name and sex in official records. Adults gained that right after years of advocacy efforts culminating in a 2024 reform.
“In Ecuador there are still political, religious and social sectors that portray gender recognition for adolescents as a threat,” said Cristian González Cabrera, an LGBTQ+ rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “That climate can translate into institutional hostility, delays and unjustified denials.”
Bonilla and her daughter, 17, experienced that firsthand in 2018. Their legal battle began when Amada was 9 and school authorities refused to admit her because her legal documents did not match her gender identity.
“We went through 14 schools and none would take her in,” Bonilla said. “We then knew we needed to change her name.”
A court initially granted Amada the right to modify her identity documents. But the civil registry appealed the decision and a higher court later ruled that her passport and ID card should reflect her birth name and sex.
“It was a step backward for our rights,” Bonilla said.
LGBTQ+ rights in Ecuador have largely been shaped by court rulings rather than by lawmakers or government officials. A similar dynamic has unfolded in other Andean countries such as Colombia and Peru.
“The legislative and executive branches represent the country’s broad majorities, yet LGBTQ people are often overlooked,” said Christian Paula, president of the Pakta Foundation, which provides legal support in cases like Amada’s. “Turning to the courts reflects a lack of openness and sensitivity within our institutions.”
Among Ecuador’s most important advances in LGBTQ+ rights, three have come through the courts. They include the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1997, a 2009 ruling that allowed an Ecuadorian transgender woman to change her name, and the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2019.
Those court decisions sparked a backlash from right-wing and religious groups.
In a post on X following the Constitutional Court’s 2026 rulings, André Santos, president of one of Ecuador’s most vocal conservative groups, said the court had overstepped its authority. He has also spoken against school protocols allowing students to use uniforms and bathrooms that align with their gender identity.
The country’s Catholic bishops conference also expressed concern over the court’s action. “Allowing adolescents to make decisions of this nature poses serious risks to their overall development,” it said.
President Daniel Noboa has not been as outspoken against transgender causes as some other conservative leaders in Latin America, but his administration has shown little support for LGBTQ+ rights.
As a candidate, he pledged to defend the traditional family. Since taking office, violence and economic instability have overshadowed gender and diversity issues in his political agenda.
“What worries us are his ministers,” said Diane Rodríguez, a lawyer and president of Ecuadorian LGBTQ+ organization Silueta X.
Rodríguez, a trans woman, pointed to officials in the Education Ministry, including current minister Gilda Alcívar, who has rejected the inclusion of what she calls “gender ideology” in education. That climate, Rodríguez said, is reflected in her daily interactions.
From Guayaquil, where she raises a 4-year-old daughter with her partner, a trans man, Rodríguez has faced difficulties at her child’s school.
“We had trouble enrolling her because people see me and assume I’m going to turn children transgender because of how I look,” Rodríguez said.
Throughout her career, she has provided legal support for people facing sex-based discrimination and backed a program providing hormone treatment for trans people. Her work has also focused on raising awareness about violence against her community.
Silueta X publishes an annual record of killings of LGBTQ+ people. Its first report in 2013 documented two killings and the numbers have risen every year. The 2025 publication reported 30 deaths, 21 of them trans women.
Amada told her parents that she was a girl at age 3. She asked for a princess-themed birthday party. But Bonilla and her husband — both raised Catholic — assumed she was confused and dressed her as a prince instead.
It took them a few years to understand their daughter and dismiss psychologists who said something was wrong with her or that they had done a poor parenting job.
“Comments can be ruthless and people have no idea what families like ours go through,” said Mauricio Caviedes, Amada’s father. “I hope education on this issue changes so people can understand.”
As they learned more about the trans community, their fight to modify Amada’s identity documents evolved into a broader cause. Bonilla and Caviedes became activists, bringing their kids with them to protests and conferences. They supported other LGBTQ+ causes such as same-sex marriage and founded an organization for families of trans children like their own.
“That became the only way we could fight the state,” Bonilla said. “We were 25 families with transgender children of different ages, the oldest being 12.”
Her family moved to Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. And while she treasures how welcoming their new home has been for her daughter, she keeps advocating for LGBTQ+ rights in Ecuador.
Amada, now a strong student who dreams of becoming a nurse, was shaped by years of watching her parents support trans friends and community members struggling to access health care without discrimination. She has never appeared publicly on camera, but the visibility of her case feels like a lifelong legacy for Bonilla.
“People think the destiny of transgender people is to become sex workers or live in hiding,” Bonilla said. “But we want every parent to know that one day their child can become whatever they want to be.”
The parents of a young trans woman in Idaho say that they’re leaving their state after it passed a law to criminalize trans people who use the restroom.
“Obviously, this law is a disaster for families like ours,” Michael Devitt, the father of 20-year-old Eve, wrote in a letter notifying his patients that his physical therapy practice would be shutting down. “We can no longer take a road trip across our beloved state, or even enjoy a family night out at a restaurant, or a movie, without running the risk of Eve being charged and sent to a prison merely for using the facilities.”
The law he’s referring to is H.B. 752, which Gov. Brad Little (R) signed into law on March 31, the Trans Day of Visibility. The hostile law makes it a criminal offense for trans people to use the restroom that aligns with their gender identity, even in private businesses. Multiple offenses could get a trans person life in prison.
While several states have passed bathroom bills, Idaho is one of only four states – along with Florida, Kansas, and Utah – to introduce criminal penalties for using the restroom.
Eve Devitt, who is attending college in New York, testified against a different transphobic bill several years ago.
“Since I started estrogen almost three whole years ago, my mental health has gotten significantly better,” she told the Idaho House Judiciary, Rules, and Administration committee in 2023. “I’ve been able to get myself off of a cliff that I wasn’t sure if I would ever find myself off of. I feel so much better and more complete with myself.”
But today the Devitts say they’ve had enough, comparing their state to an abusive partner.
“We say ‘We’re in an abusive relationship with the state of Idaho’ — all people with transgender relatives, or all transgender people. And you always think, ‘Oh, they’ll stop hitting me.’ But they’re not gonna,” Michael Devitt told the Idaho Capital-Sun. He said that H.B. 752’s penalties for multiple offenses are more than the prison sentence someone in the state could get for manslaughter.
“I mean, there are all kinds of things you can do in Idaho that will get you prison time that are less than the second offense for using the bathroom that aligns with your gender identity.”
He said that even though his daughter is in New York at the moment, he worries about how she’ll be treated when she comes home to Boise. For example, he’s worried she’ll be forced to undergo a physical exam in public.
“Every single day when I’m out in public, I have to decide: Do I feel like going to jail today, or do I feel like being attacked?” said Nikson Mathews, a trans man and the chair of the Idaho Democratic Queer Caucus, about the new law.
Eve’s mother, Dr. Angie Devitt, said that she would continue to see patients in Idaho even after the family moves to another state.
H.B. 752 is one of three anti-LGBTQ+ laws passed in Idaho this year. H.B. 561, which was also signed on the Trans Day of Visibility, bans local governments from flying Pride flags. The state passed a similar ban last year that had an exemption for official city flags, so the city of Boise made the Pride flag one of its official flags. The GOP-controlled legislature responded this year by passing another flag ban that said flags had to be officially adopted before 2023 to count, just to keep Boise from flying the Pride flag.
And last Friday, Gov. Little signed the “Pediatric Secretive Transitions Parental Rights Act,” which requires doctors and teachers to report gender non-conforming kids to their parents without investigating whether those children will face abuse if outed.
The Idaho Capital-Sun reports that a fourth anti-LGBTQ+ bill could still be passed by the legislature. House Bill 557, which would ban local governments from enacting LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination protections, passed the Idaho House of Representatives but has stalled in the state Senate. Twelve local governments have passed ordinances that would be repealed by this bill if it passes.
The 32-year-old trans high school English teacher has had enough of the state’s Don’t Say Gay vibes and the bigotry and silence they’ve inspired.
Ron DeSantis‘ discriminatory laws have instilled paranoia among the school system’s LGBTQ+ faculty, staff, students, and allies, Stone says.
Florida’s first Parental Rights in Education Act, passed in 2022, banned classroom discussion and “instruction” about sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through 3rd grade. A subsequent bill in 2023 extended the policy through 12th grade, while new restrictions on LGBTQ+ content in libraries set off a book-banning frenzy. Rules around pronoun use have effectively banned free speech for all gender-nonconforming people in Florida schools.
A settlement between the state and groups challenging the laws in 2024 did little to allay LGBTQ+ faculty concerns about teaching while gay. Stone was the only Florida teacher who would go on the record with LGBTQ Nation.
She said she has nothing left to lose.
The Orlando-area English teacher is a Florida native. She earned a law degree from William & Mary in Virginia and started her teaching career six years ago as the Covid pandemic unfolded. She’s been at the same high school ever since.
Stone says that for the most part, she has the support of her colleagues and students — it’s pressure from those higher up in power that’s inspired her to leave her job at the end of this school year. She plans on moving to Maryland with her wife this summer.
Stone spoke with LGBTQ Nation at the end of her school day.
LGBTQ Nation: What made you decide to go into teaching?
Saoirse Stone: There’s a thing that made me decide to go into teaching, and there’s a thing that made me decide to stay in teaching.
I decided to go into teaching because I was out of work during COVID, and both my parents are teachers, and both my maternal grandparents were teachers. So I knew a lot about the profession, and I knew I could probably do a pretty good job. So I got my temporary teaching certificate and took a job teaching high school.
I stayed because it turned out I both really liked it and was rather good at it, and I found a lot of value in ways that I had not found in other jobs… like a feeling that I was doing something worthwhile.
How did your teaching work line up with your transition?
I had been teaching for two years when I transitioned. I had intended to come out fully publicly and had already begun to do that with faculty and staff on campus when all of the various and assorted anti-LGBTQ pieces of legislation passed in the spring of 2023.
And then I was cautioned by my school administration, who had gotten direction from my district’s legal department. For my own safety and well-being professionally, I was strongly encouraged to not come out and not tell my students.
So just to clarify, you had already started transitioning socially before this became a question?
Yes, but I present rather butch. I’m very much a dyke, you know, to use a preferred term. So I can fly under the radar if I want to, or at least at the time I could. Not so much now that I’m four years into this. But, you know, dressing a bit more masc, I could at the time still sort of pass [as a man]. At the time, that was what I felt I had to do.
And you were advised not to articulate anything having to do with your gender after legislation had passed and been signed by DeSantis?
Yes.
And you were still presenting as a man?
Yes.
Then what happened?
Essentially, radio silence. No one says anything more to me specifically about it, from the district or from the school-based administration – really, to this day.
Now, there are plenty of school and county-level trainings after all of this stuff had fully gone into effect. This was also in the midst of all that anti-critical race theory stuff, the book ban stuff. So we had to sit through all of these policy changes.
But I had been pretty careful to mostly keep anything about me out of writing – any official stuff – because while I wanted to move towards a more authentic presentation in life, I also knew the law well enough that I didn’t want there to be anything that was going to put me on a list.
And just for context, at this point, DeSantis is campaigning for president, as well, and a lot of this stuff was part of his platform, correct?
Yes. And whether it was going to be him or whether it was going to be another candidate at the time, there was a risk of stuff at the federal level.
I wasn’t at a point where I could go truly stealth at any level. That would have put me at risk of getting my teaching certificate revoked. That’s part of what’s so insidious about these things. My school-based administration, they don’t care. They would not fire me for being trans. But if the state gets an inkling of it, the state can revoke my teaching certificate.
Why would the state revoke your certificate?
So there’s no explicit prohibition on being trans, but there is on wanting to use pronouns that align with your new gender identity and not one from your sex assigned at birth. If I use honorifics or pronouns that don’t comport with my sex assigned at birth, that’s grounds to potentially have my teaching certificate revoked. And there’s nothing about a three-strike system, or getting a warning, or anything like that.
And as any teacher will tell you, a lot of students are going to just call you Mr. or Miss. And that’s particularly frequent at our school, which has a very high Hispanic population, and it’s a manner of address that’s seen as respectful. And I don’t get to dictate what that honorific is.
What honorific were your students using?
Well, that’s where I got a little creative that fall. The district was looking to expand an E-sports program – you know, video games – across all the high schools, and I volunteered. Both because I do play video games, and I know a fair bit about several, and also because I could be called “Coach.”
Excellent.
So I did that. I got my name plate, and everything on my door changed, and that’s kind of been the way I try to navigate around this.
How has Don’t Say Gay affected your ability to teach? Can you mention Harvey Milk?
That’s part of the insidious nature of these laws. There’s not clear guidance, just a very vague standard of what’s “developmentally appropriate.”
When the book ban stuff was going on, we had this whole system set up where we had to catalog every book in our classrooms, and then we got a list back of which of those books we had to remove from our classroom library. I lost almost every book by a Black author, almost every book by a queer author, every single book I had from a native author, most of the books I had from Hispanic authors, and probably half the books by women. I had to fight to keep The Scarlet Letter.
I had to remove, for instance, James Baldwin, because certainly the powers that be in Tallahassee don’t want kids learning about James Baldwin. Shockingly, Sappho, of all authors, somehow slipped through. No one challenged that one. I have to imagine that whoever was going over it somehow didn’t know.
Let’s talk about the reaction among your colleagues to these rules. Are there any other LGBTQ+ faculty at your school?
Yeah, there are. And look, in the schools, there are so many gay and bisexual teachers. I would not be shocked if some schools cleared 30 or 40% among the faculty. I don’t have statistics to back that up, but it’s certainly a large number.
Is there a sense of solidarity among that group? Are you trading war stories?
There’s certainly solidarity. There certainly are war stories, both about this and about the general struggles of public education. My relationships with my colleagues have been very positive, both among those who I’ve had conversations with and those I haven’t. I would describe myself as rather well respected among the faculty at my school. If anyone has had a serious problem with me among the faculty or staff, they have kept it to themselves. You know, there’s always a couple outliers that I’ve heard of, but none that really crossed my path in a meaningful way.
This is really a problem from the top. This is a problem from the state. It’s an enforced, hierarchical issue. It’s not one that would be a day-to-day problem in my life, if not for the state-level laws.
Who are you talking about when you say “outliers”?
There was buzz about one particular teacher in one of the sciences that had said some fairly overtly transphobic stuff. I think they just retired, and that’s the thing: Retirement is wiping away a lot of the old guard that might have felt strongly about enforcing a lot of this stuff on fellow staff and students.
Also, there are lots of trans students, and there always have been. Your average public school teacher in 2023 already had a trans student, or two, or three, or more. We all just got used to it. So it’s not that much different to see, I imagine, a member of the faculty identifying in the same way. It’s not news.
Have you encountered any hostility from students over the fact that your gender presentation isn’t super binary?
I’ve had to have students written up, and in a couple cases, removed from my class roster for calling me slurs in the classroom.
Like what?
F***ot, specifically.
Right in front of the other kids?
Yes. In one case, multiple times.
Did this kid have other behavioral issues, or was it just really directed at you?
It was my understanding that the discipline issues did not start or end with my classroom. But the targeted nature of the term was specific to me.
Do any other incidents like that stand out?
Nothing that severe. They’re not issues with most of the students, you know? Again, that was very much an outlier. And part of the reason it got resolved and the student got removed from my room was that other students reported that student. It didn’t require me making a thing out of it. They were appalled.
The general attitude among our current crop of high school students is either general apathy, in every real sense, or acceptance. Anything beyond that is very unusual.
You say you want to leave the state at this point, but you’re describing what sounds like a fairly supportive environment, at least on the local level. Why do you want to leave Florida?
So, two big reasons.
One, it’s supportive for now. It’s supportive because I have good relationships with fellow faculty, fellow staff, and because the laws haven’t changed that much over the last few years.
However, I started wanting to move because in the past few months, the machine of transphobic legislation at the federal and state levels has started spinning again, pretty seriously. Florida has been spared the worst of it so far, but I don’t know if I trust that, and that’s a big part of it. There were some very scary things up for votes in this legislative cycle. So there’s that, as far as the civil rights element.
And what’s the other reason?
So, while we might be in something of a state of detente, as far as those policies go, the economic situation here in Florida is getting a lot worse. My wife was out of work for months this year. We were having to get by on a single teacher salary, and that was very, very hard, and we barely managed that. We had to take some debt on to handle that. It kind of wiped out most of our savings. She’s got a job now, fortunately.
Another problem is that one of the bills that did pass the legislature was a bill that is undercutting the teachers’ unions. It’s very obviously meant as a union-breaking law. And if the teachers’ union dissolves, we would all be taking pretty substantial pay cuts. On top of that, the district is bargaining over an increase of thousands of dollars to our healthcare.
So as much as I love Florida, as much as I love Orlando, as much as I love my students, and as much as I like my school, I have to kind of balance and ask, can I do this without it ruining us financially or preventing us from accomplishing things we really want to accomplish financially?
You described a kind of detente when it comes to your civil rights. Do you worry that could change?
There’s the possibility of changes in the school board, which could very much mean big shifts for how safe I am at my school. There’s the possibility of school-based administrators changing. All it takes is an administrator suddenly becoming someone who’s not super cool with trans people, and I go from a pretty good job to a deeply hostile workplace, because there is no protection for me there.
And truthfully, all it would take is one false allegation that I requested that certain pronouns be used for me, and that could be it, you know – something deeply impossible to prove or disprove. And I don’t trust the state of Florida to give me due process.
It must be tough carrying the weight of those possibilities around, while all you want is just to do your job and be yourself.
There is a mental and emotional cost to going into work for seven and a half hours every day, having everyone treat you like someone you’re not, even in spite of the relatively supportive environment. You still feel like there’s something off.
Even people who work here that are generally supportive and that I have a good relationship with, they do not call me by preferred pronouns, because, frankly, they’re afraid. They’re afraid about drawing a target on their own back. So even if under other circumstances they might try and be supportive, they don’t feel like they can be.
Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) signed a severe anti-trans bill into law last Friday that will require child care providers, health care providers, and educational institutions to out trans kids to their parents if they express any desire to act in a way perceived as discordant with their sex assigned at birth.
The Pediatric Secretive Transitions Parental Rights Act, which will take effect in July, bans folks who care for minors “from facilitating a pediatric sex transition or social transition without informing and obtaining informed consent from a minor child’s parents or guardians.”
The bill aims to close a “loophole” in the state’s anti-trans laws, as cosponsor state Sen. Ben Toews (R) reportedly put it during the state Senate’s debate on the legislation. That loophole, Toews said, is the fact that the state’s gender-affirming care ban does not cover social transitions, which he referred to as “the process by which vulnerable children are led into the pipeline.”
The legislation defines social transition as “the process by which an individual goes from identifying with and living as a gender that corresponds to the individual’s sex to identifying with and living as a gender different from the individual’s sex and may involve social, legal, or physical changes, including adopting a name, pronouns, appearance, or dress that does not correspond to the individual’s sex.”
The covered entities, then, must notify a student’s parents within 72 hours if they request to be referred to using new pronouns or a different name than their legal name; if they ask to use facilities like bathrooms and locker rooms that don’t correspond with their sex assigned at birth; or if they ask to join a sports team that does not align with their birth sex.
Not doing so, the bill says, means “aiding and abetting” a child’s transition before parental consent is obtained. Parents will also be allowed to sue entities for violating the bill, and the attorney general will be authorized to seek civil penalties of up to $100,000.
Democrats argued against the bill for its vague language and the possibility that it would put children with unaccepting families in unsafe situations.
“When we write these bills, we write these statutes, we’re writing them for all families,” argued state Sen. James Ruchti (D), according to the Idaho Statesman. “And so when nurses, when doctors, when educators, tell us we need a little room to be able to handle these situations carefully… and being required to report this within 72 hours takes that out of our hands, and it means that we have to possibly go to a family… and tell them something that that family may not be in a great place to hear.”
State Sen. Melissa Wintrow (D) called the bill “one more that’s just overcontrolling overreach and just goes far beyond what’s necessary.”
“Life isn’t that black and white,” she said.
A lone Republican, state Sen. Jim Guthrie, spoke out against the bill, saying it will “force our teachers to be tattletales” and “put additional stress on teachers that are already stressed… already overworked, and more and more they have to deal with laws like this that are going to force them within 72 hours to make a judgment.”
After the legislature passed the bill, ACLU of Idaho spokesperson Rebecca De León called it an “example of unconstitutional, big government overreach into our private lives.”
“HB 822 threatens to undermine bedrock free speech protections for students, teachers, and health care professionals and is clearly unconstitutional,” she said. “Politicians who stand for small government and personal liberties should not regulate how people dress or express themselves.”
Jane Migliara Brigham, a writer for trans news publication The Needle, slammed the bill for turning doctors, teachers, and the like into “a kind of gender secret police.”
“The language is written such that there is no clear limit on what does not constitute social transition,” Brigham explained. “As a result, whether or not some behavior which is not listed here actually constitutes social transition will be in the eye of the beholder, or more accurately, in the eye of whoever is reporting the behavior to the child’s parents. This ambiguity leaves room for personal judgment, especially where that judgment is informed by anti-trans bigotry.”
Brigham questioned whether a boy wearing pink could count as evidence of a social transition and whether the legislation does not make clear where such an act would fall.
“Most casual observers cannot reliably tell the difference between a child who is trans, gay, gender non-conforming, or one who is simply socially awkward. As a result, what does and does not get reported to parents will, in all likelihood, be determined by bigotry and stereotypes, rather than any clear guidelines.”
At the end of March, Little also signed the nation’s most extreme bathroom ban. The law is the fourth in the U.S. to criminalize trans people’s use of bathrooms and other sex segregated spaces that don’t match the sex they were assigned at birth — similar laws have been enacted in Florida, Kansas, and Utah.
Guthrie was again the lone Republican against the bill. “If [a trans woman goes] in the bathroom of their biological sex, they’re going to upset a lot of people and freak people out,” he told the Associated Press. “If they go in the bathroom that is consistent with their looks — they are knowingly and willingly going into the bathroom — that is breaking the law.”
“They’re human beings,” he said, “just like us, and what are they supposed to do?”
After refusing years earlier to acknowledge the gender of a Romanian citizen who transitioned in another European Union (EU) country, Romanian courts ruled on Tuesday that the government must recognize the man’s identity, reported Romanian news outlet Spot.
Advocates say it’s a landmark victory for transgender Europeans.
The case concerned Arian Mirzarafie-Ahi, a transgender man with Romanian and British citizenship. He was born in Romania and moved to the United Kingdom in 2008, where he began his transition several years later. After obtaining legal documentation in the UK in 2020, the Romanian government declined to recognize Mirzarafie-Ahi’s gender identity, citing a disparity with documents he used earlier in Romania.
“This put him in the position of having two sets of documents with two different identities,” said ACCEPT, the Romanian advocacy group that helped shepherd Mirzarafie-Ahi’s case through the courts. In the UK, he was recognized “as a man, in Romania, as a ‘woman’.”
Mirzarafie-Ahi sued, and the Romanian court that heard his case advanced it to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to settle the interstate argument. That court said in 2024 that the effect of Romania’s refusal to recognize Mirzarafie-Ahi’s gender identity impeded his freedom of movement among member states and was, effectively, a fundamental form of discrimination.
The court ruled, therefore, that all EU member states are obligated to recognize the identity documents of transgender individuals who have earned legal gender recognition in another EU state. (The UK left the EU in 2020.)
However, Romania, one of the most illiberal members in the EU when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights — it sits at the bottom of ILGA’s EU state rankings — resisted the order, with two different government agencies refusing to recognize Mirzarafie-Ahi’s identity.
Once again, Mirzarafie-Ahi took the Romanian government to court, but this time he won in his home country, with the same Romanian courts that sent his case to the CJEU now bound by its decision.
“Today, March 31, we celebrate Trans Visibility Day, and I am happy to use this opportunity to turn to the people in my community with good news,” Mirzarafie-Ahi said in a statement after his victory. “I have finally won in the courts of Romania! It is not only my victory, but also ours — of those who are still waiting to be seen, heard and recognized.”
Mirzarafie-Ahi’s case mirrors a similar one decide in March in Poland and Germany.
An administrative court in Poland found itself in a nearly identical situation, addressing the marriage of two men who had wed in Berlin years earlier. Government officials in Poland refused to recognize the marriage. That court, too, sent the interstate dispute to the CJEU, which decided in the men’s favor based on their right to freedom of movement throughout the European Union.
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