New Anti-LGBT Florida Law Taking Effect Forces Teachers To Out Closeted Students to Families

As the law dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” starts to take effect in Florida schools on Monday, many teachers find themselves self-censoring their work as new policies are revealed that will force teachers to out queer students to their parents.

Queer special education teacher Michael Woods has confirmed that he has had to take down all the books in his classroom’s library in fear of breaking the new law, and that they have been informed that a new policy is in place for informing parents when students want to use a different name and pronouns from their legal ones, according to NBC News.

“I’m a queer man. I did not come out until I was 31 because of the fear,” he said. “Can you imagine how much angst or how much anxiety or how devastated I would be if I essentially outed a child? I’m essentially being asked by the state to out a child.”

Due to the vagueness of the law’s mandates, many teachers and specialists have been forced to self-censor their work due to the new legislation, and activists and queer teachers believe that the law's broad terms can be used to discriminate against queer and LGBT students, PBS News Hour reported.

Some schools have withdrawn support documents related to LGBT identities so that the Board of Education in Florida can review them, and students who are out and asking to be identified by different names and pronouns need to fill out a “Gender Support Plan” with their family and the administration, Star Observer reported.

Reportedly, if the administration of the school itself does not support the student, they can continue to be misgendered and deadnamed even if the parents themselves support the children.

“The messaging of this law is horrible. It’s toxic, it’s discriminatory,” lesbian high school teacher Gretchen Robinson said. “It targets, very obviously, LGBTQ students, it ‘others’ them, and that is not OK.”

“Because this law is so vague, we’re seeing that it’s really playing out in the form of a lot of censorship and just silencing,” public policy director Jon Harris Maurer from Equality Florida said. “Teachers and school districts don’t know where the lines are. So the law is having a real chilling effect where they’ll just pull back entirely.”