LGBTQ+ students speak out after becoming a political target

School has long been where American culture wars are rehearsed before they play out everywhere else. This year, LGBTQ+ students are once again the rehearsal’s central subject — and, as usual, its least consulted party. Lawmakers are debating over queer kids in hundreds of bills, yet strikingly few adults have thought to ask what the students themselves make of it.

The scale is enormous. The ACLU is currently tracking roughly 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills moving through state legislatures, and the Trans Legislation Tracker counts just over 800 bills nationwide aimed at trans and gender-nonconforming people in 2026, with proposed education and health care legislation making up about half of that total.

Glisten’s newest National School Climate Survey offers a glimpse into student lives. Two in three LGBTQ+ students say they’ve felt unsafe at school because of who they are. Only one in three look forward to school with any regularity. More than half report LGBTQ-related discrimination. And students in schools with a supportive teacher, an inclusive policy, or an active Gender and Sexuality Alliance report better grades, a stronger sense of belonging, and fewer absences.

Talk to the students directly, though, and the picture complicates, as lived experience always adds nuance to a headline.

Jay, 16, a transgender boy in California who is equally serious about computer science and obstacle course racing, says he reads about people like him being discussed “as if we’re like a national security threat.” What actually changes his day, he says, is smaller than any bill. It’s a teacher who asks for pronouns, a Pride flag taped to a wall. “Things that are so, so small that really don’t take that much of their time or effort,” he says, “to me, as a queer kid, it was just enormous.”

Ash, 17, genderqueer, in Ohio, says the defining question among their LGBTQ+ friends is arithmetic: “How long can I survive in this space where adults aren’t making it safe for me?” Rather than wait for an answer, Ash’s circle raises money for friends’ gender-affirming care, links up with a local LGBTQ+ center, and has testified before Ohio legislators. “We are talked about a lot,” Ash says, “but when we talk amongst ourselves, we have solutions for things. We’re just not able to present them because nobody wants to talk to us.”

Christopher, 17, a gay Black senior in Virginia, locates the problem in unfamiliarity more than malice. “Ignorance is a lot of the reason why we get discriminated against today,” he says, describing classmates who reduce him to a joke or a stereotype rather than a person. His response was to found a club, Diversity Advocates, built around conversations broad enough to draw in students who’d never walk into an explicitly queer space. He has never felt fully safe at school. He says one supportive teacher still “does make me feel more confident in being able to voice myself.”

Sophia, 17, started Dear Queer Youth after failing to find any youth-led organization that reflected her daily reality. She says her friends worry about the ordinary things — schoolwork, money, their futures, immigration enforcement — not the bathroom fights consuming statehouses. Of the adults fixated on those battles, she says, “Talk to a trans kid or talk to a queer kid. You realize that you’re more similar than different.”

Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, Glisten’s executive director, warns against looking at these students solely as victims. “Our students are not waiting to be rescued,” she says. “They are organizing. They are clear-eyed. They are interested in leading because they understand the future is coming.”

That, more than any bill number, may be the year’s real finding. It’s a generation of students building the infrastructure adults keep failing to provide, and asking, plainly, to be included in a conversation that has been happening loudly around them for years.

This article is part of The Advocate's Sept-Oct 2026 print issue, on newsstands September 1. Support queer media and subscribe — or download the issue through Apple News+, Zinio, Nook, or PressReader starting August 20.

Nancy Pelosi photographed for The Advocate's September-October cover. Photography by Mike Nelson