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?”