Rising anti-LGBTQ+ censorship efforts pull directly from the playbooks of modern authoritarian leaders

Across the U.S., a campaign to seclude and suppress queer and trans lives from public visibility is continuing to spread. In public schools, libraries, universities, art galleries, museums, government websites, and national monuments, we are seeing art, books, terms, and symbols of LGBTQ+ identity disappear at a quickening pace.We don’t need to wonder where this is coming from or where it’s going. Wielding state power against LGBTQ+ communities has been a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. In Nazi Germany, LGBTQ+ culture and literature was purged as “un-German.” More recently in Putin’s Russia and Orban’s Hungary, officials have claimed children need “protection” from LGBTQ+ “propaganda,” rhetoric used to justify not only strict controls on LGBTQ+ topics in schools and universities, but also restrictions on museum exhibitions and across media, film, books and advertisements. This didn't begin with Trump’s re-election, but the current administration is applying the playbook well, declaring in executive orders that “gender ideology” is “anti-American,” and that the government needs to protect children from what they claim is “indoctrination,” – including the basic fact that queer and trans people exist. In Congress, there is now not one, but three bills gaining traction that would implement anti-LGBTQ+ restrictions on certain federal education funds. As with Florida’s 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” law that clearly echoes Russia’s 2013 law prohibiting showing “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” to minors, this trio of Congressional bills (H.R. 2616, H.R. 8705, and H.R. 7661) each seeks to weaponize funding to prevent schools teaching about made-up terms, largely pulled from Trump executive orders: “gender ideology,” “transgenderism,” “divisive equity ideology,” and “sexually oriented material.” Censors often resort to vague language like this, but the intention behind it is clear: to exclude trans an