School is often a safe haven for marginalized youth, including LGBTQI+ students. The Trevor Project reports in a large-scale 2024 survey that LGBTQI+ students who find their schools to be affirming experience lower suicidality. Even one supportive adult—such as a teacher—can decrease suicide risks for an LGBTQI+ young person by as much as 43 percent.
But in 2023, lawmakers who support anti-LGBTQI+ legislation introduced hundreds of bills that, if passed, would significantly disrupt access to a safe and quality education for LGBTQI+ students. Importantly, the legislation considered in 2023 is part of a larger trend; the number of anti-LGBTQI+ school policy bills considered across the country has steadily and dramatically increased in recent years, and this year, state legislatures have continued to introduce and consider a plethora of similar harmful bills. From censoring LGBTQI+ curricula, to restricting bathroom access for transgender students, the far right has introduced dozens of policies that inflict educational harm, with many becoming state law.
Alarmingly, this trend is also reflected in Project 2025, the far-right extremist authoritarian playbook to gut America’s system of checks and balances in order to enact a sweeping array of harmful policies. While Project 2025, which promotes unsafe school policies found in recent anti-LGBTQI+ legislation, would increase the risk of LGBTQI+ students in particular experiencing harm in school, new Center for American Progress analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data shows that all students would be negatively affected.
Anti-LGBTQI+ policies championed by the far right and Project 2025
Most anti-LGBTQI+ school policies championed by the far right fall into two buckets: curriculum censorship and student censorship. Curriculum censorship entails limiting discussion around LGBTQI+ topics at school. Student censorship policies discourage or even forcibly out LGBTQI+ students and seek to control how students show up as themselves at school, including by banning transgender students from using the restroom that aligns with their gender identity, requiring teachers to misgender transgender students, and more.
Project 2025 would censor academic learning and make book banning in schools a federal priority. In 2023, the American Library Association reported the highest number of challenged book titles in U.S. history. Project 2025 calls for the criminalization of librarians who allow students to choose banned books, including books relating to critical race theory, which the playbook falsely posits “poison[s] our children.” Project 2025’s proposal to criminalize librarians amid the ongoing decline in the number of school librarians raises concerns about the long-term survival of school libraries—the presence of which research shows improves academic outcomes for all students.
Censorship leads to a chilling effect, creating an environment where teachers are afraid to discuss LGBTQI+ or related content. When students find their schools to be affirming, they report lower rates of depression and suicidality. What’s more, a Washington Post report found that hate crimes against LGBTQI+ people on school property increased in states with anti-LGBTQ laws.
How all students benefit from LGBTQI+-affirming policies
The far right claims that affirming LGBTQI+ students at school makes the learning environment more hostile for non-LGBTQI+ students. In fact, as the data show, the opposite is true: LGBTQI+-affirming school policies lead to better outcomes at school for all students, and banning these policies would similarly harm all students and lead to increased rates of bullying.
Students who experience bullying are at higher risk for anxiety, depression, and decreased academic performance. The impacts of bullying aren’t just felt at school; these harms can stay with students for life, affecting not only physical and mental health, but also financial well-being well into adulthood.
A regression analysis of two CDC surveys—School Health Profiles 2020 and the 2021 High School Youth Risk Behavior Survey—shows that high adoption rates of LGBTQI+-affirming school policies are strongly associated with decreased reports of bullying among all students at school.
Specifically, affirming policies that correlate with decreased bullying include: respecting the use of they/them pronouns, incorporating LGBTQI+ topics into curricula, and providing online resources for LGBTQI+ students.
These are the very policies that the far right and Project 2025 seek to ban. If successful, and schools across the country can no longer implement these affirming policies, the model estimates that, on average, 20.1 percent of all students in a given state would report having been bullied on school property in the past year. Conversely, if all schools in a state adopted all these affirming policies, the model estimates an associated decrease of as much as 12.2 percentage points in the share of students who would report being bullied—not just LGBTQI+ students, but all students.
Conclusion
Prejudice, oppression, and outright racism have no place in our nation’s schools. Project 2025 would make schools and classrooms less safe, equitable, and inclusive. Every student, regardless of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity, deserves a high-quality education. Project 2025 policy proposals unilaterally create hostile and unsafe learning environments for students who are already marginalized and would reverse our nation’s progress to ensure that all students have an equal opportunity to learn in affirming and nurturing environments. When LGBTQI+-affirming school policies are restricted or even banned, all students are harmed.
The author would like to thank Weadé James and Chandler Hall for their analysis and assistance with this column.
About the author: Cait Smith is the director of LGBTQI+ policy at the Center for American Progress.
This article was published by the Center for American Progress.
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