Texas students say K-12 DEI ban and other anti-LGBTQ+ bills threaten their safety, voice and mental health

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For mental health support for LGBTQ youth, call the Trevor Project’s 24/7 toll-free support line at 866-488-7386. For trans peer support, call the Trans Lifeline at 877-565-8860. You can also reach a trained crisis counselor through the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.

When Marshall Romero came out as a trans male in 2021, he didn’t think his identity would become a political issue.

But in the years since, the 16-year-old sophomore at Alief Early College High School in Houston said he has watched the Republican Party increasingly target LGBTQ+ people, and he became more politically active in response.

“In today's world, simply existing as a trans person has become an act of resistance,” Romero said while speaking about LGBTQ+ rights during a rally at the Texas Capitol earlier this month. “And in a society that politicizes my existence, just living authentically becomes an act of defiance.”

Romero said his school has been a welcoming space so far, but he worries that could change under state legislation under consideration that targets LGBTQ+ Texans like him.

Senate Bill 12, authored by Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, would prohibit schools from factoring diversity, equity and inclusion when hiring new personnel, or developing policies or programs that reference race, ethnicity, gender identity or sexual orientation. The bill would effectively extend a ban on DEI initiatives in public universities and colleges, which the Legislature approved two years ago, to K-12 schools. The measure would also ban student clubs based on sexual orientation or gender identity and place tight restrictions on how teachers can approach topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity.

Meanwhile, Senate Bill 13, by Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, would give school boards and parents more control over what books can be put in school libraries, as well as ban books that have “indecent content or profane content.” Anti-censorship advocates say it could lead to the removal of books featuring gender and sexuality content from school libraries.

Other bills moving in the House and Senate would punish schools and staffers who support a student’s social transition.

LGBTQ+ students and their allies worry the proposed DEI ban on public schools and the other bills threaten their mental health and sense of safety in schools. They are concerned the legislation could silence supportive teachers, dismantle safe spaces, lead to overenforcement and prevent honest conversations about identity under the pressure of compliance with state and federal laws.

“I wouldn't be surprised if a teacher that has a [pride] flag in their classroom would be asked to take it down, or people would not feel comfortable expressing themselves in an academic environment,” Romero said.

State leaders have increasingly targeted LGBTQ+ Texans through legislation in recent years. In 2023, lawmakers passed a wave of new laws affecting the community. They included prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender minors and barring trans athletes from participating in certain college sports teams.

Some school districts began imposing restrictions that affected LGBTQ+ students even before the bills became law.

Cameron Samuels, executive director of Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, a youth-led movement that advocates for students’ rights, said they experienced some of those constraints firsthand when they were a student at Seven Lakes High School in Katy ISD a few years ago. They could not access Trevor Project, a crisis line for LGBTQ+ youth, along with other websites related to gender and sexuality, because the school had blocked them.

“This sent a clear message to students like me that I was alternative from the norm, that I was inherently sexual, and it was a lifestyle choice that I was making,” said Samuels, who is now 21. “That being part of the LGBTQ community was something that should be shameful and not normal, not appropriate.”

Samuels warned that the potential impact of the bills currently moving through the Legislature could extend beyond LGBTQ+ youth.

“We are going to grow up without a foundational knowledge of an inclusive sex education curriculum,” they said. “We're going to grow up feeling that race and racism are topics that we don't touch, and we only allow racism to grow. We grow up not being able to question authority, to dissent, which is crucial to a healthy democracy. We won't have the outlets for advocating not only for ourselves, but for others, when the predominant narrative is that the government is right, that oppression is the way it has to be.”

Supporters of the K-12 DEI ban say it’s needed to prevent what they see as a propagation of “woke” ideologies in schools. Sherry Sylvester with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a leading conservative think tank, argued that DEI efforts have not actually delivered meaningful diversity and instead promote a specific worldview, impacting young people’s perspectives and well-being.

“​​DEI has nothing to do with diversity. DEI is about ideology,” she said. “One of the things that we have seen with the proliferation of the ideology, particularly around so-called transgender students, is that it caused a psychological effect where there's a lot of contagion, where it's become a fad because of so much exposure.”

Speaking about books on gender and sexuality, Sylvester said that the biggest problem is that what is written in some of them “simply isn't true.”

“The idea that there is more than two genders is a falsehood and there's no science to back it down,” Sylvester said.

Organizations like the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association and American Psychological Association have long recognized that gender — how a person defines their internal and social identity — is a spectrum. Some biologists and geneticists say viewing sex — which refers to biological characteristics — in binary terms excludes people who are born intersex and have both male and female physical traits.

Sumya Paruchuri, a senior at The Woodlands High School in Conroe ISD, said some of the anti-LGBTQ+ bills lawmakers and their supporters are advocating for are misleading and harmful.

“They keep trying to push this narrative that teachers or schools or whatever are forcing queer ideology on students,” Paruchuri said. “But students can really just step away from those books or discussions or whatever if they're that opposed to it. No one's being forced to engage in it."

Paruchuri added that LGBTQ+ students are already vulnerable, and additional pressure from the state only worsens their mental health.

“They already have higher depression, suicide rates, and just putting more on them is so pointless and counterproductive when there are so many other things that [lawmakers] could be doing to actually help students,” they said.

Ash Hall, a policy and advocacy strategist for LGBTQIA+ rights at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, also said that the proposed DEI ban in K-12 schools could harm students’ mental health by taking away spaces where they can connect and find community with one another.

“Without DEI, you're going to see more students who might think that they are alone,” Hall said.

Hall said the rates of bullying and harassment toward LGBTQ+ students — the key causes of anxiety and depression among them — will likely go up without the DEI policies, leading to more discrimination.

According to a national survey the Trevor Project conducted last year on the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth, those who lived in communities they considered very accepting attempted suicide at less than half the rate of those in communities they said were very unaccepting. More than half of transgender and nonbinary youth said their school was gender-affirming, and those students reported lower suicide attempt rates.

Still, 90% of LGBTQ+ young people said their overall well-being has been negatively affected by politics, the survey found.

Activists say legislation targeting LGBTQ+ youth sends the harmful message that sexuality is something to be ashamed of.

Laura Durant, founder of Love Every Dragon, an organization that supports Texas LGBTQ+ students in Southlake, said a 15-year-old student approached her after a recent discussion about some of the Texas bills under consideration and asked, “Why do they hate us?”

“LGBTQ+ kids are constantly receiving the message that there's something wrong with them,” Durant said. “I think that’s the biggest problem I have with these bills, they’re trying to enact laws to prohibit freedom of expression. That is the most anti-American thing I’ve ever heard.”

Durant is especially worried about the proposed DEI ban on K-12 schools, which she said could make students from LGBTQ+ families, like those with “two moms or two dads,” feel silenced in the classroom.

“Those kids will have no voice,” she added. “It's like their family doesn't exist, or their family doesn't meet the standards of what our local government deems moral or right.”

Concerns about the school libraries bill center on representation. Critics fear LGBTQ+ students will no longer see themselves reflected in school materials.

Elisha Rurka, president of Dignity For All Texas Students, noted there’s no need to ban LGBTQ+ books because students are already aware that people might have different sexual preferences and gender identities, even if those topics are being limited in school libraries and classrooms.

“There’s always been a process to challenge a book. But it was so rare because parents trusted the librarians,” Rurka said. “There isn’t a lot of harmful content. But now the mere existence of a queer character is seen as a threat.”

Rurka also warned that the effect of SB 12 and SB 13 could lead to widespread self-censorship among school staff, well beyond what the laws directly require.

“The laws do enough damage by themselves, but the teachers, the administrators, their jobs are hard enough already. It’s a lot easier to just err on the side of caution,” Rurka said. “Removing even the representation of the LGBTQ experience…doesn’t even fit with what our current country's laws and values are supposed to be.”

Students are already noticing some of those effects. Ayaan Moledina, a high school student at St. Stephen's Episcopal School, fears the current climate is making some people feel they have permission to openly discriminate against LGBTQ+ communities.

“Because if the president of the United States can spread that hate and attack LGBTQ students, why can't they?” Moledina said. “In the wake of Trump's election and in the wake of anti-DEI legislation, that haze has increased exponentially.”

On his first day back in the office, President Trump signed an executive order requiring the federal government to define sex strictly as male or female, leaving transgender, non-binary and intersex people without the possibility to update their sex in their passports. Another executive order mandated that educational institutions receiving federal funding ban trans women from competing on women’s sports teams.

Among his peers, he said, people have gotten used to saying they’re “living in 2025 in Texas in the United States of America and the government is coming after students with different identities.”

“I think that's really painful and really sad to see that that is the reality and that students aren't shocked to see that they are becoming numb, they're becoming immune to this type of hate and attacks,” Moledina said.

Disclosure: Texas Public Policy Foundation has been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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