'As an ally, as a parent, as a person who cares about this community, you should be standing up and creating a space that you would want to see where folks are celebrated.'
. Many have suffered disproportionately by losing physical support networks they'd built and being forced to isolate in unsafe home environments, where they are not accepted for who they are: facing rejection, neglect, and abuse. Some have come out or transitioned during this time and face uncharted territory as classrooms reopen their doors.
"Because I've been remote, nobody at the high school really knows that I'm trans. Teachers, I hope they know how to notice microaggressions. Like if someone says, 'Oh, I couldn't tell you used to be a boy,' and stuff like that. But, to be honest, I don't think they even noticed major aggressions in the past, too."
Many calls have been for universal frustrations, like the difficulty of virtual learning or loneliness as a result of remote schooling, but Bright has also witnessed teens who have been forced to hide their true identity, who are, or who aren't able to reach school counselors or therapists with whom they'd previously been making progress.
For many LGBTQ+ youth, mental health benefits also hinged on school clubs. These had long proved to be an ultimate safe space — and not just GSAs or other identify-affirming organizations, as important as those are. Any group that offered a sense of community around a shared interest served a similar purpose to queer students. That is, until those too were upended by the pandemic.
"People are often out more to their friends than they are to their own family at first," Harte told POPSUGAR."So when people lost the opportunity to spend a lot of time with direct relationships outside of the home, it did put them back in an environment where they may have not had a supportive family situation.
For much of the past year, many LGBTQ+ students no longer feared for their safety, and some were able to come out or transition without the added pressure of doing so in plain sight of their school community. "It sounds so obvious, but when youth come into this new environment of change and back in person, they're not going to need less support," Bright said."They're going to need more support." And, historically, that hasn't always been easy to provide, global pandemic aside.While all this tension has been broiling, A.T.
"Historically, we focused just on LGBTQ+ identities and not the holistic student," they said."So that means figuring out what their experience is from the time they get to school to the time they leave to when they're at home. It's not just, 'Here's how to understand someone's pronouns.
With intersectionality as a baseline, Bright, Harte, and Furuya mapped out what else must be done to serve queer students across the nation as they return to schools and navigate new, potentially safe spaces this fall.Students, staff, and administrators alike have a remarkable opportunity before them, Harte said.
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