Aiden Cordero, 18, was suspended from her Florida high school in February for using the girls’ restroom.
Cordero is a transgender girl and a senior at Frank W. Springstead High School, in suburban Tampa, where she says she has used the girls’ restroom for the past three years without any problems. However, one of the few laws targeting LGBTQ students or subjects that Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed in May 2023 requires her to use the boys’ restroom or the single-occupancy restroom in the school’s clinic, which she said is far from her classes is.
In February, she had an emergency, so she went to the nearest bathroom, the women’s room, she said. When she returned to class, two classmates told an administrator that she had used the girls’ bathroom, and she was suspended for the day.
As a result of her suspension, Cordero said, she was not allowed to join the rest of her classmates on a senior trip, for which she had paid $180. Before the incident, Cordero had considered staying in Florida for college, since she received a Bright Futures Scholarship, which would have partially covered tuition at a state university. Because of her experiences in high school and the passage of state legislation focused on LGBTQ rights, she decided to leave Florida and attend college in New York, even though it would have meant additional expenses.
“I feel like I’ve gone to college [in Florida]“I would have to deal with that for four more years. If I stay in a dorm here, I have to be in a male dorm, using male restrooms,” she said, referring to a Florida Board of Education rule passed last year that expanded the May 2023 law.
A spokesperson for the Hernando County School District declined to comment on Cordero’s suspension, citing student privacy.
NBC News spoke with Cordero and other students, teachers and parents in Hernando County this past school year about the impact of laws targeting the LGBTQ community, including what critics have called the “Don’t Say Gay” law, which passed in May was expanded. 2023.
DeSantis signed the first version of the law, the Parental Rights in Education Act, in May 2022. The original law banned “classroom teaching by school personnel or third parties about sexual orientation or gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade” or at a manner that is not appropriate for the age or development of students in accordance with state standards.”
The expanded measure bans sexual orientation or gender identity instruction in kindergarten through eighth grade, limits reproductive health education in sixth through 12th grade and requires that reproductive health instruction be “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with the state standards.” The law applies to both public schools and charter schools.
The LGBTQ students and teachers who spoke to NBC News said the resulting climate is one of confusion about what exactly breaks the law and increased hostility toward all things LGBTQ.
Hernando County School District Superintendent John Stratton sent an email in May 2023 saying teachers should familiarize themselves with the Parental Rights in Education Act, according to a copy of the email shared with NBC News. Shortly afterwards, he sent another email, which was also shared with NBC News, instructing school staff “not to display items that could be considered classroom teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity (flags, posters, stickers, etc.) .”
Ian Wald, a digital film production teacher at Nature Coast Technical High School in Brooksville, about 50 miles north of Tampa, said he removed a rainbow sticker that was behind his desk at the end of the 2022-2023 school year, shortly after the e Stratton’s email was broadcast.
“I wasn’t trying to convert anyone; I was just trying to let the students know that they were safe in my classroom,” said Wald, who does not identify as LGBTQ.
However, teachers who are part of the LGBTQ community, like Alyssa Marano, said the expansive law made them feel like they had to hide who they are. Marano, who was also a teacher at Nature Coast, left her job at the end of the 2022-2023 school year due to the political climate surrounding LGBTQ issues in Hernando County and at the state level and took a job as a marketing manager at a local gym.
After missing the first half of the school year, she returned to the classroom in January.
“When I decided to leave at the end of last year, there were so many emotions, and it was really just a tough time,” she said. “So I had to put it down.” Now, she added, she is returning to her teaching career, hoping it will be “a little lighter.”
In March, Florida education officials and civil rights attorneys reached a settlement in a lawsuit challenging Florida’s Parenting Rights Act, which allows students and teachers to speak freely about sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida classrooms as long as it is not part of the classroom instruction. The settlement will also allow schools to develop anti-bullying policies related to sexual orientation and gender identity and to establish LGBTQ groups, such as gender-sexuality alliances. In April, a judge in a separate lawsuit temporarily blocked the restriction on teachers’ use of pronouns that do not correspond to their birth gender. However, the injunction only blocks enforcement of the law against two of the teachers who filed the lawsuit.
The settlement does not affect the part of the parental rights law that prohibits teachers from using names and pronouns for students who do not correspond to their gender assigned at birth, or the law that restricts bathroom use by trans students.
Florida has also passed a number of other bills targeting trans youth, including one that would restrict trans students’ participation in school sports. However, several of the state’s LGBTQ-related bills have been temporarily or permanently blocked in court, including a measure restricting gender-affirming care for minors and adults, which a judge largely rejected this month. In an emailed statement, DeSantis’ deputy press secretary said the governor’s office plans to appeal the ruling.
Some Florida residents have left the state or considered moving as a result of the so-called Don’t Say Gay law. In a report published in January, before the law was expanded, the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found that 56% of 133 LGBTQ parents surveyed in Florida said they had considered leaving the law because of the measure. able to leave. Another report from the Williams Institute, conducted in March 2023 as the bill’s expansion was being debated, surveyed 106 Florida parents, both LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ, and found that 40% said they had considered to leave the state as a result of the law.
Jon Harris Maurer, director of public policy at Equality Florida, an LGBTQ advocacy group founded in 1997, said the organization heard concerns from more parents and families this year than ever before.
“Families were afraid to send their children to school because protections had been removed, bullying had increased, and teachers were being forced back into the closet,” he said. “In addition, school districts were telling teachers to remove ‘safe space’ stickers and removing books from classroom and library shelves.”
School board members from a third of the state’s school districts, which represent the majority of Florida’s student population, also contacted Equality Florida during the 2023-2024 school year to say their districts had struggled to interpret the laws and that the state was “refusing to clarify them, adding to the confusion and fear,” Harris Maurer said.
Cordero, who graduated in May and decided to attend college in New York City, said that while New York is not completely safe, she hopes to live her “best life” there.
“I can use the women’s restrooms, I can stay in the women’s dorms — basically just be myself,” she said. “When I’m in New York, I’ll be free.”
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This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
