"In my small New Jersey town of 12,000 residents, the school board recently debated a policy that currently protects the rights of LGBTQ+ children who attend public schools in the district. This was brought to my attention by a resident who shared a post on Facebook which encouraged those who support this policy to show up in solidarity with these young people in order to keep the protections in place as they are."
"For many LGBTQ+ people, identity isn't just something one discovers; it remains something they have to defend, again and again and again, against systems built to erase it. Messages of rejection begin to accumulate like static, and embed themselves in the nervous system. The toll begins to show up everywhere, in higher rates of depression, anxiety, and trauma among queer and trans communities-not because of who we are, but what we are forced to endure."
A local school board debated a policy that lets LGBTQ+ students express gender and use chosen pronouns at school without mandatory parental notification. Some community members framed such solidarity as "ridiculous" or "targeting" the board, and opponents discussed trans and non-binary students as political problems rather than children. Many LGBTQ+ people must repeatedly defend their identities against erasure, causing messages of rejection to accumulate and embed in the nervous system. Those harms show up as higher rates of depression, anxiety, and trauma. Adolescent belonging is biologically essential as social circuits and identity develop, making protections necessary.
Read at Psychology Today
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]