Oct. 29, 2025, 7:33 p.m.
LGBTQ issues are a hot topic politically, particularly the rights of transgender students. The Movement Advancement Project is an independent think tank that tracks LGBTQ-related issues across the national landscape, with a particular focus on state laws affecting LGBTQ youth. Executive Director Naomi Goldberg spoke to Taameen Mohammad on the possible consequences of recent LGBTQ-related cases before the Supreme Court, laws in some states that could harm LGBTQ youth, and how to change the tone of the conversation around a heated culture-war topic. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
With the Supreme Court’s ruling on Mahmoud v. Taylor, where SCOTUS ruled in favor of parents’ right to opt out of certain topics taught in schools, where could the future of opt-outs go?
I think the SCOTUS ruling in June in the Mahmoud case is very concerning. We know that children do best when they have access to diverse materials. We're increasingly living in a complex and global world. And so when parents can opt their children out of basic conversations about family diversity, age-appropriate conversations about human sexuality, and other content they may not agree with, it takes away from those youths' ability to live and thrive and work in a diverse community.
We at MAP track parental-notification laws, as well as curriculum-censorship bills and laws, and we're increasingly seeing these pass across the country. We know these policies impact both LGBTQ students and also other students’ abilities to learn and thrive. We also know the inverse is true, that when students have access to a diverse curriculum, when they have access to protection in the classroom, and they feel supported and informed and affirmed, they have better learning outcomes.
Ultimately, I think opt-outs put a lot of onus on educators to have to sort through who can be part of which conversations. And they take away the expertise that educators have, in terms of, how do they build their students’ critical-thinking skills? How do they help them succeed?
The Mahmoud case originated in Maryland, which has an existing law on inclusion of LGBTQ curricula. What do you think this ruling could do for states like Maryland?
There are model curricula that are put out by the states, topics and standards that schools are supposed to meet. But then it's up to individual school districts to set specific curricular goals or approve a particular curriculum. Then within a community, individual schools have flexibility as well. It’s sort of an interlocking network of what curriculum is used in elementary school, what books are taught in middle school, what books are taught in high school, and what conversations can happen at which point.
Introducing an opt-out rubric creates a lot of confusion, particularly for individual schools and educators, in terms of what can we talk about, and what can't we, and how is it going to impact particular students, and who's getting pulled out of the classroom when we're talking about certain things.
Naomi Goldberg
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It allows for a lot of variation—but we know there are core topics that are important for all youth to learn about, whether that's accurate U.S. history in terms of the enslavement of Black people, or Indigenous communities, or the Holocaust, or family diversity, or the experiences of LGBTQ people.
Broadly speaking, in terms of the rights of LGBTQ youth or LGBTQ curricula in schools, where do you think policy leaders should be playing catch-up on this?
Last month we released a report focused on LGBTQ youth, and the goal was to go beyond particular hot-topic issues. The experience of LGBTQ youth is so much more than the sports teams they play on and the bathrooms they can use, or even the books they can read in the classroom. So how do we really think holistically about the experiences of LGBTQ youth and queer youth and trans youth in our country and our communities?
For me, that's where I hope we can start to have the conversation, which is that all kids want to feel safe at school, they all want to have a fair chance to succeed and to prepare for the future.
Certainly, we know that in states and in school districts with strong anti-bullying policies, not only do LGBTQ students do better on a number of different metrics—attendance at school, performance at school, connection to school, community measures—so do other kids.
And so for me, especially when there's so much concern about the state of our education system in this country, there's real opportunity to make targeted improvements that, yes, might and should help queer students—but they would also help all kids do better in school, feel more connected, have better mental health outcomes, and ultimately become the kind of citizens that we want to have in our country when they graduate.
MAP publishes conversation guides on how to talk about issues affecting the LGBTQ community. Could you describe your approach to making these guides, especially for very hot-button issues?
We at MAP do a lot of work around how to have conversations on LGBTQ issues. Our core belief is that we in this country can have hard conversations, and ultimately it's through conversation and finding shared values and being able to talk about hard things that we can actually increase support for LGBTQ people, build empathy, and help bridge some of these divides.
We try to focus on what are the shared values that we all have. So in the school community, it might be that we all want our kids to feel safe at school. Then we try to help people understand, like, where the gaps are, that not all kids feel safe at school. There are kids who are worried about going to the bathroom, who are concerned they may not be able to use the restroom because they're trans. So they're either not going to the bathroom for a whole day, or they're staying home from school, or they're constantly thinking about, if I have to go to the bathroom, where am I going to go?
When we start to share those realities with people, we can actually talk through, “Wow, I had no idea that was the experience that a child in our school community is having.”
Could you summarize what the current landscape is for conversion-therapy laws across the country, and how these state laws could change if Chiles v. Salazar keeps moving through the Supreme Court?
Currently, there are 23 states and D.C. that have laws prohibiting licensed health care providers from using conversion-therapy practices on minors, and there are a few other states that restrict the practice through other mechanisms. So about half the country protects LGBTQ youth from this discredited, dangerous practice.
And that's really important, because we know how harmful conversion therapy is for LGBTQ youth, and that it's not a practice that works. A person's sexual orientation and gender identity are fundamental parts of who they are, and these pressure tactics are trying to change something that can't be changed.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case, which involves a Colorado law that prohibits state-licensed mental health care professionals from using conversion practices on minors. Depending on how the Court rules, it certainly could call into question the protections that exist in about half of the U.S. states. Especially if the ruling is very broad, it could undermine laws in other places.
We have several states that have worked to preempt or to prohibit localities from passing ordinances. For example, Columbia, South Carolina, passed a city-level ordinance a few years ago to protect youth from these harmful practices, but the state recently passed legislation that would take away funding from any city or county that did that. So the Columbia city council repealed its ordinance because of the substantial threat of losing state funding.
So I think the landscape is definitely complicated and shifting right now.
We’ve seen political candidates use transgender youth in school environments in their ads on the campaign trail. What impact do these ads have?
Just like during the last presidential election, we're seeing politicians use anti-trans ads and rhetoric all over the place. They’re trying to play on the public's lack of familiarity with trans people, in order to distract voters from important issues, whether it's the cost of living or quality education. Rather than trying to solve the problems that constituents face, which are hard and would require real policymaking, what they're doing is singling out a vulnerable population and making them seem like the enemy.
How many trans kids are playing sports in Virginia, right? But the reality is that trans people in Virginia, and trans students too, are worried about all the same things as other voters: good jobs, health care, how to provide for themselves. And I think that's just really important to highlight, that this is a campaign tactic.
This rhetoric and these ads and conversations have a direct impact on LGBTQ people, especially LGBTQ youth. Research shows that even when laws aren't passed, just the ads and the discussion and the kitchen-table conversations can have negative impacts on youth mental health.
We just did a survey over the summer, and we put out a report a week and a half ago showing that LGBTQ people are making really hard life decisions based on what's happening at the federal level and in the states. Our study found that 1 in 10 trans people have moved to a different state because of this stuff.
I think we really need to focus on the human impact of what's going on.
