Equality Florida Condemns DeSantis Administration’s Anti-LGBTQ Attacks Alongside Parents, Students, and Families

Equality Florida Condemns DeSantis Administration’s Anti-LGBTQ Attacks Alongside Parents, Students, and Families

Fort Lauderdale, FL - Yesterday, parents, students, and community leaders joined Equality Florida to call out Governor DeSantis' attacks on their rights and freedoms. Under DeSantis, schools and classrooms have become the center of his obsession with culture war attacks. Instead of focusing on improving the educational opportunities for students, DeSantis has pursued an agenda of government intrusion and control by denying transgender students access to basic rights, threatening teachers, censoring honest and accurate history, restricting access to AP courses, and expanding book bans. Footage from the full press conference held in Broward County can be found here.

“Parents and families are fed up with right-wing extremists turning our classrooms into political battlefields with their banning books, censoring curriculum, whitewashing history, and attacking of LGBTQ students -- all at the expense of our kids and their futures,” said Jennifer Solomon, Equality Florida’s Parents and Families Support Manager. “Enough is enough. Every student who steps into a school deserves to feel safe, welcomed, and included. Parents will continue to speak out until the attacks on our parental rights and on our children stop. School districts have a responsibility to protect all students.”

Schools have become increasingly hostile because of the harmful laws passed and championed by Governor DeSantis. Most recently, we have seen the consequences of these extreme policies at Monarch High School, where a student’s life has been upended, a family is being targeted and harassed, and 2,300 students have lost their beloved principal and staff simply because a transgender student was playing on the girls volleyball team. The state exacerbated these harms with their inflammatory rhetoric and calls for “serious consequences” in response. Students deserve a Governor who is fighting to ensure that every student is protected and every family is respected.

“My school life consisted of relentless fear, guilt, and pain. This is the reality of transgender children in Florida today. What I find fundamentally lacking is a sense of humanity in these conversations,” said Andy Cardona, a transgender high school student. Think of us with the love and fragility you would any other child. We will continue to fight for a world that is safe. We will fight for a world that is loving. And I will dream of a world that loves me and wants me in it.”

"Kids just want to be kids," said Tatiana Williams, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Transinclusive Group. "They want to be kids, and they want to play, and I think we forget that. As the leader of a trans-led organization, we often deal with a lot of community members that come to us because they feel isolated, contemplating suicide, because of what's going on in our community, and because of this government."

"The only thing my child wants to have is an entirely normal life, go to school, play with other children," said Dr. Luisa Montoya, parent and CEO of Diversity Matters. "Being a mother of a transgender child in this environment is a world full of anxiety thinking that at any moment they are going to be discriminated against."

“These anti-LGBTQ laws passed in Tallahassee and pushed by our governor directly affect our schools and make it harder for us to raise our children safely,” said Jeff Delmay, parent of a middle school student. “I teach my son to respect his friends and his classmates for all that they are, including what makes them unique. I expect our schools to do the same.”