When I was in my 20s, I attempted suicide twice. It wasn’t because I lacked strength or intelligence. I was already planning to become an academic later. I was teaching. I was building a life. But I was living in a world with no language, no structures to support me, and no place I thought I could live without breaking bones.
That is the role of erasure. It doesn’t necessarily manifest itself in nameable violence. It will arrive as if you were absent. as a distortion. As a steady message that you are not meant to fully exist.
I survived. And I could not survive quietly.
For years I lived with that absence. It’s the lack of language, awareness, and proof that the future is possible. Survival became political long before I had the words to explain why. Just staying here and continuing to learn, teach, and build a life felt like rejecting the messages I had been absorbing about who was allowed to exist and who was not allowed to exist. That absence shaped who I became as an educator. I entered the teaching profession with a simple belief. Students should not move around school believing they are alone. Young people should not look for evidence of their own humanity and find none. School can hurt, but it can also heal. It can be a place where students encounter possibility rather than erasure.
I became a teacher. Then the professor. In 2005, I became the first openly transgender scholar in teacher education. Since then, I have worked in classrooms across this country. I have witnessed moments of glamor and celebration for trans students, as well as moments of panic that come without warning. I have seen the joy of being expansive and vulnerable at the same time. I’ve seen students calculate the risks before saying their name. At some point, testifying was no longer enough. I decided to intervene. It’s not symbolic. It’s not rhetorical. Structurally.
School is not a neutral place. Teachers are not neutral subjects within themselves. What educators choose to do and what they refuse to do determines whether students continue to be visible. If you are reading this, you already understand the risks. You might even be living them. Anti-trans laws have expanded dramatically across the United States, regulating names, pronouns, curriculum, athletics, bathrooms, health care, and public life. These laws extend beyond policy to everyday living conditions. They shape what can be said, who is recognized, and how trans youth move through schools and communities.
As a researcher, I have been studying these policies and their impact on education for years. But what I’ve most consistently found is more than just evidence of harm. I found evidence of resistance.
In Utah, a high school English teacher spotted a narrow gap in state law and allowed it, based on HB 374 (the Confidential Materials in Education Act) and HB 29, which turns local book challenges into potential statewide removals. genderqueer They were to remain in the classroom under the supervision of an administrator. All lessons had to be documented. All discussions had to be explicitly tied to state standards. Most teachers deleted the text. she didn’t. Instead, she turned literary analysis into a defense of reading itself. Students investigated memoirs, symbolism, rhetoric, and censorship, documenting every objective and every state’s standards. They asked who decides what is harmful, what is considered neutral, and why certain articles are dangerous. Over time, surveillance became stricter. The teacher lost his position. But her students refused to let the record end there. They organized public read-alouds, archived lesson plans, and documented what actually happened in the classroom. One parent later wrote that the book helped her child overcome suicidal thoughts. The incident ended in a personnel decision, according to state records. The students’ records provided evidence that reading itself can be an act of refusal.
Time and time again, educators, families, librarians, counselors, and community members are finding ways to support students despite increasingly restrictive conditions. they adapt. they cooperate. They refuse to leave young people to political rhetoric. Many of these policies are challenged, delayed, defeated, or never become law. This resistance is important because it reminds us that policy is not destiny. People shape results.
What I have come to understand is that rejection is not rebellious. It’s about dedication. It is a practice rooted in maintaining presence despite erasure. It lives in the tension between legality and justice, obligation and possibility. Some refusals are public. Others are almost invisible. They occur in lesson plans, standards, documentation systems, classroom routines, and teacher-selected questions. They are often intentional acts of care that are repeated daily.
Across the country, denials take many different forms. A fourth-grade teacher in Montana continues to center students’ positive names during math lessons in response to HB 400, a law that protects students who refuse to speak. A social studies teacher in Alabama who reorganized her classroom long before the ultimate failure of HB 244, a “don’t tell me I’m gay” bill, asks her students what makes a democracy stable and encourages them to consider civic participation, belonging, and power through historical inquiry rather than political sloganeering. When a transgender girl wants to run track in Georgia, coaches respond to SB 1, the Riley Gaines Act, organizing runners according to stride rhythm, endurance, and coordinated pacing, rather than gender categories. University professors in Texas are acting on SB 12 and HB 229, projecting statutory language onto screens and asking prospective teachers how social-emotional learning, literacy, and relationship building can create positive classrooms within legal constraints.
But rejection comes at a price. Some teachers are reprimanded. Some are monitored. Some are reassigned, fired, not renewed, or even kicked out. Some people quit because they can’t bear the cost of staying there anymore. But we need educators in these areas. We cannot surrender entire states, districts, and communities to policies of erasure. We need stronger protections for educators who want to stay and stronger support systems for the students who depend on them.
That work begins with understanding the law. This is legally written content. In fact, that’s how you live. The distance between the two is where rejection operates. Laws contain ambiguity. Contains an opening. They leave space even if you try to close it. If you don’t read, you won’t find the entrance. If you can’t find it, vacate the classroom before you begin.
There is progress. Let’s all study law together. Read with others. Please interpret it together. No one should do this work alone. Identify where practice is possible. Space is left in every law. Please find it. Please support your students there. Please send the law back to the legislators. Show us what happens in a real classroom. Transform abstractions into lived experiences.
Educators cannot do this work alone. Teachers need librarians, counselors, health care providers, families, legal advocates, faith leaders, journalists, unions, community organizations, and administrators who will stand by them. Student protection is not the job of a single profession. It is the work of a community willing to protect each other.
Protests are important. It builds visibility. It signals collective rejection. But protests alone won’t change what’s happening inside the classroom Tuesday morning. Educators operate in that space. Denial is an ongoing habit. Decisions are made every day to ensure students remain.
I know this because I’ve lived on both sides of that question.
I teach now because I know what happens when young people cannot imagine their future. Denial begins with making them believe and realize that they have it.
sj miller is an interdisciplinary scholar, activist, author, teacher trainer at the professional learning center, and professor of education at santa fe community college. They are the authors of the upcoming book We refuse to disappear: resistance within anti-trans education politics.. Learn more here sjmiller.info.
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