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Thanks to Texas’s version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay" bill, teachers at some public schools are under pressure to deadname their students. Under Texas Senate Bill 12 (SB 12), which was signed into law this summer, some schools are forcing transgender, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming students to go by their legal names, rather than by their correct chosen names.
“It’s been really degrading because it’s so targeted,” said James, a transmasculine high school senior in San Antonio’s North East Independent School District (NEISD). “This can’t be interpreted…as anything else but an attack directly on trans kids.” (Teen Vogue is using pseudonyms for many of the students, teachers, and others interviewed for this article to protect them from possible harassment and/or retaliation for speaking with the press.)
James and other trans students in his school are struggling with the district's implementation of the law. An email from his high school’s principal sent home to families just before the first day of classes read, “We cannot accommodate requests from students or parents for names that suggest a different biological sex.”
Aubrey Mika Chancellor, the school district’s executive director of communications, wrote the following in response to a question about how the district was determining under what circumstances it would allow students to choose their own name:
James told Teen Vogue that a few teachers are defaulting to his correct name, but others have switched to calling trans students by their last names as a workaround to avoid deadnaming them. “A few others just don’t refer to me at all because I asked them not to,” he said.
James is worried that these policies for trans students will draw attention to him and the other trans teens in his life or even force “stealth” trans teens – those who aren’t out about being transgender – out of the closet. He wants to remain true to himself, but he feels that SB 12 is trying to make him deny his identity. “I’ve never felt more at threat here,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking about the fact that everything would be so different if I detransitioned.”
Pitched by Republicans as a “parents' bill of rights,” like many similar bills in states across the country, SB 12 is a lengthy law that doesn’t just target trans+ students. Its nearly 40 pages contain a wishlist of right-wing talking points about public education.
SB 12 broadly targets schooling that acknowledges queer and trans life. It also bans clubs “based on sexual orientation or gender identity,” like Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs), which have been vital sources of support for LGBTQ+ students at schools around the country since the first GSAs’ founding in 1972. According to the ACLU of Texas, it may also put an end to clubs that support women, Black and Brown people, and other marginalized groups. The law prohibits “developing or implementing policies, procedures, trainings, activities, or programs that reference race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation” and prevents school staff from supporting the mental, physical, or emotional health of students without getting explicit permission from their parents.
Ash Hall, a policy and advocacy strategist on LGBTQIA+ rights for the ACLU of Texas, told Teen Vogue they believe the restrictions around mental health care could also have wide-ranging impacts on LGBTQ+ kids. “If a student is, for example, going to start seeking counseling at school based on struggles they’re experiencing around their gender identity or sexual orientation, then alerting the parents and guardians that the student is seeking that could open that student up to being outed,” said Hall.
In 2023, the Texas legislature banned gender-affirming health care for trans minors. With SB 12, Texas Republicans sought to further restrict trans life by banning school staff from offering support for "social transitioning," a term which refers to nonmedical actions associated with gender transition, such as changing your name, pronouns, or the way you dress. But a fact sheet published by the ACLU of Texas argues that the law does not actually prohibit the use of chosen names and pronouns.
“There are other ways that [part of the bill] could be interpreted,” Hall said. “For example, that could mean not asking a student if they’ve considered whether or not they may have a transgender identity, or it could mean not giving a student a flyer or a book having to do with gender identity.”
But they said some schools are “taking this in a really extreme direction.” As of publication, the state has not provided formal guidance on how it expects this aspect of the law to be implemented, leaving each district to begin the year with its own interpretation. A presentation about SB 12 obtained through an open-records request from the Austin Independent School District reflects the confusion around what the law means and how to implement it.
“If a student’s biological sex is not known to the community, it is possibly safe to continue using their preferred name/pronoun as you are less likely to be turned in to the board,” reads one bullet point on a slide labeled, “Implementation Interpretations.” Another similarly labeled slide has a bullet point that simply reads, “Use ‘preferred name’ or ‘nickname,’” followed by five question marks.
Without official state guidance, interpreting the law is left to school districts or principals. A teacher at Dripping Springs High School, in a town about 25 miles west of Austin, told Teen Vogue that at his school, students are free to use any form of their legal first or middle names, but that the assistant principal would reach out to parents for approval of nicknames and chosen names. Although he said this procedure would accommodate trans students with supportive parents, it also risked outing students who hadn’t come out to their families.
But in Leander Independent School District, north of the state capital, another teacher told Teen Vogue that her school is refusing to accommodate any names that are determined to be related to a trans, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming person’s “social transition.” She recalled that on her first day of school, students “just kind of circled around us, like, ‘What is going on? What do you mean that you can’t call us by our names?’” She said she feels heartbroken for trans students she has mentored, and that her school administration is watching closely for her and other LGBTQIA+-supportive teachers to make a mistake. “We had to have a conversation with [students about the law], all the while our instructional coach and assistant principal were kind of circling like sharks.”
(The administrations at Austin, Dripping Springs, and Leander Independent School Districts did not respond to Teen Vogue's requests for comment.)
“This is a discriminatory bill, and it targets some of our most vulnerable students. And because it targets them, it also targets our teachers,” said Kelsey Kling, a government-relations specialist and policy analyst at the Texas branch of the American Federation of Teachers. Kling said her union, which represents 66,000 members throughout the state, has opposed SB 12 since it first began moving through the legislature. “It is impossible to impart knowledge if a kid does not feel welcome and safe in a classroom, and this bill flies in the face of that.”
Kling said her organization has heard from numerous teachers since the start of the school year: “Our teachers’ concerns are not about, ‘What happens to me if I do this?’ It’s, ‘How can I help my kids?’” Even so, she said many teachers are afraid of the potential consequences of violating the law. Parents are the main driver of SB 12’s enforcement mechanism, which allows them to lodge a grievance with their district if they think the law is being broken. But what happens from there is less clear. “We don’t really know what the specific consequences are, and that’s just another layer of anxiety,” Kling said.
Jacob Reyes, Texas representative for the national LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD, called the law dangerous no matter how it’s interpreted. “Texas schools should be a safe space for students to learn and understand their lives and the world around them,” he said. “Instead, teachers are often forced to reject vulnerable students rather than support them, including simple things like the names they prefer to be called.” He added, “Everyone deserves to be themselves and feel safe in school. Teachers should be trusted to foster inclusive environments where everyone can belong and thrive.”
On August 28, the ACLU of Texas and the Transgender Law Center filed a lawsuit challenging the law on behalf of a few individual Texans as well as groups like Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT). Cameron Samuels, executive director at the advocacy organization, which has members in schools all across the state, including in the NEISD, said attacks on LGBTQIA+ students are linked to efforts to weaken public schools. “I think that the anti-transness and anti-queerness have been a catalyst for degrading public education,” Samuels said. “Book bans and censorship, and] honing in on race and sexuality and gender identity means that they’re able to erase trans Texans and LGBTQ Texans, while simultaneously dismantling public education and other institutions where DEI is prevalent.”
Although trans students are the main targets of some of these policies, they aren’t the only ones suffering, said Hayden Cohen, SEAT’s state policy director. “Some policies are very intentionally directed at them, but that doesn’t mean an Asian student who prefers to go by a nickname isn’t feeling the effects of it,” Cohen said. “They are.”
Safara Malone, a trans Texan who is currently a student at Harvard, and a policy intern at the Transgender Education Network of Texas, said a similar policy would have hurt her education by making her afraid to participate in class. “I wouldn’t raise my hand and answer questions because my deadname would have to be called,” she said. “That is going to put kids in a situation where they’re afraid to speak up, they’re afraid to participate in class, they’re afraid to say anything, and that’s interfering with kids’ education.”
Daniel, a stealth transmasculine sophomore in the NEISD, told Teen Vogue that he’s terrified that SB 12 and the policies around it could expose him if a teacher uses his deadname instead of his last name. “This new policy has made it more horrifying for me to go to school because now I can’t even miss a day,” he said. “What if there’s a sub, or what if that teacher forgets, and they’re all confused and they’re wondering and then maybe they eventually put the pieces together.” He added, “I am not stealth because I am ashamed. I am stealth for my own safety.”
In a text message, Caleb, another trans senior at an NEISD school, told me that losing access to his chosen name cuts at the very heart of his identity: “The lows of the trans experience are so lonely.... Abandoning my deadname is me pushing that hopelessness aside. I don’t have to live my life as someone I am not. I am choosing to be brave and assert myself in my true identity, even though it is not socially acceptable. My name is MINE and mine only. I own this part of myself.”
One of his parents told me Caleb was “really shaken up” when he came home from his first day of school following the bill’s passage. “It’s like the school has decided to pretend he’s dead, socially nonexistent,” they shared over text. “How the district is interpreting SB 12 is discriminatory,” she said later on the phone. “It really is intended to single out trans kids and humiliate them, effectively dehumanize them and humiliate them, either by refusing to address them as a person…or by marking them in front of everybody, subject to this policy.”
