How Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ law could harm children’s mental health

by philg

“How Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ law could harm children’s mental health” (The Guardian, today):

LGBTQ+ parents and pediatric psychologists say the law stigmatizes being gay or transgender and could harm the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth.

Stella, 10, attends a private school in Atlanta, Georgia, and explains to friends that she has four moms. Two of them are the lesbian couple that adopted her. The other two are her birth parents, one of whom recently came out as a transgender woman.

“I’m so grateful that [Stella] is somewhere that sees” the family “as what it is: her moms just love her”, said Kelsey Hanley, Stella’s birth mother, who lives in Kissimmee, Florida.

But Hanley, 30, worries that children who have multiple moms or dads or are LGBTQ+ themselves won’t get the same acceptance in Florida.

That’s because the state recently approved legislation that bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade and prohibits such lessons for older students unless they are “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate”.

(It is unclear how this anecdote relates to Hate in Florida because a 10-year-old with four moms, six moms, or any other quantity of moms would be in 5th grade and the new Florida law prohibits instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity only in grades K-3. Also, young Hanley’s four moms have sent her to a private school and the new law does not apply to private schools.)

What I find fascinating about this story is that, in the context of children’s mental health, it shows mentally healthy children outdoors in the baking Florida sun in rated-low-risk-by-the-CDC Hillsborough County… wearing masks:

Note the range of styles from covering face to under-nose to chin diaper and that none are N95 masks that could provide some protection against the unmasked. How can we be sure that these children are mentally healthy? The new law hasn’t taken effect yet, so these masked-outdoors children are among those whose mental health has presumably been maximized by unfettered public school sexual orientation and gender identity instruction starting in kindergarten.

Related:

  • The happiest children in Spain live with two daddies (“children who lived with their two mothers were extremely unhappy”)
  • One reason that Hillsborough County is “low risk” is that the CDC completely changed its standards in March 2022 (NPR: “Critics of CDC’s new approach say the agency seems to have moved the goalposts to justify the political imperative to let people get back to their normal lives.”)
  • CDC gives us a new canonical example of chutzpah? (after locking down children for a substantial percentage of their lives, the CDC now alerts us to poor mental health among children)

10 thoughts on “How Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ law could harm children’s mental health”

  1. The Guardian article is misleading because the Say Gay law doesn’t say you shouldn’t have two happy daddies. It says a third grader should not be pressured to figure out her gender identification. After that age, the new law says you can talk about it in “age-appropriate“ ways, whatever that is. And lastly, the new law says that those two happy daddies have to be told their daughter’s teachers are having those conversations with her.

  2. Why do people overload 10 year olds with all of that nonsense? Next, people will tell a 5 year old that he/she/ze/they is a product of a frozen embryo that was implanted in a surrogate mother.

    A little bit of hate from HBO (“This will be the least of his problems”):

  3. Mask types, kids, n95s. None of that matters as long as we get the money shot with the rainbow banners! Also The Guardian doesn’t care about factual observations (law doesn’t apply to 10 yr old etc), as long as they show us they are guardians of “THE MESSAGE”.

  4. I agree the angst against the law is overhysterical, if you will agree legislators have duties much more important than manning (!) the culture barricades.

    • Donald: Per the NYT, Guardian, CNN, et al., correct thinking is that a state government has the power to order schools to shut down and teach nothing at all for 3-18 months, but a state government does not have the power to order schools, if they happen to be open, to leave something out of the curriculum. Total shutdown is so obviously within the state government’s power that it does not require the legislature to meet and agree; a governor can simply order it for as long as he/she/ze/they thinks helpful. But a shutdown of the sexual orientation and gender identity portion of the kindergarten curriculum, even when passed into actual law by a legislature+governor, can never be justified.

    • DeSantis’s full-tilt charge at the barricades is very popular. Isn’t Florida the only state with a net positive interstate migration flow?

    • Sam: that Tax Foundation article is #FakeNews! It says that New Hampshire has no individual income tax. This is completely false. NH already taxes dividends and interest. As the state becomes majority-Democrat, capital gains and estate taxes are logical (and frequently proposed) additions. NH doesn’t tax W-2 wages and currently has no estate tax.

      I’m also not sure if that Tax Foundation article accurately accounts for documented and undocumented migrants from countries other than the U.S.

  5. I tried to count the number of protesters in that photo, and came up with ~27 all crammed close to each other. I would assume that if there were more protesters, the Guardian would have shown us that, right? So, me think, the Guardian is trying to steer up a story rather than covering the news.

    News network is now another form of social media network.

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