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"pertaining collectively to people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or those questioning their gender identity or sexual orientation), intersex, and asexual (or their allies)" (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/lgbtqia).

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pertaining collectively to people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or those questioning their gender identity or sexual orientation), intersex, and asexual (or their allies).

GOOSES. GEESES. I WANT THIS QUIZ ON PLURAL NOUNS!

Test how much you really know about regular and irregular plural nouns with this quiz.

Which of the following nouns has an irregular plural form?

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2022

LGBTQIA is a term that collectively represents people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or those questioning their gender identity or sexual orientation), intersex, and asexual.

An alternate letter order is LGBTIQA. Terms like LGBTQIA are sometimes used in a way in which the A is said to include or stand for Allies- cisgender and heterosexual people who support the people represented by the other letters. For example, an event may be labeled in a way that welcomes such allies. However, terms like LGBTQIA exist as a label for a community for those who have been marginalized and discriminated against due to their gender or sexual identity, so many don't consider allies to be part of the abbreviation.

There are many longer variations of LGBTQIA that include letters representing those who identify in different ways, such as those who identify as , transsexual, intergender, , , and . Common and more limited terms include LGBT and LGBTQ. Sometimes, a plus sign is added after the letters to represent any pertinent groups not represented by a letter. There is no consensus about which term is best, and others are commonly used or have been proposed.

All of these terms are most commonly used as adjectives, as in LGBTQIA rights or the LGBTQIA community.

Less commonly, such terms may be used as a noun to refer to a person who's part of that community. When used this way, it's typically used in the plural, as in This anti-discrimination law is a victory for all LGBTQIAs.

Example: June is Pride Month, and it's for the entire LGBTQIA community.

The abbreviation LGB (for lesbian, gay, and bisexual) gained popularity in the 1980s. In the 1990s, LGBT (with T for transgender) became more widespread. Since then, additional letters have been added to be more inclusive of those who identify in ways different than those already represented.

LGBTQIA and similar abbreviations are intended as umbrella terms-meaning they're attempts to encompass a number of different communities under one label. Of course, the more inclusive such abbreviations are, the longer they can get (often making them less practical to say or spell out). But that doesn't negate the need for inclusivity, and such labels are still evolving as terms that describe people's gender and sexuality continue to be defined.

What are some other forms related to LGBTQIA?

LGBTIQA (alternate letter order)
What are some synonyms for LGBTQIA? What are some words that share a root or word element with LGBTQIA? What are some words that often get used in discussing LGBTQIA?

The acronym is often used in political circles in discussion of human rights. Since it's an umbrella term, it's more often used to talk about groups than individual people.

Love to my LGBTQIA+ family... enjoy #PrideMonth2020 !!!! pic.twitter.com/YgoIBQi4z2

- Loni Love (@LoniLove) June 1, 2020

shoutout to all the LGBTQIA+ folks heading back to toxic/abusive families for the holidays

no matter what might happen, remember that you're valid and worthy of being loved in full 🖤🖤🖤

- aspiring thembo (@FeelingFisky) December 23, 2019

I'm sick and tired of people who claim to be Christians defending #Folau preaching hate towards #LGBTIQA people.

Homophobia causes hate crimes
Homophobia causes suicides
Homophobia causes poor self esteem and depression and isolation in young people

This is not faith, it's hate

- Kon Karapanagiotidis (@Kon__K) June 25, 2019

True or False?
LGBTQIA is an official abbreviation and the only correct one to refer to this community.

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pertaining collectively to people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or those questioning their gender identity or sexual orientation), intersex, and asexual (or their allies). GOOSES. GEESES. I WANT THIS QUIZ ON PLURAL NOUNS! Test how much you really know about regular and irregular plural nouns with this quiz.

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According to NJ.gov,
"School districts shall:
• Provide transgender students with the same opportunities to participate in physical
education as other students in accordance with their gender identity;
• Permit a transgender student to participate in gender-segregated school activities in
accordance with the student’s gender identity;
• Permit and support the formation of student clubs or programs regarding issues related to
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) youth; and
• Offer support in the creation of peer led educational groups."

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After studying 4 high schools in California, who were interested in implementing an LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum, these were the findings:
"Finding 1: Any type of LGBTQ-inclusive
curriculum increases school safety and
support for LGBTQ people and issues
Finding 2: The perception of school
safety and support for LGBTQ people and
issues may be most positively impacted
when support for LGBTQ-inclusive
curriculum is institutionalized
Finding 3: There is a difference between
LGBTQ-inclusive lessons that are
integrated into specific subjects compared
to stand-alone lessons" (GSANetwork).

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What Challenges Do Queer Students Face? 

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What Challenges Do Queer Students Face? 

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"1. Post Safe Space Signs
2. Start an LGBTQ organization at your school
3. Stand up against homophobia
4. Integrate LGBTQ topics into the curriculum
5. Pursue Professional Development" (Barile).

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Consider a few things, like ...
"Are options for bathrooms, locker rooms, and other traditionally gendered spaces accessible to and safe for students of all gender identities? Is safe sex for nonheterosexual relationships covered? Are different family compositions represented in the visuals throughout the school? What clubs, organizations and/or affinity groups exist for people who have unique identities, beliefs or interests?" (Morgridge College of Education).

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Barile, N. (2022, May 18). 5 things you can do to support your LGBTQ students. Hey Teach! Retrieved June 14, 2022, from https://www.wgu.edu/heyteach/article/5-things-you-can-do-support-your-lgbtq-students1809.html

Dictionary.com. (n.d.). LGBTQIA definition & meaning. Dictionary.com. Retrieved June 14, 2022, from https://www.dictionary.com/browse/lgbtqia

Implementing Lessons That Matter. GSA Network. (n.d.). Retrieved June 14, 2022, from https://gsanetwork.org/resources/implementing-lessons-that-matter/

Sawchuk, S. (2022, April 21). What's driving the push to restrict schools on LGBTQ issues? Education Week. Retrieved June 14, 2022, from https://www.edweek.org/leadership/whats-driving-the-push-to-restrict-schools-on-lgbtq-issues/2022/04

Transgender Student Guidance for school districts. NJGov. (n.d.). Retrieved June 15, 2022, from https://nj.gov/education/students/safety/sandp/transgender/Guidance.pdf

Understanding the experiences of LGBTQ students - wested.org. (n.d.). Retrieved June 15, 2022, from https://www.wested.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Infographic-LGBTQ-R21.pdf

What challenges do queer students face? EDU. (2020, August 21). Retrieved June 14, 2022, from https://morgridgeonline.du.edu/blog/challenges-queer-students-schools/#:~:text=LGBT%20students%20experienced%20a%20number,in%20school%20assignments%20(18.2%25).

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To conclude, it is difficult to trace back information on the past of teaching LGBT topics in schools. However, in the last post, we are able to get a tidbit on how schools reacted to the HIV outbreak and how that affected people of the LGBT community.
Currently, as previously stated, there is a debate on whether or not a school curriculum should include LGBT topics and if it is appropriate for students of all ages. Nonetheless, data has shown that there is a more positive climate in schools that discuss and support the LGBT community.
As with any topic, it is important to research the history to assure history does not repeat itself. However, this is an ongoing issue in today's society that might not have a quick and easy outcome.

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History > Present of LGBTQIA+ in Schools

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History > Present of LGBTQIA+ in Schools

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"In the 1980s and 1990s, during the height of the HIV epidemic, a number of states passed laws proscribing mention of homosexuality; many, but not all, have since been rolled back. About six states now require LGBTQ history to be taught as part of the curriculum or mandate that LGBTQ people be represented in teaching materials" (Sawchuk 2022).
Fast forward to the present, there is a debate on whether or not teachers should allow the curriculum to include LGBT topics. A lot of the debate is geared towards parents and their beliefs on what their children should be introduced to and at what age is appropriate.

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A raft of legislation in the statehouses taking aim at LGBTQ students this year draws from the newly ascendent discourse about parents' rights, curriculum transparency, and schools purportedly indoctrinating students via critical race theory and other ideas.

But what is driving it? To get a better sense of the rapidly evolving political landscape and accompanying rhetoric, EdWeek spoke to political scientists, historians, LGBTQ advocates, legal scholars, and the lawmakers themselves.

The picture that emerges is complex. Old fears about gay people are being combined with newer concerns-and newly developed political tools. Parents are largely divided about instructional issues on LGBTQ matters. And the political rhetoric has gotten far more intense, leaving some advocates gaping at its frankness.

Here are six insights into this rapidly evolving situation, and what it means for schools.

1. Lawmakers introducing these bills echo older fears about LGBTQ people.

(Gender-affirming care includes a spectrum of services to validate students' gender identities. It can include counseling, supporting a child's choice to change names and pronouns, or supporting a child's choice to alter dress and presentation. For adolescents, it may eventually include the use of drugs to delay puberty or hormones, though these are rarer. Major U.S. and international health organizations do not endorse gender-conforming surgery for minors.)

Education Week reached out to some 10 lawmakers who sponsored versions of these bills, seeking their rationale in introducing them. Most did not return phone calls or emails. Those that did, though, variously say they're introducing them to guard parents' rights or prevent indoctrination by teachers, though they were often unclear about what specific impact they expect the laws to have.

Rep. John Kavanagh, in Arizona, was one of the few lawmakers who agreed to speak on the record about the bill he sponsored, which would require parents to give approval for their children to join gay-straight alliances at schools or other such clubs. He said his concern was that these clubs could promote or influence "controversial" lifestyles.

"If it's LGBTQ club, if the club is presenting a positive view of that, if it's presenting a belief that it's normal behavior, or that this is behavior that should be explored, absolutely they're promoting it," he said. "Parents need to consent to something like that."

Asked if he thought that happened routinely, he said: "I have no idea. It's what we'll find out once we get these transparency bills through."

In Rhode Island, lawmaker Patricia Morgan, who introduced a bill that would, among other things, require schools to address students "by their common names and the pronouns associated with their biological gender" unless parents say otherwise, said in an interview that she had heard complaints from constituents that some teachers refused to do so, though she couldn't name a district that seems to have issued guidelines to that end.

She said repeatedly that "activist teachers" were trying to delve into the "personal and private sexual emotions of children."

"The school should be informing the parents right away so parents can get professional help for their child," she said. "A professional [counselor] needs to deal with someone, not an ideologically driven teacher."

Historians of education say the idea that schools and teachers are indoctrinating students in harmful ideas is a long one that encompasses, for example, fears from the 1930s onward over communism that culminated in teacher loyalty oaths and other such prescriptions. And periodic debates over everything from evolution to sex education have also contained a subtext about what's age-appropriate for students to learn.

"Some of this is political grandstanding and vote-pandering, but there's also an authentic anxiety around parents and nonparents alike that America's children are being Pied-Pipered by these vague and distant threats, they're invading the community through the schools," said Adam Laats, a professor of education and history at the State University of New York, Binghamton.

The idea that gay teachers are recruiting students who need to be protected is a particularly vicious theme that recalls the latter half of the 20 th century, Laats said, which at that time resulted in the firing of scores of teachers-a process usually spearheaded by state lawmakers, but was also supported by teachers' unions, cities, and others. Not until 2020 did the U.S. Supreme Court rule that employees cannot be fired for being gay.

2. The parents-rights framing has a long history.

Parents' rights recently became a rallying cry again following a widely publicized gaffe in late 2021 by Virginia gubernatorial Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe, who when asked about opting students out of lessons on books parents objected to said he didn't think parents "should be telling schools what they should teach." Republicans seized on the opening, claiming the banner of the "party of parents" and championing new parents'-rights and curriculum-transparency bills.

The text of such measures has now evolved to add new provisions on the teaching of race and on how LGBTQ people can be addressed or portrayed in curriculum.

"These bills are legislative veterans of generations of fights over identity in schools. There is language in there you can trace back to the 1990s, early 2000s, the 2010s," said Jeremy Young, the senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America, an anti-censorship group.

Those who support the thrust behind this legislation, though, say the pandemic and remote schooling gave parents a closer look at what students were learning, and many were unhappy with what they saw.

"I think schools have started to deviate from the core mission of educating kids in the basic things they need to exist in society-math and reading and science and history-and the pandemic in particular gave a lot of parents a window into what their kids are being taught and realized a lot of it looks like political indoctrination," said Luke Berg, an attorney at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative firm focused on individual rights cases.

The organization supports a bill in the state to give parents the final word over students' name and gender pronouns.

3. The issues may be old, but the political tools are new.

For some observers, the new wave of legislation represents a particularly cynical brand of politics-a way of riding the coattails of the nation's current frenzy about school indoctrination to pass policies about LGBTQ people, some of which might be unpopular on their own.

It's old wine in new bottles, they say.

"These are movements that have been around for a while," said Young of PEN of the proposals. "The critical race theory frame and curriculum-transparency frame are new, and have been wildly successful, in part because they're smart framing and smart politics. And in part it's because there's an incredible amount of national money going to support them, and from their proponents' view, a degree of success at the ballot box."

Political scientists, as well as advocates, divide those who are pushing these bills for political purposes from a smaller subset of people that includes many evangelical Christians and others who are opposed on religious grounds or who view LGBTQ people as somehow a threat to traditional nuclear family culture.

"I think there is a pragmatic wing that sees this as an opportunity to get certain types of voters to the polls in the midterms," said Zein Murib, a political scientist at Fordham University in New York City. "And I think there is a very strong ideological current that really does believe the heart and soul of America is at stake and being threatened by trans people, by gays and lesbians, by undocumented people, that is looking to institutionalize the version of America they want to see."

Murib's view was seconded by Sanders, the executive director of the Tennessee Equality Project.

"What has crystallized it is the Virginia governor's race. Some of these proposals existed before this, but their power has come in the wake of it, and I think they're just testing to see whether they will work," he said. "And it is working in some places, but I don't think parental rights means the same thing to every set of parents."

4. States have historically not given schools much guidance, and public attitudes about LGBTQ issues in schools are complex.

What makes the surge of legislative interest particularly complicated is that states have historically not provided much guidance on how their schools should address LGBTQ issues.

But most states do not prescribe much in the way of how LGBTQ issues should be handle d-even in sex education, leaving a lot of discretion to the nation's 13,000 school districts.

That's probably one reason why, like the discussion over race, so much of the discourse has focused on a handful of local examples: Schools are all over the place in what they teach and what materials they choose.

5. Bills about transgender students are being coupled with aggressive new rhetoric-and are heightening advocates' concerns.

The focus on students' pronouns and who can select them, how schools should interact with trans students, and increasingly on gender-affirming care seems to have boomed following the U.S. Supreme Court's 2015 ruling establishing the right of gay people to marry, said Murib.

"It's another way to assert what's really [white evangelicals'] core set of values-men and women make up the nuclear family that is reproductive," they said.

But what's at stake is not merely political rhetoric, but an existential threat to transgender people, Murib said.

"At this point it's bordering on existence. It's about the existence of LGBTQ people and particularly trans people at this moment," they said. "This legislation is trying to erase trans youth. It has significant effect on them, and they are there-they are hearing this."

EdWeek asked the lawmakers about these concerns.

Morgan dismissed them. "It may be jarring to a parent in the beginning, but in the end, a parent will always work in the best interest of the child," she said.

In Arizona, Kavanagh said: "Those parents should be arrested for endangering the welfare of their children, and they should be put into foster care or put into a better environment. Quite frankly, if the parents are like that, maybe the child is better off [elsewhere]."

6. Emergent nonprofit groups are fueling the flames.

Increasingly, the discourse about LGBTQ issues in schools is being echoed and promoted by newly emergent parent-advocacy networks, like Parents Defending Public Education, No Left Turn in Education, and Moms For Liberty.

In 2021, such groups collected purported instances of school-based indoctrination over race; now they are also collecting them over supposed gender-related indoctrination.

(Both Parents Defending Education and No Left Turn in Education were incorporated as nonprofits in 2021. So far, neither appears to have filed annual required federal financial disclosure forms. Moms for Liberty is in the process of becoming a nonprofit and will file its disclosure form by May, a co-founder of the organization said.)

The language fomented by some of these groups and by politicians has taken a darker turn in recent weeks. DeSantis, widely considered a 2024 presidential candidate, said during the recent bill signing in Florida that it's a necessary counter to those who embrace "woke gender ideology," and that his political opponents "support sexualizing kids in kindergarten;" his spokesperson has called the bill an "anti-grooming" measure. (Grooming is when an adult establishes an emotional bond with a child to facilitate sexual abuse.)

Such ideas are now being repeated by influential pundits. Christopher Rufo, who works at the Manhattan Institute, a think-tank, last year fanned the flames of alleged race-based indoctrination in schools; in new Twitter threads, he has cast schools as a major locus for sexual abuse. Analysts at more-moderate think-tanks are now beginning to entertain similar critiques.

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What's Driving the Push to Restrict Schools on LGBTQ Issues?

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A confluence of factors have resulted in a wave of legislation this year targeted at classroom discussions on gender and sexuality.