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Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

Governor Ron DeSantis: In Florida, we will make sure that parents can send their kids to school to get an education, not an indoctrination.

Melissa Harris-Perry: On Monday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights and Education bill dubbed the Don't Say Gay bill by opponents into law. The law bans public schools from teaching kindergarteners through third graders about sexual orientation and gender identity. It also prevents teachers from discussing these topics in a matter that is "not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students." LGBTQ advocates worry that language could extend to students beyond the third grade, and the law allows parents to sue the school districts for violations.

Protestors: Say gay. Say gay. Say gay. Say gay. Say gay. Say gay. Say gay.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Earlier this month while the bill was moving through the Florida legislature, high school students across Florida staged walkouts to protest the bill. Last week, Disney employees in Burbank, California walked off the job to protest Disney's tepid response to the bill, and on Monday, Disney released a statement condemning the law. The bill even grabbed some attention at the Oscar's last weekend.

Speaker 1: We're going to have a great night tonight and for you people in Florida, we're going to have a gay night.

Crowd: Gay. Gay. Gay. Gay. Gay.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, the governor has been defending the bill for weeks.

Governor Ron DeSantis: If you are out protesting this bill, you are by definition putting yourself in favor of injecting sexual instruction to five, six, and seven-year-old kids. I think most people think that's wrong. I think parents especially think that's wrong.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Ooh. That's not how the law is going to affect students. A 2021 report from the Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization that helps prevent suicide among LGBTQ young people says that LGBTQ youth who learned about queer issues in school are 23% less likely to report a suicide attempt. We wanted to hear from you. We asked for your takes on the bill and what it would mean if a law like this was passed in your state. We definitely got a mixed set of reactions.

Ashley: Hi, my name is Ashley from Salt Lake City, Utah, and if I Don't Say Gay was passed in my state, I would be organizing rallies and marches and making speeches nonstop.

Ray: I'm Ray calling from Westchester. If a law like that was passed in Pennsylvania, that would be the last straw. I would move.

Terry: Terry from Hackettstown, New Jersey. It would mean we had regressed at least 100 years in New Jersey.

Brian: Hi, this is Brian from Cold Spring, New York. Yes, I really don't think that children from kindergarten to third grade need to think or be taught anything to do with gender. This is supposed to be school and social upbringing, and they're too young for that. You can do that in the later grades, so I agree with the law.

Matt: Matt from Littleton Mass. First, it's not a Do Not Say Gay bill. It's anything but that, it's to keep children to not talk about sexual reproduction and things of the sort and also about transgenderism, and homosexuality, and everything else.

Sunny: Sunny in Richmond, Virginia, home of Richmond Independent Radio. If there was a law about not saying gay in Virginia, there would be so many people in the streets wearing rainbow flags and rainbow colors and dancing because there are so many people who support and know and love people who are gay.

Laura: Hi, my name is Laura. I'm calling from Long Island. I'm a teacher in middle school and this bill would devastate me. I have students who are non-binary, who hang out in my room during lunch because it's a safe place. If this bill was introduced in New York, it would scare a lot of people.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As always, thanks so much to everyone who called in and shared your perspective with us, but this is not just hypothetical that a law like this could pass in states far beyond Florida. According to The Hill, lawmakers in 15 other states have introduced legislation limiting how gender and sexual orientation can be discussed in schools. For more, I'm joined now by Heather Wilkie, executive director of the Zebra Coalition. It's a nonprofit that helps support LGBTQ youth in Central Florida. Welcome to The Takeaway, Heather.

Heather Wilkie: Thank you so much for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As you heard, there was a bit of a mixed set of reactions, and certainly at the core for the folks who have been supportive of the bill, that it's this belief that without it there'll be an injection of conversations of overt sexuality in very young grades. Can you address that a bit for us?

Heather Wilkie: That's an interesting perspective, but what we know is that this bill is just unnecessary. There was no reason to have any bill that's like this. Teachers are not standing up in the classroom talking about sexuality and it's beyond sex education, and I think that's where we have a disconnect in our understanding of this bill. A lot of folks thinking that this is about sex education, well, sexual orientation and gender identity is not about sex. That's where we have to understand that this curriculum, there was no agenda, to begin with in talking about sex education for groups this young.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm shocked. You're saying that kindergarten teachers were not having critical race theory, sex ed classes on a regular basis in their classrooms in Florida?

Heather Wilkie: You know what? They were not. I will say from personal experience, I have a first grader, a seven-year-old son, and one example that I've been giving when I'm talking about this bill is that I'll send him to school. They'll have open book days where we can read to the kids or they can take their own books from home, and a lot of my books are very inclusive.

It's about him having two moms or it's about learning about what non-binary means in a way that speaks to first graders. We're not talking about sex education here. We're talking about human beings. We're talking about families. For him to be able to go to school and be himself and talk about his family is a normal thing. To create these classrooms that are safe and welcoming, that's the goal so kids can learn. It's not about indoctrination of sex education.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm sorry, I was teasing a bit on the previous question, but it is clearly a serious matter. I guess part of what I'm trying to get at here is if there wasn't a crisis in actual classroom curriculum, if kindergarten teachers in Florida, like kindergarten teachers all over the country were doing things like teaching numbers, letters sounds, how to sit in a circle and listen to stories, it does seem to me though that this law must be about either signaling something or riling something up or tamping something down. I guess part of what I'm trying to understand is how lawmakers might be perceiving what the purpose and at least from their perspective, value of this law is.

Heather Wilkie: Sure, and we talk a lot about culture wars and that's exactly what's happening right now. It really is creating this discussion about issues that really do not need to be there anyway. We weren't indoctrinating kids. Teachers were not incorporating sex education into classrooms anyway. It seems to be a political pawn, and unfortunately, our kids are the ones who are going to ultimately be impacted by this.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering also a bit about teachers, if there's a way that a bill like this simply has a chilling effect on exactly what you were describing. Being a first-grade teacher who has in their classroom books where the families may have two parents of the same sex where there may be a non-binary child in the book or quite honestly family structures that are connected in all kinds of different ways that are not presumably the sole notion of one man, one woman, and their biological children.

Heather Wilkie: Correct, and even looking beyond LGBTQ issues, we know that the ability to speak about different cultures and speak about different types of families, it's huge for that age. It's how they connect with each other. It's how they start learning. They identify themselves and their own families, and then we learn from there. This is not the only bill. It's not just about LGBTQ issues, these culture wars go way beyond that. We're talking about race, we're talking about religion, all types of different issues that-- It's a slippery slope when we start to open up issues like this to say, "Well, you can or cannot speak about this." It's just not realistic, and for our teachers who already have so much pressure on them and so many regulations that are already happening for educators across the country, it's just sad to see that we continue to put this stress on them. They certainly don't need anything else to have to deal with.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me a little bit about mental and emotional wellness for young people who are themselves LGBTQ+, or are in families where their siblings or their parents, or simply their beloved cousins who come over on a regular basis are LGBTQ+. How does, again, this discourse and restrictions impact their mental and emotional growth and well-being?

Heather Wilkie: I heard earlier there was a statistic about the Trevor Project. What we know is that there is a much higher likelihood of LGBTQ young people having increased rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, not because of their sexual orientation and gender identity, I think it's important to know that. It's not because of that, it's about how society perceives them, and how they're treated. That begins at a very young age.

For those of us who have been around children, we know that gender begins very, very early on. We start to identify what is for a boy, what is for a girl, those are social constructs that we know that are picked up on at a very young age. This age demographic, it's very important that we foster a healthy environment for these kids. As a therapist, I have seen this happen way too often in my organization where we have young kids who starting out came out to their teachers early on because they felt safe, they felt comfortable, they knew that they could trust an adult.

We're trying to foster those relationships, we're trying to have a healthy learning environment. It's not that we are adding anything to the classroom, we're not trying to do anything different than we've already done. We just want our kids to feel healthy and to feel safe within their classrooms, so they can learn.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Given that this bill is now law, what are you expecting in classrooms and in communities? Will there be resistance to this?

Heather Wilkie: Well, there already is resistance to this. A lot of teachers have stood up and said, "There's just no way that I'm going to be able to adhere to these rules, regulations." Another thing to notice that we really don't know how it's going to roll out. There are so many questions, many more questions than answers when it comes to how this bill is going to look for us in the next couple of years.

I do anticipate, and we've been speaking with a lot of lobbyists and legal groups, that there will be a lot of lawsuits that will happen. It will have to go back and forth. You know what? That just costs the state a lot of unnecessary money and a lot of unnecessary time. I really just feel like we should be focusing on supporting kids rather than creating issues that work against them.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I think your point about gender being part of our conversation and discourse so early on is something that is invisible when people are cis-gendered and heterosexual. They can miss that actually we already are doing gender education, but it feels like the water that you're swimming in for fish or the air that you're breathing for people. I'm always interested in trying to build coalition, so folks who feel alarmed about this idea that we are going to teach gender or that teachers are going to teach gender. Do you have a way of talking about the ways that gender is already part of what we teach on a daily basis to young people?

Heather Wilkie: I really appreciate how you said it, sort of the air we breathe because there are so many systems in place and so many things that we do on a regular basis that have to do with gender that we may go throughout our day and not even think about. Especially when it comes to the classroom, especially when it comes to younger kids. Think about how often we're separating boys from girls, or how often we have differences in the way that we teach or the way that we implement ideas because of gender.

We also have media pop culture that brings in different ideas about gender or about families as it relates to gender. This isn't something that you can really avoid in any cost. We are going to be talking about gender. Kids are going to have questions. As adults, I do believe it's our responsibility to have an honest and safe approach. Do we have to talk about sex education for young kids? Absolutely not. We do things in a developmentally appropriate manner. Teachers, educators, they know this because that's what they have been taught.

That's what they go to school to do. They're experts in this field. I can guarantee that my son's first-grade teacher knows exactly what they're doing when it comes to having these discussions. What we're doing is creating more of a barrier and opening up the ability to have lawsuits against these teachers who are trained to do this work and to be able to answer simple questions that are normal for behavioral development for children.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Heather Wilkie is Executive Director of the Zebra Coalition, a nonprofit that helps support LGBTQ+ youth in Central Florida. Heather, thanks for joining us.

Heather Wilkie: Thank you for having me.

Caroline: Hi. My name is Caroline Siegelbaum. I live in Pompano Beach, Florida. I fear that there will be a rise in teen suicide into this bill.

Betsy: Hey, this is Betsy from Ione, California. It would mean that I wouldn't have to worry about my children going into the school and being told things that are totally inappropriate. They're not old enough to even know what sex is. That's it. They don't care about transgender, gay, lesbian, or any of that other stuff, nor do they even care about straight. They really don't care at that age.

Jake: Hey, this is Jake from Bel Air. It is a direct suppression of the constitutional right to free speech. As a teacher, I want to be able to explain current political issues in class when they are the subject. When a law forbids me from talking about them at all, whether supporting them or against them in any way, then that is extremely unhelpful and very cruel.

Nikki: Hi, this is Nikki from Arlington, Texas. Obviously, the more bizarre the law, the more likely we are to pass it. At any rate, this law reeks very much of Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." It solves nothing. It's just political pacification for those who are offended by the word gay.

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