As non-discrimination policies protecting transgender youth are increasingly under attack nationwide and right here in Georgia, one local student is pushing back on the heated rhetoric and encouraging all Georgians to express their support publicly for transgender youth.

Bennett is a fifth-grade student in Roswell, Georgia. Last year, as part of a school project on gender diversity, he asked his friends, teachers and administrators at school to join him in writing kind notes to transgender youth.

He had been hearing a lot of untrue, hurtful things said in Georgia and around the country about transgender people, especially transgender youth, and he wanted his transgender friends to know they had his support and the support of the community.

The project was a huge success, but Bennett didn’t want it to end there. He knew students in other communities would need to read the kind words his project had collected, because transgender students are disproportionately targeted for bullying and harassment.

According to the National Center for Transgender Equality’s 2015 US Transgender Survey statistics for Georgia, 80 percent of transgender students in the Peach State experience discrimination. This includes half who experience verbal harassment, and 1 in 4 who experience physical violence.

Georgia Unites Against Discrimination is eager for Bennett’s project get that wider audience. Nationally and in other Georgia communities, opponents of LGBTQ rights are trying to roll back policies meant to protect transgender students from discrimination. That means there has never been a more critical time for a project highlighting support for transgender youth

Earlier this year, the Trump Administration rescinded guidance from the Obama Administration that encouraged schools to put in place non-discrimination policies that apply to transgender students. The rescinded guidance supporting transgender students was the result of growing legal precedent that has found Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972—which prohibits sex-based discrimination—applies to transgender students as well.

Still, individual schools are creating and implementing their own policies for protecting their transgender students. But these too are threatened, including right here in Georgia.

The local school district in Decatur, Georgia currently has in place a policy protecting transgender students from harassment, bullying and discrimination. This policy has been keeping students safe for more than 10 years—while harming no one—but recently it’s come under fire.

What started as a community-focused conversation has now drawn national anti-LGBTQ organizations who are targeting Decatur as part of their broader effort to weaken protections for transgender youth in Georgia and nationwide.

At a Decatur Board of Education meeting on Tuesday, October 11th, community advocates supporting the policy delivered hundreds of pledge signatures from residents urging the Board not to weaken it. Ultimately, the Board affirmed its support in very strong terms, but advocates for transgender youth must remain vigilant.

Because national forces are aligning against school policies that protect transgender youth, this issue is not going away. And it could become a political football in next year’s Governor and General Assembly races.

Sending kind words to transgender youth through Bennett’s Project is a great way for you to signal your support for these policies and stand with transgender youth against these attacks.

Click here to read more about Bennett’s Project and send your letter now.

Beth Sherouse, Ph.D. is a longtime LGBT activist, writer, and proud Southerner who calls Georgia home. As a bisexual woman – and former employee of a major national LGBT organization – her story about why she celebrates Bisexual Awareness Week (#BiWeek) stems from a range of unique perspectives.

Beth first came out as bisexual to a friend at about 16 years old, and by the time she arrived on her college campus, she fully embraced her bisexual identity – even co-founding the first officially recognized LGBT student group at her Southern Baptist university in central Georgia. It was Christmas break of her freshman year when she was 19 that she returned home to her parents, revealing that she’d fallen in love with a woman. “They weren’t happy about it,” she admits. Growing up, both of her parents had served as baptist ministers, and had taught her that being LGBT was wrong and shameful.

“When I was younger and mostly dated men, I tended to let people assume what they wanted to assume unless I knew someone very well. Now, I don’t let people assume,” Beth says. “I am super out, and it’s permanent. I’m certainly happier being out and not having it seem like some secret I have to carry.”

For the next few years, Beth mostly embraced long-term relationships with men – then, at 23, she started dating another woman. “I had to come out again to my parents,” she explains – a common occurrence and unique aspect of the bisexual experience. Beth wrote her mother a long letter, and although she still did not respond well at first, she has come around.

Now – almost 15 years later – Beth’s parents attend an LGBT-affirming Baptist church. They live about 45 minutes from Orlando, and when the tragic shooting took place at Pulse nightclub, they went to several vigils and attended the local Pride festival a couple of weeks later, without Beth, because they wanted to show their support. Beth’s first cousin on her father’s side, who is a straight cisgender married Baptist minister himself, has been a wonderful ally and an outspoken leader in his denomination (Cooperative Baptist Fellowship), pushing more conservative clergy and laity toward to be LGBT-affirming.

For Beth, working at a major national LGBT organization for several years gave her a great opportunity to connect with the bisexual community and grow in her identity and activism. Now, in her spare time when not working a full-time job in development, Beth volunteers with BiNet USA, the national organization advocating for bisexual and bi+ communities. In her role there, she helps develop resources and materials on bisexual-specific issues, and promotes public education efforts about the diverse experiences of bisexual people.

“The bisexual community doesn’t get a lot of help from anybody else,” Beth pointed out. “Even within larger national LGBT organizations, there’s very little bisexual programmatic work, and the programmatic work that happens is almost entirely done by people who are bi-identified. I feel like there’s not an institutional investment in making sure this kind of work gets done. Working with BiNet and being able to work with bi people who are out and know and care about the bisexual community certainly feels more at home, more welcoming, and more meaningful.”

Beth’s personal experience also showcases the many ways that bisexual people’s experiences can differ from those of gay men and lesbians, and the need for visibility around bisexual-specific causes.

The invisibility, erasure, and reluctance to center bisexual people and voices – and develop openly bisexual leadership, both within and outside of LGBT communities – likely contributes to the challenges bisexual people face in America today. Bisexual people are disproportionately affected by higher rates of anxiety, mood disorders, and mental illness. Bisexual people face unique discrimination in the workplace, including harassment, invasive questioning, and anti-bisexual comments and stereotypes. And like other members of the LGBT community, bisexual people lack explicit protections from discrimination in 32 states.

“I’ve always been treated differently by some lesbians and gay men – like I wasn’t queer enough because I’m relatively gender conforming,” she explained. “I have most often partnered with men, so there’s always the sense that if I reference a male partner, I have to reference a female partner in conversation to prove my queerness. And then I have to prove my dedication to the cause as an activist, too. People tend to think there is some sort of privilege to ‘passing’ as straight. But it’s a process of coming out over and over again just to correct people’s assumptions. That is kind of exhausting, but it’s also something I realize that not everyone can handle – and if you can handle it, you should do it, to make it easier for other people.”

After having lived in Washington, DC for several years, Beth is happily settled in Atlanta, Georgia and continuing her advocacy without any plans to slow down. “What I like about the South is interacting with the people here who are doing the same kind of work that I am doing,” she says. “It’s so much harder to be a politically active progressive and to be openly queer here. And so I feel some sort of obligation to be part of the change that needs to happen and is happening down here, rather than abandoning my Southern roots. It feels better to make the change here.”

On Thursday, September 7th, Lambda Legal petitioned the US Supreme Court to hear the case of Jameka Evans, a Georgian who was the victim of anti-LGBTQ employment discrimination.

Earlier this year, Lambda asked the full US Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to weigh in on the case, after the Court’s three-judge panel rejected it in March. They declined; now, Lambda is seeking a final decision from the nation’s highest court.

In representing Evans Lambda Legal has argued that she should be protected from discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because of its prohibition on sex-based discrimination. And this year, for the first time ever, another federal court agreed with them.

In April 2017—less than a month after the Eleventh Circuit ruled against Jameka—the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals came to the same conclusion, ruling that Indiana employee Kimberly Hively was illegally discriminated against by her employer.

Now, any decision from the Supreme Court would shore up this federal court split on this issues, resolving one way or the other whether anti-LGBTQ employment discrimination is prohibited under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

And no matter what happens in this case, there is legislation under consideration right now in Georgia that would protect LGBTQ people like Jameka from discrimination in employment, as well as housing and public accommodations. Click here to read more about and signal your support for these critical LGBTQ-inclusive civil rights bills.