In my small New Jersey town of 12,000 residents, the school board recently debated a policy that currently protects the rights of LGBTQ children who attend public schools in the district. This was brought to my attention by a resident who shared a post on Facebook which encouraged those who support this policy to show up in solidarity with these young people in order to keep the protections in place as they are. However, as the post appeared in on my timeline, it included commentary from the resident about how this act of solidarity would be “ridiculous” and that attendance would be “targeting” the school board.

The central topic of debate was a particular protection under which a child can choose to express their gender and utilize pronouns at school, without the school informing the parents that they are doing so, and these adults spoke about trans and non-binary students as though they were political problems rather than actual children.

Moments like this are happening across the United States, in towns just like mine, and they carry a quiet yet devastating psychological cost. For many LGBTQ people, identity isn’t just something one discovers; it remains something they have to defend, again and again and again, against systems built to erase it. Messages of rejection begin to accumulate like static, and embed themselves in the nervous system. The toll begins to show up everywhere, in higher rates of depression,

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