Anti-Queer Policy & Rural Schools: A Framework to Analyze Anti-Queer Policy Implementation in Rural Schools

There are more than 300 anti-Queer policies that are being proposed and implemented across the nation that impact education, including Tennessee's Senate Bill 1229; Virginia's "2022 Model Policies on the Privacy, Dignity, and Respect for all Students and Parents in Virginia's Public Schools;" and Florida's "Parental Rights in Education Bill" CS/CS/HB 1557, expanded April 2023, which prohibits topics of gender and sexuality in K-12 public education, unless related to reproductive health lessons. This policy brief offers a critique of three assumptions that can be applied to analyze how anti-Queer policies influence Queerness in rural schools. Those assumptions are: (1) Does the policy make assumptions on one type of parent? (2) How does the policy define gender and sexual identities? and (3) Will the policy erase rural queer educators and students?