Homophobic High: Graduating From High School Under Texas’ Senate Bill 12

This story was originally published by The 19th.

Adrian Moore was sharing a blanket with his friends, watching the sun come up over Morton Ranch High School before the first day of his senior year. Parents and teachers milled among the teenagers, overseeing the “Senior Sunrise” tradition to kick off the semester. The principal approached Adrian’s mom, Julie Johnson, looking pained. She told Johnson that due to a recent change to Texas law, this year teachers and staff would be required to call her son by the name on his birth certificate — a name he had never used in his entire time in Katy Independent School District. 

The hope and promise represented by the Senior Sunrise event went cold, as Adrian and his friends wondered what lay ahead. They’d heard about a new “anti-DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion} law when it passed. It wasn’t the first time they’d been the targets of state or local policy, but they’d thought it might be possible that while the school board and politicians debated, their lives would carry on relatively undisturbed. 

“I couldn’t conceptualize how much it would change things until it happened,” Adrian said. 

This marked the first school year under Senate Bill 12, the Texas law prohibiting schools from “assistance with social transitioning” through the “adoption of a different name, different pronouns, or other expressions of gender that deny or encourage a denial of the person’s biological sex at birth.” The law also prohibited clubs “based on sexual orientation or gender identity.” 

Adrian came out as transgender in seventh grade, just as the family moved into the suburban district west of Houston known for good schools. He chose the name Adrian, and began his life in the school district using he/him pronouns. 

Before SB 12, using a name and pronouns different from his birth certificate had not always been seamless. His birth name showed up on legal documents, which sometimes meant that a class roster would need to be amended. But no one made a big deal about it, he said, even as Katy ISD became a flashpoint in the culture wars that have gripped Texas schools since 2021. 

In the potent cocktail of backlash over COVID-19 protocols and the Black Lives Matter movement, parent groups like Moms for Liberty and conservative lawmakers came after library books and classroom curriculum they felt encouraged LGBTQ+ identity, among other things. Katy ISD in particular became infamous for book banning. The district lists 107 books removed from libraries since 2022, and watchdogs reported that more than 400 additional books with LGBTQ+ themes and characters were not formally banned, but were made inaccessible to students. In 2023, his sophomore year, Adrian spoke at a school board meeting about the new district policy banning Pride flags and requiring teachers to report if a student asked to change their name or pronouns. 

But even though the politics raged around him, he said, his teachers and school administrators had never faltered, and he felt secure in his place in the student body. 

Choir was his “everything.” Occasionally he would compete in interscholastic theater competitions in a male role. In the big spring shows, especially musicals, he was often cast in a female role because of his vocal range, but in the program accompanying the show, along with award ceremonies, he was Adrian. 

“I’d rather play a male part, but I’m aware that as a performer, I do better in a female role,” he said. “I treat it like drag.” 

Adrian, who has autism, sometimes found it easier to relate to teachers than peers, often relying on his teachers to help him navigate the subtle currents of adolescence. By his senior year he had several teachers whom he considered close mentors. 

But on the first day of school under the new SB 12 policies, he said, those relationships and sense of home had already begun to change. 

The teachers had been told what they could not do, but they had not been told what to do instead. Mostly Adrian just asked them to call him by his last name — a solution some schools around the state have used rather than “dead-naming,” calling a transgender person by the name they no longer use. 

Some teachers preemptively told Adrian they were frustrated, that their hands were tied. One cried. One teacher approached him in the hall, looking anguished. “What am I supposed to do?” the teacher asked. While he appreciated their expressions of solidarity, he said, “I was kind of put in a position to have to reassure my teachers.” 

As the year went on, some teachers would test the boundaries to see if the storm had blown over. One signed him up for a University Interscholastic League competition under “Adrian.” But Adrian heard the teacher was reprimanded by administrators and the name was changed.

Meanwhile, his parents tried to get a doctor’s note saying that the chosen name and pronouns were medically necessary for Adrian’s mental health. They tried to get what is known as a 504 plan, a special education policy that creates classroom accommodations, making the case that because of Adrian’s autism, the chosen name and pronouns were essential to his learning environment. Nothing worked. There was one option left: sue Katy ISD and the Texas Education Agency, asking a judge to stop the implementation of SB 12 statewide. 

For Adrian, the decision to sue was fraught. He was already feeling like a problem no one could solve. He was just about to turn 18, when he would be able to legally change his name and seek gender-affirming healthcare. He would graduate in May. But that did nothing for the LGBTQ+ students younger than him. So, in September, he decided to fight not only for himself, but also for the thousands of Texas teens affected by SB 12, and joined the lawsuit filed by the ACLU with two other plaintiffs, both of whom used pseudonyms.

Meanwhile, students around the state were reaching the same conclusion — that their only option was to fight — not only about SB 12, but about other laws and policies that impacted their classmates. 

Like Adrian, students in Bastrop ISD, in a small town east of Austin, arrived at school in August to find banished clubs, disappeared Pride flags and even gaps in the curriculum where feminist history and world religions should have been. The Mental Health Fair was canceled and Radiant Hearts, a student-run organization that passes out hygiene products to “erase period poverty” was not allowed to distribute menstrual pads or tampons in communal spaces anymore. Because SB 12 requires parental consent for any sort of  “psychological evaluation” or instruction in mental health, many districts have interpreted it to mean that teachers and counselors can’t talk to kids about anything mental health related unless a parent has signed a form granting permission. (Bastrop ISD did not respond to requests for comment at the time of publication.)

Throughout the fall, Bailey Calderon watched as her classmates struggled to adapt. Calderon is straight and Catholic, but the injustice and the general sense of discouragement among the student body made her feel like fighting back on behalf of others was “what Jesus would have done,” she said. 

She quickly realized that the laws had students hemmed in tightly. When Calderon tried to conduct a survey on the effects of SB 12 on student well-being, she was told it violated the law’s prohibition on student well-being surveys administered without parental consent. She spoke at school board meetings, joined a statewide student activism organization called Students Engaged in Advancing Texas and joined Democratic state lawmaker James Talarico’s U.S. Senate campaign as a student organizer to “show students they have a voice and it actually matters,” she said. 

The members of the banned and curtailed clubs found ways to carry on. The Mental Health Club figured out how to talk around the issues prohibited by SB 12, and other student clubs became quiet, unofficial places where queer kids could connect socially, even if they couldn’t explicitly talk about the topics they might have in the disbanded Gender and Sexuality Alliance.

 “The law is a butterfly net,” said 16-year-old Izzy Mock. “But underneath we’re still unified.” 

Across the state, similar stories popped up. Bookstores and churches opened their doors to host the banned clubs off campus. Students continued to refer to one another by their chosen names and pronouns. Some spoke at school board meetings on the harms of SB 12-related policies. Wherever they went, they went together.  

“No matter how repressive state laws may be, many students are building community among their peers. They are advocating for their rights at school board meetings and remaining unapologetic and resilient,” said Cameron Samuels, executive director of Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, an organizing group and one of the plaintiffs in the ACLU lawsuit.

Often what students find as they organize with their peers is the very support that politicians are actively trying to undermine. The sense of purpose and belonging they are finding among their protesting peers makes even more sense given the adolescent shift long observed by doctors, psychologists and sociologists: As kids enter their teenage years, their peers, not their parents, influence their feelings of belonging. 

“When lawmakers seek to silence and erase LGBTQ+ youth, it’s the youth ourselves who are taking courageous stands to live authentically, defend our rights, and support our peers,” Samuels said. But while student activism is “cathartic and fulfilling,” it doesn’t negate the harm the laws and policies do, or the need for adults to act. For Adrian, his mom’s support was a critical component of his wellbeing. 

When the Texas Education Agency and Gov. Greg Abbott began threatening to investigate districts if they didn’t crack down hard enough on protesters, the number of protests grew. Student organizers around the state shared not only a moral clarity about mass deportations, but a frustration at the state’s increasingly heavy hand. From book bans to gun violence to SB 12, they said, it felt like students were suffering because of adults’ agendas. “What do the officials actually care about?” one student organizer in an Austin suburb said. “Because it’s clearly not kids.”