T.J. is one of more than 200,000 students in New York City public schools classified as having adisability, which can be anything from mild dyslexia to a complex physical disorder. These studentsare a small city unto themselves, and the special education system that serves them is awash indelays, misinformation and confusion

This passage speaks volumes about the “coming-out” experience and how it is portrayed inAmerican film and media. Oftentimes when non-LGBTQ+ people hear the term “coming-out,”they always attribute it to this giant event that happens once in a person's life. But in reality,coming-out as queer, gay, lesbian, trans, or non-binary and gender nonconforming is somethingthat occurs repetitively and continuously for many LGBTQ+ youth. When Ngo says that “you’repotentially coming-out whenever you meet someone new” he attributes it to his own K-12experiences in middle and high school. Ngo believes that many of his peers and classmateswould “hint” that they’re queer, and they would come-out at different times and with differentpeople who fall under the same spectrum. Ngo even explains how coming-out became arecurring activity with his own mother, “I will say that, in terms of coming out in middle andhigh school, it’s definitely true that there is no set coming out experience. I told my Mom, andshe didn’t believe me, I told her later and she didn’t believe me. I told her two years later and shedidn’t believe me” (Ngo, 2022). In his book, Mayo explains how LGBTQ+ youth lack supportfrom family members within their immediate household and school environments, “these [lackof supports] may include a lack of role models in schools, discomfort with parental involvementor, especially in the case of children with LGBTQ parents, difficult relations between school andfamily” (Mayo 2014). And this ties back to that idea of a continuous coming-out experience

King's story underscores the strength of young gender nonconforming,gay, and transgender people, their sense of confidence about their identity,and, as well, the very real dangers they can face in public schools. As ayoung person of color, King's experience was further amplified by racism.Wearing eye shadow to school and trying to be authentic in this hostilecontext of school, King was continually open to taunting and bullying, andtried to keep strong by flirting with tormentors (

he rela-tionship among gender bias, homophobia, and harassment is complicated.On the one hand, young women of all sexualities experience harassment,including homophobic harassment if they act in ways that do not fit thenorms for women.

Schools, like the rest of the social world, are structured by heterosexism-the assumption that everyone is and should be heterosexual (that such anassumption should have to be stated or even reinforced by policies indicatesthat everyone might not be heterosexual but they should be). Curricula, texts,and schools too often are constructed to reflect that heterosexuality is notonly the norm but also the only possible option for students. Heterosexismalso is reinforced by homophobia, overt expressions of dislike, harassment,and even assault of sexual minority people, a practice that members of theschool community often ignore or dismiss as typical behavior based on theheterosexist assumption that either there are no LGBTQ people present inschool communities or, if there are, those LGBTQ people ought to learnto expect a hostile environment.

Acknowledging the existence of m~ilnp~e cultural,local, and global forms of same-sex affection and ge~der d1vers1ty may beone starting point. Examining the variety of expre~s1~ns of tolerance a_ndvalue of minority identities within minority and maJ_onty cultures may giv_einsights into the differences that make up even seemmgly co~~rent and urn-fied cultures and subcultures. These issues should be familiar to an_yonethinking carefully about how to study and educate about_ any !orm of iden-tity. But there are particular features to sex and gender identity that makeaddressing it challenging.

Despite pressures to conform to normative gender, gender remains inplay. While this sense of play may open possibilities, play with gender orplay with sexuality also raises anxieties and bias against transgender andgender nonconforming youth. Such bias and harassment affect gender non-conforming, transgender, or cisgender youth at a higher rate than gender con-forming youth and may come from peers or school personnel (Grossman &D' Augelli, 2006). By suggesting to adults that there are more possible identi-ties for students to inhabit than adults might consider normal or even possi-ble, such play may indicate not only adult insufficiency of understanding butperhaps also adult lack of control of young people's identities. Unexpecteddifferences in identity or behavior may seem to break rules, even rules thatadults think didn't need to be articulated, like those indicating that boys andgirls, or young men and young women, dress in particularly gendered ways.

The com-plexity of gender and sexuality is interwoven, as well, with messages, defi-nitions, and reworkings of the meanings of other categories of identitylike race, ethnicity, social class, disability, and religion, among others.

Heterosexism and heteronormativity, the beliefs and social practicesthat maintain the dominance of heterosexuality over other forms of sexu-ality, rely on a stable conception of binary genders. Men have to act inaccordance with norms regulating masculinity, and women nee<l to be femi-nine, not only in order for their genders to be legible in expected ways butalso to justify the "opposites attract" version of heterosexuality. Gen<lerand sexuality, then, sort out who is "normal," and the categories providenorms that interact with one another.

Practices like having elementary students line up bygender or organizing teams of boys against girls, she argues, highlight theimportance of gender differences to young students at a time when theyalso are working through different ways of being gendered themselves.Concerned that the institutional culture of schools not only creates rigidideas about gender but also pits one gender against the other, she suggeststhat adults in schools consider more carefully the messages about genderthat even simple practices, like making gender-based small groups or en-couraging gender-segregated play, convey to young people.