What Happens When A School Approves An LGBTQ+ Student Club, Then Shuts It Down After Facebook Outrage
Last month, I met my friend Sarah for coffee at the little bakery off Main Street in her small Virginia town, the one with lumpy sugar cookies and mismatched ceramic mugs. She stirred her oat latte slowly, then tilted her phone toward me, showing a 300-comment thread in her local neighborhood Facebook group. Her 7th grader goes to the same middle school that made headlines a couple of weeks back: the one that approved a GSA, then shut it down less than two weeks later after a flood of local outrage online.
The club started small, like most middle school clubs do. Two 8th graders, Lila who is trans and Mia who came out as lesbian the year before, asked their guidance counselor for help getting it approved. The principal reviewed their application, followed all the same district policies used for student council, art club, and the football booster club, and signed off. The first meeting was just an informational get-together during lunch, 12 kids showed up, and they talked about what they wanted out of the space: maybe a monthly movie night, a table at the spring diversity fair, just a consistent spot to sit together where no one would bother them.
Then a parent picking up her kid early for a dentist appointment stopped by the meeting, took a two-minute cell phone video, and posted it to the community group with a caption saying the school was pushing gender ideology on children and it needed to stop. Within 48 hours, the post had thousands of views and hundreds of angry comments. People threatened to pull their kids out of the school, demand the principal resign, and vote down the upcoming district budget. Most of the commenters didn’t even have kids in the middle school, Sarah told me. They just lived in the county and liked to weigh in on local drama.
Within a week, the school released a short statement saying they’d completed a second review of the approval process and found a technical error in the club’s paperwork, so the club would no longer be recognized. No one bought the technical error line. Everyone knew it was a response to the Facebook outrage.
Sam, Sarah’s kid, came home that day crying. He’d gone to the first informational meeting because Lila asked him to come support her. He said after the club was shut down, Lila didn’t go to lunch for three straight days. She sat in a bathroom stall the whole period because kids were yelling slurs at her in the cafeteria.
I’m a middle school language arts teacher myself, so stories like this hit close to home. I hear the same question over and over from adults on both sides of the issue: why do middle schoolers even need a club like this? Can’t they just hang out with their friends anywhere? The thing no one talks about much is how brutal middle school is for anyone who deviates even a little from the norm. Kids this age police each other’s identities harder than most adults, and the cafeteria is a minefield if you’re queer, or have queer parents, or even just question the way things are supposed to be. A GSA isn’t about pushing anything on kids. It’s just a place to breathe without being judged for who you are.
A lot of teachers and parents look at this story and think, what can I actually do? If I speak up publicly, I’ll get targeted too, and that’s a valid fear. I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to risk their job or their reputation in a small town. But there are small, low-key things you can do that don’t require a public fight. For example, after my own district put restrictions on identity-based student groups a couple of years back, I just opened my classroom after school to any kid who wanted to hang out while waiting for their parents. I keep a bin of granola bars and fruit snacks, there’s an old couch in the back, and I don’t police what kids talk about. Most of the kids who would have joined our GSA come here. No one has called me out on it, because it’s just extra help time, not an official club. If you’re a teacher, you can also leave a stack of free, age-appropriate pamphlets from GLAAD and PFLAG in the back of your room by the assignment turn-in bin, no fanfare required. Kids who need them will grab them, and no one else has to notice.
For parents, you don’t have to organize a school board protest to make a difference. If your kid says their friend doesn’t have a safe place to hang out, offer to have them over for dinner or a movie night. If a small group of kids want a regular spot to meet, most public libraries offer free meeting rooms for community groups. You don’t have to be an activist, you just have to show up. When my kid’s friend was kicked off the volleyball team after coming out a couple of years ago, we started having her over every Sunday to bake cookies and watch bad 90s movies. That meant more to her than any public statement ever could.
What always strikes me about these Facebook outrage cycles is how quickly the adults move on. A month after this story broke, the same community group is now arguing about the new school dress code, and no one is posting about Lila and Mia anymore. But Lila and Mia are still in 8th grade, they still have to walk that hallway every day. The damage doesn’t disappear when the thread drops off the first page.
Right now, a small group of parents in that town host a weekly meetup at the public library for any kid who needs a safe place to hang out. A couple of teachers from the middle school go sometimes after school, off the clock. It’s not an official school club, it doesn’t get funding or a room in the building. It’s just a space. No one knows if they’ll get the club approved again next year, and a lot of things are still uncertain. But for right now, 10 or 12 kids have a place to sit together and talk without being bothered, and that’s more than they had two weeks ago.
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