Why youth activists in Louisiana say they’ll ‘no longer stay quiet’

NEW ORLEANS — As Republican state lawmakers in Louisiana have pushed a barrage of bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights, a new wave of youth activism has been awakened, especially in the state’s rural, conservative strongholds.

Wyn Arenth never thought he’d turn to activism, but the 15-year-old trans teen led a walkout in April at Mandeville High School to protest a bill that allows schools to intentionally misgender transgender and nonbinary students instead of honoring their chosen names.

“I never thought that I’d be doing this kind of stuff. … but I’m willing to put my foot down even if it is incredibly difficult in Bible-belt Louisiana.” he said. “We will no longer stay quiet growing up in a world where people debate our very existence.”

“When people use fear for their political agenda, it’s not right,” he added.

Louisiana high school students like Wyn are protesting, walking out of classes, signing petitions, conducting phone blasts, and testifying before the legislature and other government bodies to push back against the raft of legislation that focuses on different facets of their lives.

“The spirit of activism has grown over the past couple of years along with this feeling of ‘We’re not sure that the adults are taking care of us anymore,’” said Rebecca Cavalier, an English teacher at Ben Franklin High School in New Orleans who serves as the faculty sponsor of its Genders & Sexualities Alliance (GSA). This has compelled students to get louder, step outside of their comfort zones and speak up, “even if it means breaking a few rules.”

Students at Benjamin Franklin High walk out of classes and march through the French Quarter in New Orleans for International Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31. Photo by Greg LaRose/Louisiana Illuminator

In recent years, states across the nation have advanced a record number of bills that attack LGBTQ+ rights, often targeting trans youth. Louisiana Republicans have a supermajority, which has allowed lawmakers this session to adamantly propose and advance several new education and health care-related laws aimed at LGBTQ+ people.

This wave of legislation introduced earlier this year includes bills that seek to ban books with LGBTQ+ themes, quash discussion or teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, and prohibit doctors from offering gender-affirming medical care. All are advancing and gaining momentum to pass with margins large enough to override a veto from Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards. Both the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and a measure to ban gender-affirming medical care for minors have passed the House.

All of the proposals are aimed at when, where or how LGBTQ+ people can be themselves. It’s why some students in St. Tammany Parish, about 30 miles north of New Orleans, have “outed” themselves at great risk to protest censorship and anti-LGBTQ+ bills currently making their way through the state house. In a parish where 71 percent of voters supported the Republican Party candidate for president in the last election, this is no easy task.

“I lost a lot of friends over me coming out,” Wyn said, adding that “word spread quickly [about the planned walkout], and a lot of people were against it.”

WATCH: Librarians in Louisiana at odds with conservative activists working to ban books

Many students are being forced to defend themselves from the adults that are supposed to be protecting them.

“Some parents were supportive. Others were just harassing. And they were incredibly violent, he said. “They were sending threats, and calling me slurs. We definitely got a lot of bad backlash.”

The threats and harassment included “people saying they were going to throw smoke bombs, weapons, tomatoes, just anything to get us to shut up,” Wyn added. “It was very scary. But we were able to push through.”

The students had the support of the principal, and a police presence helped address concerns of violence breaking out.

Still, Wyn said, the thought of people responding with attacks “is a little sickening.”

Gen Z is ‘aware of its power’

Young students from New Orleans skipped classes to rally along St. Charles Avenue, one of the city’s most famous thoroughfares, during a youth-led climate strike in March 2019 to protest politicians’ inaction on climate change. Photo by ©Julie Dermansky/Independent Reporter

Students say the hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation seen this year is causing harm. It’s sparked many Gen Zers — a generation that has sharpened its political consciousness and aged into the electorate after years of being shaped by school shootings and racial justice movements — to take action.

Jesus Zorrilla, an 18-year old student at Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans, said lawmakers are turning a blind eye to what young people need.

He said interfering with schools and libraries or the lives of LGBTQ+ people is the “most frivolous thing” to choose to take on, adding that there are “clear choices” on what they could prioritize instead.

“We need to make sure that every time I see someone running in the hallway, I am not worried about, ‘Oh my God, there’s a shooter,’ or every time I go to the bathroom, I think about, ‘OK, if I heard gunshots right now, what classroom would be the fastest to run into?’”

Youth activist organizations like GLSEN (Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network) say there has been an “unprecedented level of hate directed towards marginalized students,” and that the anti-LGBTQ+ measures have awakened the consciousness of young people looking for solutions to issues like gun violence, health care, minimum wage, and mental health, said Michael Rady, GLSEN’s senior education programs manager.

For instance, he said, Louisiana lawmakers spent a great deal of time this session discussing how to prevent teachers from using a student’s chosen name and appropriate pronouns, but shot down efforts to give educators a pay raise and tabled a bill to temporarily remove firearms from individuals who threaten violence against themselves or others.

WATCH: A Brief But Spectacular take on the power of a name

“It’s not as if this activism is coming out of nowhere. It’s in response to the fact that LGBTQ+ students, Black and brown students, are under attack, and they’ve felt the need to step forward to defend their right to exist in schools and in society,” Rady said.

The 2022 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that about 1.4 percent of youth ages 13 to 17 in the U.S. — approximately 300,000 people — identify as transgender.

Rady said students, too, are “more confident today than they have been in the past and are aware of their power.”

Young people are defending their rights and declaring to people in positions of power — in their school districts, in their state houses — “that they deserve to have a presence and to be affirmed and to feel safe in their schools and in their communities,” he added.

In fact, more young people — aged 18 to 19 — participated in the most recent midterm elections. The 2022 midterms had the second-highest youth turnout in 30 years, according to exit poll data from Tufts University. An estimated 27 percent of people in this age group cast a ballot.

Louisiana voters in New Orleans cast their ballot for the 2022 midterms. National data shows an estimated 27 percent of youth voted in the election, the second-highest turnout in 30 years. Photo by Roby Chavez/PBS NewsHour

Rady said he hopes elected officials and other people in positions of power “see that assaults on the rights of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ youth are not a political winning move for them and that they choose to stop implementing and putting forward these really dangerous policies so that they can do right by young people.”

Until recently, 19-year-old Ezra preferred “to help fight in the background,” to use art instead of a bullhorn.

In February, the trans artist, who asked to be identified by his chosen name for fear of retribution, displayed a sign along a rural road earlier this year. It read “BAN HATE, NOT BOOKS,” in response to the push to restrict or remove books from library shelves in St. Tammany Parish.

“We wanted to show our family support, and we did not want these books to be banned in any way, because they’re very important for my generation to learn about who they can be and who they are and accept who they are in themselves,” Ezra said.

But one night in April, the sign was burned. The incident, which Ezra said felt like a personal attack, is now being investigated by the Louisiana State Fire Marshal as a hate crime.

A sign (left) that reads, “BAN HATE, NOT BOOKS,” was created by a trans teen in Abita Springs, Louisiana. It was destroyed (right) after being set on fire. The incident is being investigated as a hate crime. Photos by Jeremy Thompson/Queer Northshore

“I was very, very freaked out,” he said, after seeing the sign burned. “I was scared because it happened while we were at the house late at night. I was scared that more things could happen.”

The aspiring artist plans to rebuild the sign, which has been duplicated and distributed by Queer Northshore. The local group has embraced Ezra’s illustration as a logo of sorts. Hundreds of copies of the artwork have been distributed and can be found on yard signs, stickers, and billboards throughout the parish.

For Ezra’s mother, Evette, the attack revealed the tough road ahead for her son and his peers.

“I thought we were beyond all of this kind of hate. It makes you think back to the burning of crosses. I thought it was a thing of the past. I guess it’s not,” Evette said as she choked up with tears. “That’s just a scary thought. And I feel like the climate in our nation, in particular in the last year, has gone backward. I mean, we are truly going backward.”

The cost of hate

Advocates said at least five of the bills in Louisiana would have irreversible and harmful impacts on young LGBTQ+ people.

Republican state Rep. Dodie Horton, who authored Louisiana’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, said the measure has “nothing to do with someone’s personal lifestyle,” but rather was created to “protect all children” and would give parents greater control in which subjects are brought up in the classroom. The bill, in part, bars schools from teaching sexual orientation or gender identity. It has already passed the state House.

“No one should talk to our children about sensitive subjects without the consent of their parents,” Horton has said.

These kinds of laws have significant effects on the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth. Nearly two out of three LGBTQ+ youth said their mental health worsened when they heard about proposed laws banning discussion about LGBTQ+ people in schools, according to the latest data from the Trevor Project. The survey, which included 28,000 LGBTQ+ people across the country aged 13 to 24, also found that more than 40 percent seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, and 56 percent wanted mental health care but weren’t able to get it.

Not having resources or support weighs heavily on teens, Wyn said.

“It is entirely possible that it leads to the point where a trans teenager decides to end their life. And it’s a horrible reality,” he said. “But by enforcing these laws and even just bringing them up, it’s terrifying to teenagers like me. It’s crazy to me that these lawmakers and people in power can ignore that possibility.”

Wyn said problems like gun control are issues that need to be solved. Instead, lawmakers “decide to put their trust in a gun that could kill somebody rather than a book that’s to educate a fourth grader on photosynthesis,” he said.

How a community of high school activists is growing

Queer Northshore, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group in St. Tammany Parish, recreated and distributed yard signs, stickers, and billboards using the same image from a roadside sign that was torched. The sign can now be found throughout Southeast Louisiana. Photos by Wyn Arenth and Alyisen Gisleson/St. Tammany Parish Library Alliance

Youth activism powered up in 2018 when young people became more civically engaged and mobilized around gun violence, COVID lockdowns, climate change, and systemic racism.

It was that year that teens opted to skip classes at New Orleans’ Benjamin Franklin High School, the first public high school in New Orleans to desegregate in 1963.

Students packed the courtyard on a chilly morning in March 2018, just two days after the school had to cancel classes due to its own gun threat. There have been several other walkouts since then, especially during the last two legislative sessions. The students’ actions at the school have inspired protests in rural areas like Mandeville.

Jesus is a transmasculine senior at Benjamin Franklin High School and has helped organize two walkouts in the last year. He said it is “genuinely terrifying” what fellow students are facing, but “we want to show kids that there is a future” and that “we have community, and we are here to support each other.”

Jesus and others were honored by the New Orleans City Council in June as “student leaders who have demonstrated extraordinary leadership and impact in their school and communities.” For Jesus, it was a bittersweet moment because it happened the day after Louisiana became the 18th state to enact a transgender athlete ban.

“It was just this moment of, like, ‘Thanks, but … .’ Yeah, this is a great slip of paper, but now my friend Charlotte can’t play soccer like she grew up doing, and she doesn’t have a trophy that she deserves.”

Students from Benjamin Franklin High School were honored by the New Orleans City Council for demonstrating extraordinary leadership after organizing student-led protests denouncing anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Photo by Jesus Zorrilla

Cavalier, the GSA faculty sponsor at the school, has supported similar alliances at different schools for the last 15 years and said as gender politics has moved to the forefront of the state’s politics, the club is more important than ever.

“They’re so deeply controlled by the system and their parents. And for people that have such dire consequences, it’s so brave,” Cavalier said. “When they speak out, they have a lot to lose, but they’re still sort of making that sacrifice and taking that risk and speaking out for themselves and for other kids as well.”

As for making inroads with lawmakers, students said their representatives are not eager to hear them during visits to the state Capitol.

Zorrilla said some have tried to run away from them, “and then you talk to a legislator, and they give you the most dismissive response of a person that is not really listening to us.”

Others, he added, have had their microphone turned off at the state Capitol or were not allowed to speak at all.

Even so, students promise activism will continue, although they know there is a good possibility that the GSA club will be illegal next school year if the bill banning, teaching or discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity becomes law.

Benjamin Franklin students are already planning to branch out by forming a Young Activism Club outside of school to connect with students statewide. It’s what they believe they have to do to get attention.

“When we see these bills enacted, it’s going to have a devastating effect. It’s going to feel very heavy for our entire community,” said Ava Kreutziger, a lesbian who was afraid to speak a year ago but is now the school’s GSA president. “It is about as out as you can be. I decided that I was ready and that if someone tried to challenge my identity, I had a strong enough army of people around me who would fight back for me.”

Ava, a junior, said a GSA club “where people can feel angry and hurt together can really help inspire a bigger change,” adding that “it opened up a sudden wave of activism.”

Next year, the student activists plan to make more trips to the state Capitol, and participate in more protests and unite with more of the greater community, especially in New Orleans, which has one of the largest concentrations of LGBTQ+ people in the U.S. About 4.7 percent of the adult population identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.

While the country has a great history of youth-led action, the question remains as to whether this is a generational movement that will endure. For some young student activists, they would prefer that a new movement wasn’t even necessary.

“The heroic thing to say would be, ‘This is our moment.’ But in all honesty, I really don’t want it to be our moment,” Jesus said. “I want this trans hate to die out. I want it to go away. I want people to forget about it because it has no basis. And it’s killing kids.”