How Republicans Are Using Anti-Trans Rhetoric to Dismantle Public Education

The right weaponizes anti-trans propaganda in their fight to privatize the American school system.

This article is a companion piece to The Anti-Trans Hate Machine podcast. You can listen to Season 4: The Destruction of Public Schools wherever you listen to podcasts, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts.   

At a 2024 school board meeting in Mesa, Arizona, far-right activists urged board members to take action against an elementary school teacher named Tami Staas. Her crime? Supporting LGBTQ+ students and fostering an inclusive learning environment.

“There were articles being published calling for my removal, calling for me to be fired, calling for me to be deemed a — for lack of a better word — sexual predator,” Staas told TransLash in an interview for the Anti-Trans Hate Machine podcast.

A third grade teacher and head of the Arizona Trans Youth and Parent Organization, Staas is one of many trans-inclusive educators the far right has targeted over the past five years. In addition to taking aim at school curricula and pressuring school boards to ban books by LGBTQ+ and Black authors, conservative politicians and influencers have been positioning public school teachers as the enemy. They purport that educators are indoctrinating kids, and insist that parents deserve every opportunity to avoid exposing their children to matters of diversity. 

Staas has been repeatedly threatened and labeled a “groomer” by right-wing activists. These attacks started in 2022, when Charlie Kirk, the recently assassinated far-right organizer, posted about Staas and her two trans children on the social media platform, X. In his post, Kirk referred to the teacher’s work as “extremist gender ideology that is infecting our public schools and mutilating our kids.” In 2024, a local conservative activist wrote a blog post calling Staas a danger to children, and a future Mesa school board member accused her of indoctrinating students. Staas has refused to back down, and has since filed a defamation suit against the blogger and the school board member.

In the wake of school shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, conservative activists have implemented a strategy to undermine trust in public education by scapegoating trans people and weaponizing anti-trans propaganda. A disparate alliance of conspiracy theorists, paramilitary groups, conservative advocacy groups, and so-called “parents’ rights” activists is targeting trans people and their allies in public schools across the United States. These groups are not only creating a hostile environment for trans kids; they are working toward privatizing the entire school system — destroying public education, and our democracy, as we know it.

Dividing Local Communities

In 2021, the Pennridge School Board in Bucks County, Pennsylvania elected a supermajority of conservative candidates. During their tenure, they enacted policies that restricted trans students from using their chosen bathrooms and prevented them from playing on sports teams that aligned with their gender.

Laura Foster, a Pennridge mom and activist who pushed back against these policies, lamented the spread of anti-trans hate in her community. “The narrative around demonizing trans kids kind of worked in our community,” she said. “I mean, to this day, I think it works in our community.” 

In her efforts to challenge the school board on their discriminatory rulings, Foster learned that the election of these conservative officials in her politically purple district wasn’t organic. It was part of a coordinated effort by far-right activists to reshape education and seize power from the ground up.

Instrumental in the rise of anti-trans bigotry in Bucks County and across the United States is Moms for Liberty. Described by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as an anti-government group known for spreading conspiracy theories, Moms for Liberty was founded by a trio of conservative Florida school board members in 2021. The group grew rapidly with funding from legacy conservative institutions and Julie Jenkins Fancelli — the heiress to the Publix Super Market fortune who helped fund the January 6 rally. 

Moms for Liberty aimed to take over school boards across the country in order to protect what they call “parental rights.” The organization has a catchphrase, often trumpeted by their leaders: “We do not coparent with the government.” They believe parents deserve control over any information or education their children receive, and they are vehemently opposed to the acknowledgement of LGBTQ+ people — especially trans people — in schools. Moms for Liberty currently advertises over 300 chapters across 48 states.

Initially formed to protest mask mandates and school closures in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Moms for Liberty changed its agenda within months of its founding. The organization began to rally against inclusive education in public schools. Members advocated for curricula that minimizes the history of racism in the United States, and coordinated bans on books and reading material with LGBTQ+ representation or anti-racist themes. Soon, members of Moms for Liberty began lobbying against LGBTQ-inclusive teachers across the country, whom they accused of “grooming” children. 

The conservative group quickly gained allies in some of the most notorious groups on the far right. Members of the Proud Boys, the paramilitary group that stormed the Capitol in 2021, worked in concert with Moms for Liberty chapters around the country to protest at school board meetings. (The national Moms for Liberty organization has since denied any affiliation with the Proud Boys.) In Sarasota, Florida, Proud Boys openly campaigned to elect three far-right school board candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty. All three won their 2022 elections. Proud Boys also violently protested in Los Angeles when the Glendale Unified School District (GUSD) voted to recognize LGBTQ+ Pride Month in June 2023. 

This decentralized organizing followed an overall shift in far-right tactics after the failed January 6 insurrection. Conservatives weren’t able to enact immediate, sweeping change at the national level, so they pivoted to more local strategies. At Moms for Liberty’s annual conference in 2023, conservative educational consultant Jordan Adams — previously the K-12 curriculum director at Hillsdale College, an ultra-conservative Christian institution working to curtail education on racism in schools across the country — ran a workshop that explained the group’s overarching strategy. 

“The other side…can’t counter everything. Everything should be up for debate,” he said, describing bombardment tactics to overwhelm sitting school board members and progressive advocates like Laura Foster. This approach to school board meetings sows chaos, making it easier to divide local communities, flip board seats, and seize power. In 2022, conservatives saw results when nearly half of all candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty won their respective school board elections. 

Education advocate Eliza Byard, co-founder of The Campaign for Our Shared Future, is particularly aware of Moms for Liberty’s impact on school board races. According to her, school board members were not equipped to respond to the sudden influx of criticism, questions, and protests.

“School board meetings were being held virtually and…being live-streamed. So all of a sudden, school board meetings were television,” Byard said of the early 2020s. “How many school board officials have any media training? None. …So you also set up a situation where…a determined advocate or an extremist who showed up at a school board meeting could have a very large remote audience.” 

Byard sees this effort as part of a larger war on democracy. “When you look at the attacks…anti-trans attacks and anti-LGBTQ+ attacks, there is — at their root — a desire to eliminate the idea that there is room for everyone in our society… to foster a healthy multiracial democracy,” Byard said. “[School boards are] not built to be defenders of democracy.”

Attacks on school boards have diminished trust in public education on both sides of the aisle. In September 2025, Gallup reported that more than 60 percent of U.S. adults are dissatisfied with the current state of public educatio

Dismantling Public Education

Another instrumental figure in the campaign to erode the American public’s trust in public schools is political operative Chris Rufo. He’s a proponent of universal school choice: a policy that allows parents to receive public funding (also known as a school voucher) to send their children to a private school of their choosing. The budget for these tuition vouchers comes out of taxpayer money that would otherwise fund public schools — many of which are already chronically underfunded. 

Standing before a massive crowd at Hillsdale College in 2022, Rufo laid out the far right’s plan to implement universal school choice programs nationwide. “The best strategy in the immediate term is the siege of the institutions,” Rufo told the crowd. “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.” 

Conservatives have been attempting to gut the public school system in favor of a privatized one for decades. Historically, voucher programs have been unpopular, as they divert resources away from public education. But the far right has been cultivating anti-trans and anti-Black hate as a tool to sow distrust in public schools, allowing privatization efforts to succeed where they previously haven’t.

According to John Rogers, director of the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (IDEA) at UCLA, the far right deliberately targets purple and swing districts when mobilizing against trans-inclusive teachers and school board members.

“There was a purposeful effort to try to build political power, to try to deepen and energize the [conservative] base of support within those purple communities by amplifying attacks on…educators who were supporting queer youth,” Rogers said.

Amplifying anti-trans and racist rhetoric serves the far right’s goal of gaining power and influence over local communities and school districts. Rogers further explained: “I think that the election of Donald Trump has affirmed the theory of some on the right — that attacking public schools, attacking the teaching of race and racism, attacking queer youth, [and] attacking educators for supporting queer youth is a way to energize the base… to win political advantage.”

To SPLC research analyst Maya Henson Carey, the contemporary political moment is reminiscent of the period around Brown v. Board of Education, when white nationalists and conservative mom groups came together to fight integration with racist propaganda.

“Now [the target is] trans: ‘Do you want your kids in schools with these trans kids that are going to corrupt your kids — with these groomers?’ It’s very similar rhetoric,” said Henson Carey.

By scapegoating trans people, conservatives have created a bogeyman to rally against. And by creating a common enemy to run from (trans people in public schools), they have also constructed a safe haven to run to (private schools, made accessible via the golden ticket — a school voucher). 

The first universal voucher program in the United States was enacted in Arizona in 2022, on the heels of anti-trans bills that barred trans girls from playing sports in public schools and banned trans surgeries for minors — even with parental consent. The results for the state have been financially catastrophic. According to Arizona’s budget office, the universal voucher program cost over $800 million in 2025. The program continues to siphon money from public education, and at least 20 schools across six districts have been forced to close. 

More than 30 states now have voucher programs in some capacity, opening the door for even more public funds to be rerouted to private schools. Florida, the home base of Moms for Liberty, modeled its own universal voucher program after Arizona’s in 2023. In a budget summary for the 2025-2026 fiscal year, The Florida Policy Institute reported the program’s cost at nearly $5 billion. The independent non-profit also documented a decrease in the proportion of state funds allocated to Florida public schools: 88 percent for the 2021-2022 fiscal year dropped to 77 percent in 2024-2025. Funding for vouchers over this same period nearly doubled from 12 percent to 23 percent.

It’s not just conservative actors like Rufo who are championing universal school choice — there are larger forces at play. The Council for National Policy (CNP) is a secretive steering committee that has been directing the agenda of the conservative movement for more than 40 years. The group, founded by Christian nationalists, hosts triannual gatherings where the most powerful right-wing leaders in the country congregate to shape policy and strategy. 

According to journalist Anne Nelson, who investigated the CNP and other far-right groups for her book, “Shadow Network,” the council initially formed because these Christian bigwigs felt America was headed in the wrong direction. “The CNP came together around 1980, and it was already adversarial towards public schools because of integration,” said Nelson.

The CNP counts leaders of parental rights groups and some of the most prominent lobbyists for school vouchers as members — including the DeVos and Prince families, who are among the largest financial contributors to the CNP. Rich DeVos (former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s father-in-law) served two stints as the council’s president, Edgar Prince (Betsy’s father) separately served as vice president, and Elsa Prince Broekhuizen (Betsy’s mother) served on CNP’s board of governors. Betsy DeVos herself is one of the biggest backers of the universal voucher movement; she has put millions of dollars into school privatization efforts.

Nelson, who has also written a book on the rise of Nazi Germany, noted that attacks on public schools are a key strategy of authoritarian movements. “Public schools in the United States are absolutely fundamental to democracy and our concept of civic life,” Nelson said. “If you destroy public schools and public education and you remove the protections, you create a population that is much easier to lie to and to manipulate and to indoctrinate.”

The widespread loss of trust in the public school system is not simply a byproduct of the far right’s war on diverse and inclusive education — it’s the intended outcome. With the CNP at the helm, the conservative coalition is making headway toward their goals of an education system dominated by Christian private schools, and a country dominated by the far right. 

Defending Democracy

Despite declining levels of trust in public schools, people across the country are still fighting to preserve this vital public good. 

Liz Barker, a school psychologist and mother of four, decided to run for a Sarasota school board seat against a Moms for Liberty candidate. She recognized the severity of the organization’s impact on her district when her daughter came home from sixth grade with chilling news. “She said, ‘Mom, I just helped my English teacher pack up our classroom library,’” Barker recalled. 

Growing up in a fundamentalist Christian sect, Barker was not allowed to attend public school herself. She was homeschooled as a child, and fought with her parents about her education until 10th grade, when she finally declared, “I’m getting on that bus, so get on board…I’m going to public school.” Hearing that her own children would have increasingly restricted access to books was the last straw. 

“That’s when it struck me that my daughter was now going to have an experience like I would have had if I hadn’t gone to public school. That she was not gonna have access to resources and different ways of thinking, and different people, and different ideas,” she said. 

Barker defeated her conservative opponent and became a school board official with help from her community. Multiple progressive advocacy groups supported her candidacy, including Support Our Schools, a group working to preserve public education; and Social Equity through Education Alliance, a youth-led organization fighting to win back Florida school boards.

While Moms for Liberty’s strategy to overwhelm and overtake school boards was initially successful, many communities have since caught on to their tactics and challenged them accordingly. Laura Foster and other parents in Bucks County campaigned for progressive candidates during the Pennridge School Board elections in 2023. They won all five open seats.

Since 2023, Moms for Liberty has lost more races than they won in the first two years of their existence. The movement to destroy public schools is only in its early stages of success, and pro-democracy activists say there’s still time to reverse these efforts.

Teachers’ unions are also working to push back against the promotion of anti-trans hate and the privatization of the school system. In March of this year, the National Education Association (NEA) — the country’s largest teachers’ union — sued the federal government over its attempt to cut funding to schools that have diversity initiatives in place. 

NEA president Becky Pringle told TransLash, “Throughout history, it has been educators who have stood in the way of an authoritarian’s march toward unfettered power.” She knows that even in this rapidly changing landscape, teachers are still among the most trusted figures in many communities. “We need [teachers] to be courageous, to stand up for their students in a way that they know they’re not alone.”

In Arizona, despite ongoing harassment, Tami Staas continues to do just that.

“I’m gonna continue to stand up at those board meetings because if I don’t, what does that say to the kids that I’ve served?” Staas said. “My trans friends, my gender-nonconforming community — they need somebody who can walk in those spaces safely and talk for them when they can’t. If I walk away, I walk away from them. I can’t do that.”