April 09 2026, 08:15 
When Randi Weingarten feels hopeless, she remembers herself as a closeted kid in the 70s. That girl, she told LGBTQ Nation, would never in a thousand lifetimes have thought she’d someday stand before the love of her life – already a decade into her tenure as the first lesbian president of one of the nation’s largest teachers unions – and legally say, “I do.”
But on March 25th, 2018, that’s exactly what she did.
Related
The right knows conversion therapy bans don’t stop them. Here’s why they fought to repeal them.
Living a life that her younger self could not even have conceived helps the longtime union powerhouse and leader of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) muster the faith to fight through the moment we’re in now, when the Trump administration and others on the extreme right have waged a bitter war against inclusive and truthful education.
Today’s landscape, frankly, is bleak.
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today
Don’t Say Gay laws have silenced teachers across the country while cutting off students from critical information; a Trump-stacked Supreme Court has greenlit parents to opt their kids out of lessons they deem inappropriate; books on queer identities have been banned from countless classrooms and libraries; officials are hiding behind Title IX to justify transphobic sports policies; trans kids are being forced to use the wrong restrooms and their teachers forced to call them by the wrong pronouns; educators are being doxed for promoting acceptance; and the Trump administration has weaponized what’s left of the Department of Education to investigate and threaten schools for having LGBTQ+-inclusive policies.
Nevertheless, Weingarten sees a path forward, one she says must be grounded in justice, inclusion, and respect. She has already seen democracy work to enhance LGBTQ+ rights, and that fuels her every day to keep going.
“We didn’t win marriage equality by yelling at people,” she said. “We won by saying, how dare you not give us the rights that you have? We may have felt it, but we didn’t win hearts and minds that way. We didn’t win the Supreme Court case that way, and we didn’t win in legislative battles that way… Nonviolent protests are important. But to change hearts and minds, you actually have to think about how to change hearts and minds. And education is a really important way of doing it.”
Weingarten’s book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers, positions educators as the country’s secret weapon against the Trump regime. Teachers, Weingarten writes, have always been on the frontlines fighting governments that exhibit what she calls “fascistic behavior.” Because good teachers don’t teach kids what to think; they teach kids how to think. And a country filled with critical thinkers is the precise antidote to the poison of fascism.
Even with the educational repression perpetrated by the Trump administration today, Weingarten sees plenty of cracks where the light can get in. Not only are lawsuits forcing the administration to temper its attacks, but determined teachers across the country are finding ways to make it work for the good of their students.
It’s no wonder she describes her book as “a love story” to the educators who refuse to give up.
An existential threat
Weingarten describes a classroom as a “mini democracy.”
“You’re creating rules of engagement,” she said. “You’re helping kids figure out how to work and operate with each other… That is pluralism, and that’s what schools do.”
But bad actors on the right, she said, want to make us fear one another, which runs counter to the very structure of the classroom. “Fascists… want the division; they want the hate; they want to create a sense of, ‘be scared of something that’s different.’”
Queer people, then, make a perfect scapegoat.
“Fear of the other centralizes power and control for the strong man who’s in office,” Weingarten explained. “They use that as an intentional strategy… They say, ‘We’re going to degrade, we’re going to dehumanize, we’re going to make them so venal, so awful, so toxic, and we are also then going to say that we are the ones who are fighting against them.'”
“You take people who really don’t have much power anyway, and you pretend they’re so powerful, and then you say, ‘We will protect you from that.’”
The fear and outrage machine the right has been building for years has culminated in acts like the Department of Education directing its workers last year to end all transgender-inclusive programs and policies. It has resulted in a Don’t Say Gay bill signed in Texas last year, barring discussion of LGBTQ+ identity in classrooms, banning LGBTQ+ student clubs, and prohibiting school staff from acknowledging student identities that diverge from the binary.
The relentless fearmongering led the Idaho legislature to pass a bill in March requiring educational institutions to out trans kids to their parents if they express any desire to act in a way perceived as discordant with their sex assigned at birth or risk being charged with “aiding and abetting” a child’s transition without parental consent.
It is this right-wing plot that led two in three students to report in Glisten’s 2025 school climate survey that they feel unsafe at school due to their sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. Only one in three LGBTQ+ youth reported that they frequently look forward to school, and 62% said there is no LGBTQ+ content in their classrooms. 53% said they’ve experienced anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination.
One 18-year-old in Georgia reported, “I constantly had to watch how I presented myself and how much of my identity I could share. Safety for me isn’t just no bullying. It’s being able to exist without shrinking myself.
” A 17-year-old in Florida said they took their pronoun pin off their backpack so no one would ask them questions about which bathroom they use.
“We pose in their view this really existential threat to a mythical past,” Weingarten said, “of the two-parent household, of a male and a female and a picket fence, where the male makes all the decisions in the household. In their view, that was a time in America that was just peachy keen, so they are really trying in every way they can to pull us back to the past, which never existed in the first place.”
So if a successfully operating classroom is a mini democracy, what does that make classrooms like those in Idaho, Texas, and the 17 other states with laws that censor LGBTQ+ curricula?
According to Weingarten, it makes them “sanitized” and “stilted.”
“Classrooms are not the safe and welcoming places that they need to be where kids really feel that they can live and be seen, and what happens is the engagement and the agency that kids really need doesn’t happen.”
At the same time, she emphasized that teachers are strong, smart, and resourceful (which is what scares the right so much) and, in many instances, still find ways to help their students feel a sense of belonging.
“There are thousands of classrooms in America every day that are operating as you and I speak, and most of the time, except in the extremes, teachers figure out how to engage with kids so they get the confidence they need and a sense of the agency that they need. So what these laws do is just make our jobs harder.”
Unworkable
Weingarten has always believed in the importance of a strong relationship between teachers and parents. “I always say that parents are kids’ first teachers,” she said, “and we have to actually work with parents to make kids’ lives successful.”
But the rise of the so-called parents’ rights movement has, in many areas of the country, severely blurred the lines between partnership and control. As groups like Moms for Liberty gained influence, more and more parents began treating teachers not as collaborators but as adversaries.
“The movement is [focused on] division as opposed to a fundamental understanding that parents and teachers have to work together in the best interest of kids,” Weingarten said, emphasizing that she will always fight for a parent’s right to raise their kids as they see fit. At the same time, she said, it is impossible for any parent to exert control over every piece of information their child is exposed to out of their home – especially in the age of screens.
“When I hear somebody saying that parents have the right to control everything, that to me is a statement out of fear of the absence of the ability to control everything. Because frankly, with these devices, nobody can control everything.”
Moms for Liberty has been at the forefront of the right-wing movement against inclusive education since it first formed to fight mask mandates during the COVID-19
The organization has been designated an “extremist” group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which wrote on its website that “the group’s primary goals are to fuel right-wing hysteria and to make the world a less comfortable place for certain students – primarily those who are Black, LGBTQ, or who come from LGBTQ families.”
The Moms for Liberty-fueled movement gained so much steam that the question of parents’ rights reached the Supreme Court. The Mahmoud v. Taylor decision said a Maryland school district must allow parents to opt their children out of instruction relating to LGBTQ+ identities.
Weingarten says the question of whether parents should have the right to opt their kids out of certain lessons is complicated, as she wholeheartedly believes it is critical to respect a parent’s right to raise their children as they see fit. But she knows one thing for sure: “It is fundamentally terrible for kids when parents opt out.”
She emphasized that to become successful adults, it is vital that kids learn to deal with conflict, difference, and disagreement. “If somebody is opting out of having a conversation or a book about difference, then where are you going to learn it?”
“What I have said,” she added, “is when we get to the question of people opting out, we have lost the battle already,” because “there has to be a presumption, unless you see otherwise, that parents have the best interest of their children in mind.”
Opt out isn’t just bad for kids, though. It’s also a massive burden for teachers. Those in the Maryland district at the center of the Supreme Court case, for example, are required to create alternative assignments for the small number of students who must be removed from the classroom when certain topics are discussed. In fact, the district originally had an opt-out policy but removed it because it had become “unworkable.”
The power of unions
Weingarten said the number one thing teachers who want to stand up to Trump should do is join a union. The “associational rights” of labor unions, she said, “are really, really important.”
“It’s part of the reason why the far right hates us so much. A community is the number one way that we start fighting autocracy, fear, and apathy, and have some fun doing it.”
She said she strongly believes in the message in Martin Luther King Jr.’s book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community. “The power of being together in a community that can then not only do mutual aid, but fight the forces of tyranny and fight for the kind of humanity and the kind of government and the kind of society we want,” she paraphrased. “That’s what teachers do every single day in classrooms, and that’s what we need to have them shielded by and embraced in community.”
Teachers who arm themselves with the support of a union, she said, feel more empowered to take to the streets for No Kings rallies, to do what feels right in the classroom, and to do the hard work of changing public opinion. And when they do it with a community behind them, the weight of it all doesn’t feel so crushing.
In its quest to protect both students and teachers, AFT has also been behind critical wins against the Trump administration, including its recent victory against the administration’s attempt to punish schools for having DEI programs. And in an October deal, the administration agreed to resume student debt relief for millions, which it had paused.
“None of us can do everything,” Weingarten said. “But we can all do something.”
A common enemy
Weingarten identified the fight against big tech as a possible uniting factor between the left and the right. “All of a sudden, we have a common enemy,” she said.
“What I’m hearing is that Moms for Liberty and people who support Moms for Liberty are rooting us on to actually limit screen time… It’s not a surprise to me.”
And Weingarten is ready to collaborate.
“My view is you expand the tent as much as you can. At the end of the day, regardless of who I am, our job when it comes to public education is to strengthen it and to make sure we prepare all kids for their lives… But now what’s happened is that the screens are so ever-present, they are taking attention away from schooling, and because the screens are so ever-present at home… You’re seeing MAHA moms and folks who have been historically with the Moms for Liberty movement and conservative moms, as well as liberal moms, basically saying, ‘Wait a second, this is taking our control away.’”
The internet, she said, is where parents really have no power. Kids can get around parental controls, and it’s impossible to know what they’re doing in their bedrooms at three o’clock in the morning. So all this time spent fighting over how to keep kids safe in the physical space becomes moot if they’re unprotected in the virtual one.
Weingarten sees potential for this fight to alleviate some of the tensions between the sides. “Does that mean people in Moms for Liberty are going to like the lesbian labor leader of the AFT?” she asked. “No. But sometimes, if you work together on anything, if you can have a shared experience on anything, that starts opening up the respect and human dignity… and that is how we won marriage equality.”
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.