Saoirse Stone is leaving Florida.

The 32-year-old trans high school English teacher has had enough of the state’s Don’t Say Gay vibes and the bigotry and silence they’ve inspired.

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Ron DeSantis’ discriminatory laws have instilled paranoia among the school system’s LGBTQ+ faculty, staff, students, and allies, Stone says.  

Florida’s first Parental Rights in Education Act, passed in 2022, banned classroom discussion and “instruction” about sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through 3rd grade. A subsequent bill in 2023 extended the policy through 12th grade, while new restrictions on LGBTQ+ content in libraries set off a book-banning frenzy. Rules around pronoun use have effectively banned free speech for all gender-nonconforming people in Florida schools.

A settlement between the state and groups challenging the laws in 2024 did little to allay LGBTQ+ faculty concerns about teaching while gay. Stone was the only Florida teacher who would go on the record with LGBTQ Nation.

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She said she has nothing left to lose.

The Orlando-area English teacher is a Florida native. She earned a law degree from William & Mary in Virginia and started her teaching career six years ago as the Covid pandemic unfolded. She’s been at the same high school ever since.

Stone says that for the most part, she has the support of her colleagues and students — it’s pressure from those higher up in power that’s inspired her to leave her job at the end of this school year. She plans on moving to Maryland with her wife this summer.

Stone spoke with LGBTQ Nation at the end of her school day.

LGBTQ Nation: What made you decide to go into teaching?

Saoirse Stone: There’s a thing that made me decide to go into teaching, and there’s a thing that made me decide to stay in teaching.

I decided to go into teaching because I was out of work during COVID, and both my parents are teachers, and both my maternal grandparents were teachers. So I knew a lot about the profession, and I knew I could probably do a pretty good job. So I got my temporary teaching certificate and took a job teaching high school.

I stayed because it turned out I both really liked it and was rather good at it, and I found a lot of value in ways that I had not found in other jobs… like a feeling that I was doing something worthwhile.

How did your teaching work line up with your transition?

I had been teaching for two years when I transitioned. I had intended to come out fully publicly and had already begun to do that with faculty and staff on campus when all of the various and assorted anti-LGBTQ pieces of legislation passed in the spring of 2023.

And then I was cautioned by my school administration, who had gotten direction from my district’s legal department. For my own safety and well-being professionally, I was strongly encouraged to not come out and not tell my students.

So just to clarify, you had already started transitioning socially before this became a question?

Yes, but I present rather butch. I’m very much a dyke, you know, to use a preferred term. So I can fly under the radar if I want to, or at least at the time I could. Not so much now that I’m four years into this. But, you know, dressing a bit more masc, I could at the time still sort of pass [as a man]. At the time, that was what I felt I had to do.

And you were advised not to articulate anything having to do with your gender after legislation had passed and been signed by DeSantis?

Yes.

And you were still presenting as a man?

Yes.

Then what happened?

Essentially, radio silence. No one says anything more to me specifically about it, from the district or from the school-based administration – really, to this day.

Now, there are plenty of school and county-level trainings after all of this stuff had fully gone into effect. This was also in the midst of all that anti-critical race theory stuff, the book ban stuff. So we had to sit through all of these policy changes.

But I had been pretty careful to mostly keep anything about me out of writing – any official stuff – because while I wanted to move towards a more authentic presentation in life, I also knew the law well enough that I didn’t want there to be anything that was going to put me on a list.

And just for context, at this point, DeSantis is campaigning for president, as well, and a lot of this stuff was part of his platform, correct?

Yes. And whether it was going to be him or whether it was going to be another candidate at the time, there was a risk of stuff at the federal level.

I wasn’t at a point where I could go truly stealth at any level. That would have put me at risk of getting my teaching certificate revoked. That’s part of what’s so insidious about these things. My school-based administration, they don’t care. They would not fire me for being trans. But if the state gets an inkling of it, the state can revoke my teaching certificate.

Why would the state revoke your certificate?

So there’s no explicit prohibition on being trans, but there is on wanting to use pronouns that align with your new gender identity and not one from your sex assigned at birth. If I use honorifics or pronouns that don’t comport with my sex assigned at birth, that’s grounds to potentially have my teaching certificate revoked. And there’s nothing about a three-strike system, or getting a warning, or anything like that.

And as any teacher will tell you, a lot of students are going to just call you Mr. or Miss. And that’s particularly frequent at our school, which has a very high Hispanic population, and it’s a manner of address that’s seen as respectful. And I don’t get to dictate what that honorific is.

What honorific were your students using?

Well, that’s where I got a little creative that fall. The district was looking to expand an E-sports program – you know, video games – across all the high schools, and I volunteered. Both because I do play video games, and I know a fair bit about several, and also because I could be called “Coach.”

Excellent.

So I did that. I got my name plate, and everything on my door changed, and that’s kind of been the way I try to navigate around this.

How has Don’t Say Gay affected your ability to teach? Can you mention Harvey Milk?

That’s part of the insidious nature of these laws. There’s not clear guidance, just a very vague standard of what’s “developmentally appropriate.”

When the book ban stuff was going on, we had this whole system set up where we had to catalog every book in our classrooms, and then we got a list back of which of those books we had to remove from our classroom library. I lost almost every book by a Black author, almost every book by a queer author, every single book I had from a native author, most of the books I had from Hispanic authors, and probably half the books by women. I had to fight to keep The Scarlet Letter.

I had to remove, for instance, James Baldwin, because certainly the powers that be in Tallahassee don’t want kids learning about James Baldwin. Shockingly, Sappho, of all authors, somehow slipped through. No one challenged that one. I have to imagine that whoever was going over it somehow didn’t know.

Let’s talk about the reaction among your colleagues to these rules. Are there any other LGBTQ+ faculty at your school?

Yeah, there are. And look, in the schools, there are so many gay and bisexual teachers. I would not be shocked if some schools cleared 30 or 40% among the faculty. I don’t have statistics to back that up, but it’s certainly a large number.

Is there a sense of solidarity among that group? Are you trading war stories?

There’s certainly solidarity. There certainly are war stories, both about this and about the general struggles of public education. My relationships with my colleagues have been very positive, both among those who I’ve had conversations with and those I haven’t. I would describe myself as rather well respected among the faculty at my school. If anyone has had a serious problem with me among the faculty or staff, they have kept it to themselves. You know, there’s always a couple outliers that I’ve heard of, but none that really crossed my path in a meaningful way.

This is really a problem from the top. This is a problem from the state. It’s an enforced, hierarchical issue. It’s not one that would be a day-to-day problem in my life, if not for the state-level laws.

Who are you talking about when you say “outliers”?

There was buzz about one particular teacher in one of the sciences that had said some fairly overtly transphobic stuff. I think they just retired, and that’s the thing: Retirement is wiping away a lot of the old guard that might have felt strongly about enforcing a lot of this stuff on fellow staff and students.

Also, there are lots of trans students, and there always have been. Your average public school teacher in 2023 already had a trans student, or two, or three, or more. We all just got used to it. So it’s not that much different to see, I imagine, a member of the faculty identifying in the same way. It’s not news.

Have you encountered any hostility from students over the fact that your gender presentation isn’t super binary?

I’ve had to have students written up, and in a couple cases, removed from my class roster for calling me slurs in the classroom.

Like what?

F***ot, specifically.

Right in front of the other kids?

Yes. In one case, multiple times.

Did this kid have other behavioral issues, or was it just really directed at you?

It was my understanding that the discipline issues did not start or end with my classroom. But the targeted nature of the term was specific to me.

Do any other incidents like that stand out?

Nothing that severe. They’re not issues with most of the students, you know? Again, that was very much an outlier. And part of the reason it got resolved and the student got removed from my room was that other students reported that student. It didn’t require me making a thing out of it. They were appalled.

The general attitude among our current crop of high school students is either general apathy, in every real sense, or acceptance. Anything beyond that is very unusual.

You say you want to leave the state at this point, but you’re describing what sounds like a fairly supportive environment, at least on the local level. Why do you want to leave Florida?

So, two big reasons.

One, it’s supportive for now. It’s supportive because I have good relationships with fellow faculty, fellow staff, and because the laws haven’t changed that much over the last few years.

However, I started wanting to move because in the past few months, the machine of transphobic legislation at the federal and state levels has started spinning again, pretty seriously. Florida has been spared the worst of it so far, but I don’t know if I trust that, and that’s a big part of it. There were some very scary things up for votes in this legislative cycle. So there’s that, as far as the civil rights element.

And what’s the other reason?

So, while we might be in something of a state of detente, as far as those policies go, the economic situation here in Florida is getting a lot worse. My wife was out of work for months this year. We were having to get by on a single teacher salary, and that was very, very hard, and we barely managed that. We had to take some debt on to handle that. It kind of wiped out most of our savings. She’s got a job now, fortunately.

Another problem is that one of the bills that did pass the legislature was a bill that is undercutting the teachers’ unions. It’s very obviously meant as a union-breaking law. And if the teachers’ union dissolves, we would all be taking pretty substantial pay cuts. On top of that, the district is bargaining over an increase of thousands of dollars to our healthcare.

So as much as I love Florida, as much as I love Orlando, as much as I love my students, and as much as I like my school, I have to kind of balance and ask, can I do this without it ruining us financially or preventing us from accomplishing things we really want to accomplish financially?

You described a kind of detente when it comes to your civil rights. Do you worry that could change?

There’s the possibility of changes in the school board, which could very much mean big shifts for how safe I am at my school. There’s the possibility of school-based administrators changing. All it takes is an administrator suddenly becoming someone who’s not super cool with trans people, and I go from a pretty good job to a deeply hostile workplace, because there is no protection for me there.

And truthfully, all it would take is one false allegation that I requested that certain pronouns be used for me, and that could be it, you know – something deeply impossible to prove or disprove. And I don’t trust the state of Florida to give me due process.

It must be tough carrying the weight of those possibilities around, while all you want is just to do your job and be yourself. 

There is a mental and emotional cost to going into work for seven and a half hours every day, having everyone treat you like someone you’re not, even in spite of the relatively supportive environment. You still feel like there’s something off.

Even people who work here that are generally supportive and that I have a good relationship with, they do not call me by preferred pronouns, because, frankly, they’re afraid. They’re afraid about drawing a target on their own back. So even if under other circumstances they might try and be supportive, they don’t feel like they can be.

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