Each November, Transgender Awareness Month invites us to celebrate the resilience, creativity, and brilliance of trans people—and to confront the forces that continue to deny them dignity and safety. In classrooms across Arizona and across the country, trans students are showing what courage looks like every day. They navigate policies that erase their names, bathrooms that deny their existence, and adults who debate their right to belong. Yet they persist, organize, and buil

By kelley dupps Queer visibility today didn’t happen by accident. It grew out of specific events, struggles, and the work of people who were often pushed out of official history. Words like “gay,” “straight,” and “trans” are not the same across time and places. They are ideas shaped by laws, medicine, religion, and culture. Finding queer history is different from usual history. Archives and old books often ignore or hide queer lives. Historians must look in unusual places: pr

Queer History as a Blueprint for Survival & Resistance By kelley dupps Queer Americans have repeatedly held democratic institutions accountable for the harms they inflict on everyday queer people, and in doing so have remade law, medicine, public memory, and civic life. From the AIDS crisis to marriage equality to today’s fights for trans existence, queer movements have exposed how institutions produce exclusion and then used those same institutional levers to demand accounta