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

PHOENIX, AZ - Just Schools strongly condemns yesterday's Supreme Court decision allowing the Trump administration to restrict gender markers on U.S. passports, forcing individuals to list their sex assigned at birth rather than a marker that aligns with their lived identity. “This decision isn’t just about passports; it’s about the right to live freely and authentically,” said Carol Tappenden, Executive Director of Just Schools. “Transgender people know exactly who they are.

We Were Once Illegal. We Can Do It Again. by kelley dupps At many points in history, being queer was treated as a crime. Laws named our loves and bodies as unlawful. Courts labeled desire as disease. Police raids closed the doors to the few places we could gather. These legal and social systems forced us into secrecy, into coded lives, into margins where survival and community became the same thing. Those conditions are not only past. The gains of recent decades such as decri