Intelligencer - Don’t Say Gay, or He, or She, or They

When Mandy Burkhart first found out that her children’s Florida school district would require parents to fill out a permission slip to list any alternate name their children may be called in class, she was sitting with her eighth-grader, Cailyn, in a doctor’s office waiting room.

“Cailyn asked what I was reading, because she noticed I looked upset,” Burkhart said. She explained the policy — and her frustration — that she would have to grant school faculty and staff permission to call Cailyn’s first-grade sister, Elizabeth, by her nickname, Betty.

“Tell them to call me ‘Princess Consuela Banana Hammock!’” Cailyn responded.

Burkhart filled out the form as Cailyn asked, but she said, “So far as I know, no one has used that nickname for her yet.”

It was just a taste of the maddening spectacle to come for millions of parents and students in Florida this school year thanks to Governor Ron DeSantis and his Republican allies’ harsh crackdown on anything in schools that references homosexuality or gender identity.

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