{"id":26090,"date":"2023-05-16T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-16T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/news\/aha-releases-statement-opposing-exclusion-of-lgbtq-history-in-florida-may-2023\/"},"modified":"2024-06-19T21:32:42","modified_gmt":"2024-06-20T01:32:42","slug":"aha-statement-opposing-exclusion-of-lgbtq-history-in-florida","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/news\/aha-statement-opposing-exclusion-of-lgbtq-history-in-florida\/","title":{"rendered":"AHA Statement Opposing Exclusion of LGBTQ+ History in Florida"},"content":{"rendered":"

The AHA has released a statement condemning the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE)\u2019s recent ruling<\/a> banning educators from \u201cprovid[ing] classroom instruction to students in grades 4 through 12 on sexual orientation or gender identity unless such instruction is . . . expressly required by state academic standards.\u201d \u201cThis erasure flattens the story of America\u2019s long Civil Rights Movement\u2026[and] bars students from examining cultures, religions, and societies\u2014including Indigenous nations within Florida\u2014that have embraced traditions of gender fluidity and homosexuality as meaningful categories of social identity and organization,\u201d the AHA wrote. \u201cWe ask that the FLDOE reconsider its vague and destructive policy of censorship, and instead encourage the teaching of accurate and inclusive histories of the United States and the world.\u201d To date, 51 organizations have signed on to the statement.<\/p>\n

\n

Approved by AHA Council, May 2023<\/em><\/p>\n

The American Historical Association condemns the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE)\u2019s recent ruling<\/a> banning educators from \u201cprovid[ing] classroom instruction to students in grades 4 through 12 on sexual orientation or gender identity unless such instruction is . . . expressly required by state academic standards.\u201d No such mandates appear in current American or world history standards. To comply with this clause, teachers would have to exclude from their curriculum significant aspects of the nation’s history.<\/p>\n

Consider the implications of this radical legislation\u2014radical in the sense of the reach of state government into local classrooms. Extending Florida\u2019s so-called \u201cDon\u2019t Say Gay\u201d law, the FLDOE would eliminate almost entirely the history of LGBTQ+ people from the Florida social studies curriculum. And to eliminate that history is to compel a distorted and incomplete teaching of the past. Neither law nor policy will change the fact that LGBTQ+ people have always existed. This erasure flattens the story of America\u2019s long Civil Rights Movement by ignoring the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the pathbreaking 2015 Supreme Court caseObergefell v. Hodges<\/em>. It bars students from examining cultures, religions, and societies\u2014including Indigenous nations within Florida\u2014that have embraced traditions of gender fluidity and homosexuality as meaningful categories of social identity and organization. Its effort to silence and segregate LGBTQ+ voices cannot but cripple our understanding of the richness and diversity of the human experience.<\/p>\n

Historical aspects of \u201csexual orientation or gender identity\u201d include heterosexual and cisgender peoples, too, and we wonder how the state might regard historical explorations of womanhood, masculinity, family relations, gender roles, even the marriages of John and Abigail Adams or Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. As the AHA explained in its 2021 Statement on LGBTQ+ History Curriculum<\/em><\/a>, \u201cStudents who attend schools that include LGBTQ+ history will therefore not only be better informed citizens but will also be better prepared to engage with the complexities of everyday life.\u201d The new policy\u2019s distressing imprecision combined with threats of license revocation and termination for those who violate it will chill good history teaching in the state.<\/p>\n

We ask that the FLDOE reconsider its vague and destructive policy of censorship, and instead encourage the teaching of accurate and inclusive histories of the United States and the world. These histories necessarily include LGBTQ+ people. Simple respect for the past in all its complex humanity demands that we give attention to these experiences.<\/p>\n

The following organizations have signed on to the statement:<\/p>\n

African American Intellectual History Society
\nAmerican Academy of Religion
\nAmerican Anthropological Association
\nAmerican Association of University Professors
\nAmerican Society for Environmental History
\nAmerican Society for Theatre Research
\nAssociation for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
\nAssociation of Ancient Historians
\nAssociation of University Presses
\nBerkshire Conference of Women Historians
\nCalifornia Scholars for Academic Freedom
\nCollege Art Association
\nCoordinating Council for Women in History
\nCzechoslovak Studies Association
\nDance Studies Association
\nFlorida Freedom to Read
\nGerman Studies Association
\nHistory of Science Society
\nImmigration and Ethnic History Society
\nJohn N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education
\nLatin American Studies Association
\nLinguistic Society of America
\nNational Association for Diversity Officers in Higher Education
\nNational Council for the Social Studies
\nNational Council on Public History
\nNetwork of Concerned Historians
\nNorth American Conference on British Studies
\nOral History Association
\nOrganization of American Historians
\nPEN America
\nPolish American Historical Association
\nRadical History Review
\nReacting to the Past Consortium
\nRoy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
\nSocial Welfare History Group
\nSociety for Cinema and Media Studies
\nSociety for Ethnomusicology
\nSociety for French Historical Studies
\nSociety for Historians of American Foreign Relations
\nSociety for Historians of the Early American Republic
\nSociety for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
\nSociety for Music Theory
\nSociety for Textual Scholarship
\nSociety for US Intellectual History
\nSociety of Architectural Historians
\nSouthern Association for Women Historians
\nUrban History Association
\nWestern History Association
\nWestern Society for French History
\nThe Woodhull Freedom Foundation
\nWorld History Association<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The AHA has released a statement condemning the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE)\u2019s recent ruling banning educators from \u201cprovid[ing] classroom…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":17025,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"%%post_title%%","_seopress_titles_desc":"The AHA has released a statement condemning the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE)\u2019s recent ruling banning educators from \u201cprovid[ing] classroom instruction to students in grades 4 through 12 on sexual orientation or gender identity unless such instruction is . . . expressly required by state academic standards.\u201d","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"aha-topic":[],"month":[556],"geographic-taxonomy":[],"post-type":[10,613],"thematic-taxonomy":[31],"year":[105],"class_list":{"0":"post-26090","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"month-may","8":"post-type-advocacy","9":"post-type-history-education","10":"thematic-taxonomy-lgbtq","11":"year-105","16":"year-2023","17":"has-featured-image"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26090"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67589,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26090\/revisions\/67589"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"aha-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/aha-topic?post=26090"},{"taxonomy":"month","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/month?post=26090"},{"taxonomy":"geographic-taxonomy","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/geographic-taxonomy?post=26090"},{"taxonomy":"post-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post-type?post=26090"},{"taxonomy":"thematic-taxonomy","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematic-taxonomy?post=26090"},{"taxonomy":"year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/year?post=26090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}