Abstract
This Health Education Journal (HEJ)-themed symposium examines how the mobilisation of far-right populism has remade educational discourse and policy related to gender, identity, health and sexuality education in schools. In recent years, the USA, along with a number of other countries, has witnessed a surge of extreme far-right ideology strategically inserted into the pedagogies and practices of schools through dangerous legislative policies and agendas. We began working on this issue in 2023 during the rise of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation that was sweeping politically conservative-leaning US states. Far-right political interference has had a significant effect on the gendered body: its existence, its acknowledgement, its acceptance and its treatment. Far-right populism’s central grievance claim is that educators and public schooling have become too ‘woke’ and too intrusive in the lives of children and have limited the parent’s right to determine the content of their child’s education.
Since 2023, these political logics have moved from finding decentralised home in individual conservative-leaning states, political action committees, and social media outposts to the centralised offices of federal power through the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK) as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Fast forward to July 2025, and there are currently 598 pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation being tracked by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU, 2025) across the USA. These Bills include threats to educational inclusion, facility accommodations (e.g. inclusive toilet/bathroom facilities), freedom of expression, free speech rights, marriage rights, privacy protections, access to healthcare, curriculum bans, trans sports participation bans, and the re-definition of sex as an exclusively biological category. In addition, politicians and far-right activists claim that ‘gender ideology’ – ‘a supposed gay and feminist-led movement to subvert traditional families and social values’ (Reid, 2018) – has been deployed within educational institutions to thwart the role of parents in the raising of children and quicken the upending of society entirely.
To contextualise what has occurred since US President Trump took office in January 2025, we turn to three presidential actions that are relevant to this themed symposium. On 20 January 2025, President Trump issued the following action: ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’ (Trump, 2025a). This order declares: ‘It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality’. In addition, this action withdrew ‘federal recognition for transgender people’, undoing the legal status of such individuals along with civil protections and human rights. Next, on 28 January 2025, ‘Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation’ declared that the USA ‘will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called “transition” of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures’ (Trump, 2025d). Finally, on 5 February 2025, ‘Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports’ resulted in mandating a reinterpretation of Title IX to prohibit the participation of transgender girls/women in female sports (Trump, 2025b). In addition, these executive orders were followed by the removal of federal.gov webpages related to gender and sexual health which were accused of promoting gender ideology rather than adhering to the biologically determined definition of sex and other Trump-era logics (Johnson, 2025; Richards and Cohen, 2025). These presidential actions were met with significant legal challenges that continue to be ongoing contestations.
On 13 February 2025, RFK was confirmed the Secretary of Health and Human Services by a vote of 52–48 after a contentious Congressional confirmation hearing. Kennedy, an outspoken sceptic of vaccine effectiveness, the US food supply and public health research, has routinely touted misinformation and conspiracy theories when questioned about his beliefs and policy agenda. Since taking office, Kennedy has removed all 17 members of the US Centers for Disease Prevention and Control’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), stopped recommending COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant women and healthy children, argued for different medical treatment and vaccine schedules based on racial identity and relied on ‘willful medical disinformation’ related to unpublished studies and the mischaracterisations of research to support his position (Constantino, 2025; Daniels, 2025; Fortier, 2025).
In addition to the concrete political power given to RFK as a member of President Trump’s Cabinet, on 13 February 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14212 establishing the ‘Make America Healthy Again Commission’ that seeks to remake childhood into a ‘healthy’ state of being (Trump, 2025c). The claims of chronic disease in childhood centre on five hypotheses: poor diet, the accumulation of environmental chemicals, lack of physical activity, chronic stress, and overmedicalisation. Although many political persuasions in the USA (Left, Right, Moderate and everything in between) find elements of the Make American Healthy Again movement compelling, other executive orders related to sex, sexuality and gender have many educators, parents and researchers dedicated to inclusive health education concerned for the wellbeing of many minority identities as well as the general public.
The most recent of these occurred on 18 June 2025, when the US Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in United States vs Skrmetti to affirm Tennessee’s right to ban gender-affirming care for minors. The majority opinion argued that such a ban did not challenge the equal protection clause guaranteed by the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. The 14th Amendment was central to the expansion of civil rights throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, along with Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote a concurring opinion in this case that went further than Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion. Their opinion argued that transgender people did not qualify as a ‘suspect class’ because they lacked ‘obvious, immutable or distinguishing characteristics’ and did not have a ‘discrete group’ identity given that they can have a wide range of gender identities and expressions (United States vs Skrmetti, 2025). In addition, Barrett and Thomas argued that there was an insufficient history of legal discrimination citing the distinction between private animus and de jure discrimination and that the courts were ill-equipped to judicially manage private discrimination. This represents a stunning set of arguments that exposes the dramatic shift occurring in how the USA approaches the legal rights, civil protections and basic humanity of sexuality and gender minorities – this decision and its proceedings mark a legal return to the de facto discrimination of previous generations.
Despite these political attacks, health education research consistently demonstrates that inclusive health education contributes significantly to the wellbeing and academic success of all students in schools (Basch, 2011; Bridges and Alford, 2010; Kim, et al., 2023). Comprehensive sexuality education that includes LGBTQ+ topics has been shown to reduce bullying, improve school climate and decrease health disparities among sexual and gender minority youth (Kim, et al., 2023). When schools provide affirming environments – through inclusive curricula, supportive policies and trained and well-supported educators – LGBTQ+ students report higher levels of school connectedness, improved mental health outcomes and reduced absenteeism (Bordogna et al., 2023; Mayo, 2013; McQuillan et al., 2024). Moreover, inclusive health education benefits all students by promoting critical thinking about diversity, reducing prejudice and preparing young people to participate in pluralistic democratic societies (Proulx et al., 2019). The professional standards of major health education organisations, including the American School Health Association and the Society for Public Health Education, explicitly call for curricula to address the needs of diverse student populations and recognise that exclusionary practices violate educators’ ethical obligations to serve all learners (National Sexuality Education Standards, 2020). These evidence-based practices stand in stark contrast to the ideologically-driven policies that seek to silence such approaches.
Given all of this, our aim in this HEJ-themed symposium is to better understand this contemporary historical moment and the implications of this moment for teachers, young people, practice and pedagogy and make recommendations for responding to such a reality as educators who are members of a profession that have an ethical imperative to protect young people. Some of the organising questions that served as a starting point for our thinking were as follows. How do current policies and practices influence the ability to create safe and open classroom spaces? How do educators create a democratic, inclusive, pluralistic schools so all student identities are affirmed within the learning environment? What topics in health education are being informally muted and/or formally banned from the curriculum? How are certain gendered identities being (re)constructed in schools and classrooms? What are the possibilities and opportunities for resisting this brand of far-right extremism? Does far-right extremism represent a return to historical exclusionary practices, or does it produce a new way to actuate inequality? What implications do contemporary policies and practices have for (re)imagining family structures? How do recent far-right mobilisations of parental rights threaten teacher autonomy and academic freedom in the classroom? What becomes of teacher expertise in the face of such political threats?
The articles in this themed symposium engage with various threads of these contemporary concerns. Although state-sanctioned discrimination is not new, what is unique, contemporary and disturbing is the onslaught of such a reality within the experience of social media algorithms, podcast culture, bad actor influencers, the amplification of echo chambers and the calls to ‘cancel’ inclusive education at all levels. The authors of the papers included in the symposium offer theoretical and philosophical analyses to assist teachers and health educators to stick with the trouble of educational health policy that seems designed to exhaust and demoralise. In ‘History on Repeat: Silencing Trans-Related Health Information and Violating Health Professionals’ Ethical Obligations’, Cris Mayo and Mollie McQuillan (2025) trace historical patterns of conservative backlash against LGBTQ+ health information, demonstrating how current federal policies mirror earlier attempts to silence research-based guidance on gender-diverse youth. Salvatore Daddario et al.’s (2025) paper ‘Exploring pronoun badges in clinical education: Medical students’ experiences and perspectives’ investigates how simple acts of allyship, such as wearing pronoun badges, can create more inclusive clinical environments while revealing the complex negotiations medical students must make around identity disclosure. Caitlin Howlett’s (2025) paper ‘Sexuality education, populism, and the promise of critical health education studies’ employs ‘queer of colour critique’ to expose how populist movements use strategic ambiguity to circulate oppressive politics while appearing to depoliticise educational debates.
Alison Happel-Parkins and Katharina A. Azim’s (2025) paper ‘Legislative consequences: The state-sanctioned accumulation of genital baggage’ uses narrative inquiry data to explore how conservative legislation creates long-term embodied consequences for women, drawing connections between restrictive sex education policies and the physical manifestation of sexual shame and dysfunction. Finally, Matthew Thomas-Reid’s (2025) paper ‘We are real: Sexuality, gender and the problem of ontology in US health education’ provides a philosophical analysis of far-right arguments, employing Roy Bhaskar’s concept of epistemic fallacy to differentiate between questions of being (ontology) and ways of knowing (epistemology) in debates about LGBTQ+ inclusion.
Both individually, and together, these contributions reveal how attacks on inclusive health education operate across multiple registers – from policy and legislation to embodied experience and philosophical argumentation – while offering tools for resistance and more critical approaches to health education policy and practice. We hope you enjoy reading the symposium and feel energised and inspired to join us and the symposium authors in advancing the continued struggle for recognition, equity and inclusion in health education.
