LGBTQ Messaging Guides

The Talking About LGBTQ Issues series is a set of research-based resources designed to help shape discussions with conflicted or undecided Americans and help them better understand key issues of importance to LGBTQ people.

These guides offer ways that LGBTQ organizations, community members and allies alike can build common ground with moveable audiences, show them how their actions—or inaction—can hurt LGBTQ people, and help them understand issues of LGBTQ equality through the lenses of their own values and beliefs.

Our guides are geared toward helping those who are conflicted or undecided better understand the issues, and toward helping them recognize the importance of and need for their support. View our featured messaging guides below or use the buttons to explore additional guides by issue.

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Featured Guides

Talking About Family Recognition Laws & LGBTQ Families

Family recognition laws establish a secure legal relationship between a child and their parent or parents. Learn conversation approaches that help people understand why strong legal child-parent ties are essential to a child’s security and well-being and why families—no matter how they are formed—should be treated equally under the law.

Guide

Talking About Transgender Youth Participation in Sports

Kids learn important life lessons in sports: leadership, confidence, teamwork. Amid efforts to ban transgender youth from K-12 school sports, this guide provides messaging tools that emphasize shared values and show how harmful it is to exclude transgender youth from this vital part of their education.

Guide

Talking About Conversion “Therapy” Practices

Conversion “therapy” practices are dangerous, discredited efforts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Learn how to help conflicted audiences understand what’s at stake when a state-licensed mental health practitioner subjects an LGBTQ young person to these dangerous conversion practices under the guise of “therapy.”

Guide

Talking About Curriculum Censorship and Anti-LGBTQ School Bills

Far-right politicians are trying to pass laws designed to censor school curriculum, books and teaching—and create a hostile school climate for LGBTQ students. Explore approaches for discussing these growing cultural attacks on schools, education, and LGBTQ youth and the adults who support them.

Guide

Talking About Transgender Youth Health Care

Parents of transgender children, like most parents, want to do what is best for their child—and that includes ensuring that their child is able to receive the prescribed medical care they need. Read more about why this care is so important for transgender youth, and why bans are so harmful.

Guide

Talking About Transgender People and Restrooms

Explore approaches for talking about transgender people and restrooms in a variety of contexts by acknowledging audiences’ feelings of unfamiliarity, inclusively emphasizing safety for all of us, and helping people understand how transgender people are hurt when they’re denied access to restrooms.

Guide

Talking About Transgender Students and School Facilities Access

Every student deserves a fair chance to succeed in school and prepare for their future—including students who are transgender. This guide provides messaging approaches to build support for policies that protect transgender students’ ability to access school facilities that match their gender identity.

Guide

Talking About Family Acceptance and Transgender Youth

Family acceptance is essential when it comes to the health and well-being of young people who are transgender, gender non-binary or gender diverse. This guide provides an overview of conversation approaches that can help parents, family and friends build and expand support for transgender youth.

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