How lesbians perceive and navigate discrimination from their child’s school

This study aimed to understand how lesbian parents experience and navigate perceived discrimination from their child’s school in states that have laws against LGBTQ curriculum. Using an interpretivist case study approach and semi-structured qualitative interviews, I explored the experience of lesbian mothers and what they perceived as discrimination using Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory and Queer Theory. The findings revealed that lesbian mothers share five themes in which they report perceived discrimination, and use a direct, educational approach to combat the perceived discrimination. The five themes that emerged from analyzing the data are lesbian mothers wanting to be acknowledged and supported in schools, wanting school children to be exposed to diverse family structures (e.g., same-sex parent households), viewing political affiliations of school workers as a sign of approval or disapproval of same-sex relationships, wanting documents at schools to be representative of different family structures, and believing that educating people is the way to negate confusion of family structure.