Advocates in the News
The sex ed you get depends on your ZIP code — and your state’s politics
The 19th, NOvember 2025
As students and advocates in blue states push for refinements to their sex ed courses, activists like Fluker are working to give youth where they live access to basic contraception so they don’t become teenage parents.
Fluker once worked at an Alabama Walgreens and saw young people scrape together the cash to buy emergency contraceptive Plan B. That experience fuels her current work to get condoms into schools and community centers, but the effort is not without pushback. She has to justify to parents why she’s providing these products. “They obviously know that pregnancy is a consequence, but they don’t believe that their children are [sexually] active,” she said.
Although Muñoz is across the country in Nevada, he can relate to Fluker’s experiences. He said that sex education has been stigmatized.
“It has been the villain of the story,” he said. “But I think these topics should be addressed before people go to university, just so they know what to watch out for, to know what’s healthy and what’s good.”
Are fewer young people identifying as trans?
Vox, November 2025
If trans people aren’t counted in surveys, “it almost leads to a sense of isolation,” Marlin Xie, an 18-year-old activist with the nonprofit Advocates for Youth, told me. “It’s almost like there are less of my community that I can go to for support.”
Young people in particular might be fearful of sharing their gender identity, since they are highly aware of government surveillance efforts and the potential of hacks that could expose private data, Xie said: “Why would you want to give someone that knowledge, that information, when you don’t know how it will be used against you?”
An F in Student Activism?
Out Magazine, October 2025
This school year, our failures can be a collective tool to help us learn and grow. If you’re experiencing failure, or if you’re scared to start because of it, remember that movements don’t build themselves in a day. If you’re not failing, you’re not trying. Generations before us have tried, failed, reassessed, and recentered. Let’s follow their lead while rooting our activism in honesty and hopefulness this school year.
25 years of youth power: Advocates for Youth celebrates milestone institute in D.C.
The Advocate, september 2025
In Washington, D.C., more than 100 young activists came together for Advocates for Youth’s annual Youth Activist Institute (YAI) – a five-day gathering that has become a cornerstone of youth advocacy and leadership development. This year marked the 25th anniversary of the Institute, underscoring decades of commitment to equipping young people with the tools to fight for sexual health, reproductive justice, and LGBTQ+ rights.
What Women Wish They’d Known Before Trying to Get Pregnant
The Atlantic, September 2025
Young people themselves seem to want to have this more expansive, impartial information about reproduction. The idea for California’s period bill came from a high-school student, [YWOC4RJ Collective member] Sriya Srinivasan, who had stopped menstruating for three years, didn’t understand why, and felt too embarrassed to ask her doctor. She told me that she thinks kids should have a place to learn about reproduction other than the internet—a place where, as she put it about a hypothetical student, “I can sit and listen to this, and I don’t have to feel that stigma or shame from searching it up online myself, or I don’t have to feel the stigma of my family shaming me.” Ideally, Srinivasan and other teenagers would come away from sex ed understanding both how not to get pregnant and how to get pregnant: basic information about the human body that the body’s owner deserves to know.
Campuses reopen under Trump administration sexual assault rules critics say protect the accused more than survivors
CNN, August 2025
Emma Grasso Levine was a student when the 2020 rules came out. She now helps students navigate those rules as a senior manager for Title IX policy and programs at Advocates for Youth, which fights for sexual health and equity for young people. […]
“There’s no rule that says that schools and states both can’t go above and beyond what the real bare minimum of Title IX is right now,” Levine, with Advocates for Youth, said.
Trump administration threatens to pull federal funding from sex ed programs that mention transgender people
CNN, August 2025
Removing transgender people from sex ed programs will be damaging, said Debra Hauser, president of Advocates for Youth, a nonprofit that creates programs to educate young people about their sexual health, who has designed sex ed programs and national standards for decades.
“For young people – any young people – to feel engaged and for them to learn from a program like this, they need to feel reflected and included and affirmed,” Hauser said.
[…]
“This is not a decision based on science, this is really about politics, this is about their ideology. It’s not what young people need” Hauser said. “That’s what’s so frustrating and so unconscionable, to take a group of young people that are some of our most vulnerable and to further demonize them, and to get that message from the federal government, it’s absolutely outrageous, and it leaves me speechless.”
Opinion: Contraception Gives Young Women Control of Their Bodies—So Why Are So Many Girls Afraid to Use it?
Rewire News group, july 2025
“One encouraging approach is Advocates for Youth’s “The Busybodies Club.” This national campaign, which launched before I joined the organization, combines digital education with relational organizing to teach young people how to “spot fake facts, identify misinformation, and challenge misconceptions.” The Busybodies Club is structured to recognize that challenging misinformation requires more than facts—it requires trust, community, and creativity at the interpersonal and systemic levels. The organization’s guide to spot red flags on birth control posts is a great starting point for folks interested in being part of the solution.“
How algorithms, alpha males and tradwives are winning the war for kids’ minds
The 19th, July 2025
The vast majority of young men stumble onto the manosphere through innocent online queries, and algorithms set the trap, explained Geoff Corey, director of Advocates for Youth’s sex education project AMAZE.
“They are looking to make friends, to look better, to win over girls or become better people,” Corey said. “Then, they discover that it seems like the only people creating content geared towards men are people who give them an easy answer for what they want, and that easy answer somehow leads to trickery, violence, unhealthy behaviors, bottling up emotions.”
Supreme Court decision ‘sanctions discrimination,’ parent of trans teen says
NBC News, June 2025
Trans young people like Violeta Acuna, 19, are afraid of the ruling’s impact on trans youths and their mental health.Acuna, who lives in Pomona, California, started hormone replacement therapy when she was 17 after she experienced anxiety and depression due to gender dysphoria, which is the distress caused by a misalignment between one’s birth sex and gender identity. Within two months of starting the treatment, she said, her mental health improved. “If I had not had that opportunity, I probably wouldn’t be here speaking,” Acuna said.
How civil rights investigations against schools have changed under Trump admin
The Hill, June 2025
“It’s definitely been tough to have students come to us who are considering filing an Office of Civil Rights [OCR] complaint because they’ve experienced discrimination at their school, and have to sort of say, ‘I’m not even sure if it’s a good idea at this moment,’ given the way that the Trump administration is enforcing Title IX,” said Emma Grasso Levine, senior manager of Title IX policy and programs at the Title IX advocacy project Know Your IX.
Trump Is Using Title IX as a ‘Battering Ram,’ Experts Say
iNSIDE HIGHER ED, MAY 2025
“The news out of Penn, to me, was just another example of the way they are, unfortunately, using [Title IX] as a battering ram to beat down safe and inclusive school environments for trans students,” said Emma Grasso Levine, senior manager of Title IX policy and programs at Advocates for Youth, a youth sexual health and LGBTQ+ equality advocacy organization.
Why this nonprofit made a $1.2 million decision to reject federal funding under Trump
The 19th, May 2025
Advocates for Youth says that it can’t serve marginalized young people and adhere to the president’s executive orders, restrictions and censorship on race and gender.
Don’t SLAPP Me: NWLC Leads Amicus Brief in Support of New York Student Survivor Against Retaliatory Defamation Suit
The national Women’s Law center, April 2025
If you are a survivor and are thinking about speaking out (or already have spoken out) and are worried about facing retaliation, including being targeted with a SLAPP, you can learn more about your rights, risks, and options using NWLC’s and Know Your IX’s toolkit: Survivors Speaking Out: A Toolkit About Defamation Lawsuits and Other Retaliation by and for People Speaking Out About Sex-Based Harassment.
‘Keep Your Money!’ Some Nonprofits Push Back on Federal Funding Freezes; Others Take a Quiet Approach
The Philanthropy Chronicle, March 2025
Advocates for Youth, a 40-year-old organization that advocates for young LGBTQ people, recently turned down $1.4 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Governor Mills Stood up for Students and Survivors—Who Will Join Her?
COMMON DREAMS, March 2025
Even as we identify and invest in alternate approaches to protecting students from gender-based discrimination, we cannot grant right-wing politicians leeway to weaponize Title IX for their own political gain.
National Youth HIV & AIDS Awareness Day 2025
POZ, april 2025
Advocates for Youth says that it can’t serve marginalized young people and adhere to the president’s executive orders, restrictions and censorship on race and gender.
Meet Our New Education Secretary, Who Has One of the Worst Resumes I’ve Ever Seen
Jezebel, March 2025
“McMahon’s responses to Senate questioning demonstrate she has no understanding of the harmful, anti-survivor Title IX policies President Trump ordered the Department of Education to enforce,” Grasso Levine said.
Connecticut considers adding emergency contraceptive vending machines to college campuses
CT INSIDER, MARCH 2025
Nimisha Srikanth, 24, is a public health graduate student at Yale University and one of the student leaders working with legislators to expand access to reproductive care on college campuses.
Some of the most common barriers students face when accessing reproductive care is transportation, knowledge on where to go, cost and the clinic’s hours of operations. Even if there’s an on-campus pharmacy, Srikanth said some students may feel ashamed or stigmatized to go.
Dobbs stripped reproductive rights. Columbia students are fighting to protect them.
cOLUMBIA SPECTATOR, MARCH 2025
“I felt like, as a student and not just as an organizer, I deserved to have those answers,” Ramya Arumilli, a Reproductive Justice Collective organizer and Barnard senior, told The Eye. “Access to information is so important.”
“We’re Just Supporting Our Kid the Best We Know How”: Meet the Families Who Traveled to D.C. to Stand Up for Gender-Affirming Care
VOGUE, DECEMBER 2024
Last week, The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) heard oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a critical case from Tennessee that will decide the future of medical access to gender-affirming care for youth nationwide.