Texas legislators made a refuge necessary for the children they chose to target.
An eleven-year-old floats on the lake. For four days, no one demands they cut their hair. No one erases their name. The water holds them without asking what they are.
Color Splash Out is a four-day summer camp for queer and trans youth in Texas. It is led by Yadi Martínez-Reyna, a non-binary minister, and operates as a secular, non-denominational space. Campers choose the names and pronouns they use there. They create houses with names such as the Glitter Gorgons and the Rainbow Legends. They pay what they can. Many pay nothing.
The camp draws young people from the Rio Grande Valley, a majority-Latino region that is one of the poorest areas in the US. In the Rio Grande Valley, there are no queer youth organizations. In 2025, Texas passed seven anti-trans bills, including a bathroom ban in government buildings, restrictions on changing gender identity in certain records, and the expansion of a 2023 ban on medical transition care for minors. The camp’s location changes each year because of safety concerns and a shoestring budget.
Former campers return as fellows when they turn eighteen. Adults lend kayaks. Librarians donate banned young-adult books. Children build group projects from Frito-Lay boxes. The state withdraws protection, and ordinary people gather scraps to make a shelter.
This is what you have made, Texas.
Your throat should close when you hear a child say, “This is the first time I’ve ever heard someone say my name in public.” Your chest should tighten when a thirteen-year-old returns home and says that what they must face feels lighter only because, for four days, they were not alone. Your hands should become unfamiliar to you when you call the erasure of a child’s name safety and the punishment of a child’s body freedom.
You do not get to call the camp unusual and then pretend the children are the reason it must exist. You made the ordinary world unsafe. You made a lake, a cabin, a house name, a pronoun round, and a borrowed kayak carry the work of public protection.
The children are not asking for your permission to exist. They are learning how to breathe in a place where the air has not been filled with your contempt.
I see the difference. A child enters the water without thinking twice. A child hears their name spoken aloud. A child goes home after four days carrying less fear than they carried in. This is not a miracle. It is the smallest measure of what a public world owes its children. That is not sentimentality: research finds that LGBTQ+ youth with at least one affirming space report lower rates of suicide attempts.
And this is why the growth of Texas camp closures after new safety rules matters. When the state makes safety harder to provide, the burden does not vanish. It moves into the hands of parents, volunteers, librarians, ministers, and children who should have been swimming.
The Gospel of Matthew does not leave the matter hidden: “Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” (Matthew 25:45)
The child floats. The child is named. The child goes home.
The law remains what you made it. The witness remains what you refused to be.