Bigoted laws and bad policy ideas are constantly emerging, zombielike, from the muck of the Arizona legislature. Yet during the 2023 session, Arizona's Republican lawmakers launched new and particularly vicious attacks on LGBTQ+ people in the state: bills targeting drag performers, bills limiting health care for transgender people and most of all, bills affecting LGBTQ+ youth. Arizona's schools — and students — were a key target for lawmakers. They proposed bills this year that would prevent teachers from using students' pronouns and bar transgender pupils from using bathrooms that aligned with their gender. Most of these bills didn't make it past the desk of Gov. Katie Hobbs. And that was thanks in part to activism by students across the state, including Support Equality AZ Schools, a student collective led by Chandler high schooler Dawn Shim. Beginning in September 2022, after former Gov. Doug Ducey signed several anti-LGBTQ+ bills into law, and continuing through 2023, Shim helped organize walkouts out at their own school and high schools across the Valley, drawing awareness to the anti-LGBTQ+ bills flooding the legislature; the anti-LGBTQ+ crusades of Tom Horne, the new Arizona education chief; and the hostile school environments that queer youth often encounter in Arizona. Hundreds of students took to the streets — and schoolyards — as a result of SEAZS's organizing. But it was, of course, deeply unfair that the walkouts were necessary at all. In the words of one student organizer at a rally, it proved that Arizona had devolved into "pseudo-apocalyptic bullshit."