The Department of Education threatened on Thursday to pull federal funding from the Denver public school district, charging that it had violated students’ civil rights by providing gender-neutral bathroom facilities and letting transgender students use bathrooms that align with their gender identity.
In a statement, the department gave the school district 10 days to ban transgender students from using bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity and abolish gender-neutral bathrooms, requiring that all multistall bathrooms be designated male or female. If the school district did not voluntarily meet those requirements, the department said, it could face “imminent enforcement action.”
Craig Trainor, a top official in the department’s civil rights office, said in the statement that the school district was “not free to accept federal taxpayer funds and harm its students.” Denver Public Schools did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The move fulfills a campaign promise by President Trump, who vowed last year to pull funding from schools that recognize or provide protections for the hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren who identify as transgender or are questioning their gender identity. The Education Department has used similar threats to pressure schools to eliminate diversity programs.
The Trump administration had already withheld millions in federal funds from Denver Public Schools as part of a wider freezing of federal grants earlier this year. That funding was finally disbursed late last month after 10 Republican senators pleaded for the Trump administration to release the Congressionally appropriated funds.
Thursday’s move is the latest addition to Mr. Trump’s wide-reaching effort to restrict the rights of transgender people and undermine the idea that transgender identities are legitimate. Borrowing from Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, the Education Department portrayed transgender students in Denver as dangerous and predatory, asserting that the public schools had violated students’ civil rights by allowing transgender children who were born male “to invade sensitive female-only facilities.”
Those efforts have particularly focused on restricting the ability of transgender children to seek gender-related health care. The Justice Department has demanded confidential data from doctors and hospitals on children seeking transgender care. Other agencies, like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, have threatened to pull federal funding as part of the administration’s pressure campaign to end all transition care for children.
Transgender children were often the focus of political attacks by Mr. Trump and his campaign surrogates during the election last year. Many of those attacks stoked fears that children were being indoctrinated by their schools and teachers into becoming transgender against the will of their parents.
The Trump campaign also sought to portray policies protecting transgender children in Democrat-governed states as a scheme to undermine parental rights and — in their most extreme forms — authorize the state to take custody of transgender children.