As the leftist liturgical calendar proceeds through June, it’s worth stepping back to reflect on where we’ve been, where we are, and where we could be going regarding gender ideology in public schools.
Ten years ago, no one aside from the LBGT agenda-pushers at places such as the Human Rights Campaign — and probably some pharmaceutical executives — had any idea what was coming. The argument then was not nearly as aggressive: “Come on,” they’d say, “just let the distressed kid go to the bathroom comfortably.”
But conservative “conspiracy theorists” warned that this agenda would escalate quickly — that schools would start secretly gender-transitioning students without their parents’ knowledge or consent and promoting sterilizing hormone treatments to elementary schoolchildren.
That is exactly what’s happening now.
Today, those same “conspiracy theorists,” who were so manifestly correct before, are warning that the liberal push for “community schools,” which offer medical services, combined with a decrease in the age of medical consent, will yield schools that directly sterilize children without their parents’ knowledge.
But that need not come to pass. President Joe Biden could certainly push things along that way. Former President Donald Trump, however, could roll back the transgender administrative revolution in K-12 schools.
In its first term, the Trump administration did not take an aggressive stance on this issue. It took Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos seven months to partially rescind the Obama administration’s already-enjoined Title IX “Dear Colleague” letter, which forced schools to allow boys into girls’ bathrooms.
Under DeVos, schools could still face federal civil rights problems if one student “misgendered” another. But the DeVos Title IX regulation did not address “gender identity,” dealing instead exclusively with campus sexual assault.
However, that was back when many Republicans still believed that the key policy issue was how to sensitively administer school bathrooms. If you believed that, then federal neutrality made sense. But no one who is paying any attention still believes that.
So, what should a second Trump administration do?
The most obvious and necessary thing is to regulate and implement Title IX so that “no discrimination on the basis of sex” actually means that.
Title IX largely created female sports. So now Title IX should be used to defend it. No public school or college that allows biological males to compete in women’s sports should receive federal funding. Full stop.
Title IX also prohibits schools from enabling a “hostile environment” on the basis of sex. I’ve heard countless stories of girls who refuse to go to the bathroom at school because they don’t want to risk some boy leering at them while they do their business. I’d say, and the Trump administration could say too, that allowing boys into girls’ bathrooms creates a hostile environment and hence is impermissible in any institution that receives federal funds.
It could be difficult to regulate Title IX to prohibit secret gender transitions. But Trump could get at that problem through enforcing the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act. FERPA gives parents full rights to their child’s educational records. Some schools are skirting FERPA by declaring that secret gender-transition records qualify as educational records. Trump could certainly put the kibosh on that. And his administration could go even further, requiring schools to notify parents if a student requests to be addressed by a different name or as the opposite sex.
This would put the Trump administration on a collision course with California, which recently passed a law supporting secret gender transitions. That’s a fight the Trump administration should want to pick. If California schools want to sacrifice federal money in order to secretly gender-transition children, then by all means let them.
The Trump administration could also work with an outside group, maybe the American College of Pediatricians, to revise the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-endorsed National Sex Education Standards. The current version of those standards promotes puberty-blocking hormones to children as young as third grade.
The next version could promote the Cass Report — highlighting the actual data on gender transitions — to high schoolers. Middle schoolers could learn how the concept of “gender identity” was pioneered by Dr. John Money, a scientific fraudster who, by credible account, produced child pornography and was in principled support of pedophilia. (Don’t we want to equip students with the facts?)
And elementary school students could learn … nothing about sexuality. Because only the morally deranged far Left thinks that schools should be teaching elementary school students about sexuality.
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The Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment already should prevent schools from collecting data on students’ sexuality and “gender identity.” But it must be regulated and aggressively enforced. The Civil Rights Data Collection should be revised to cancel the question on whether students are “nonbinary.” Asking that question tells students that “nonbinary” is a factual human category, which it is not.
Many other things can and should be done, as well. The issue of whether people want their public schools to endorse the claim that children can be born in the wrong body, and that this can and should be addressed by sterilizing hormone treatments and mutilating surgical interventions, will undoubtedly be on the ballot this November. And come Election Day, the Left might just discover that most people want to “roll the clock back” to about 10 years when this wasn’t something our public schools promoted.
Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.