Trump admin kills civil rights settlements supporting trans students

Continuing the assault on transgender people that President Donald Trump launched as soon as he returned to power last year, the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights rescinded portions of settlements intended to protect trans students at five school districts and one college.

The department framed the move as “freeing schools” from the Biden and Obama administrations’ “illegal and burdensome enforcement of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972,” a landmark civil rights law that bars sex-based discrimination in schools that receive federal funding.

According to The Associated Press, “One of the school systems, Delaware Valley School District in rural eastern Pennsylvania, received notice of the change from the Trump administration in February and has since voted to roll back its antidiscrimination protections for transgender students.”

The administration also rescinded provisions of resolution agreements with Cape Henlopen School District in Delaware and Fife School District in Washington, as well as California’s La Mesa-Spring Valley School District, Sacramento City Unified, and Taft College.

“The Trump administration has opened at least 40 civil rights investigations into educational institutions that provide protections for transgender students,” and filed lawsuits in California and Minnesota, The New York Times reported. However, “Education Department officials said there was no precedent for the federal government terminating previously negotiated civil rights settlements with schools. Civil rights lawyers who worked under Democratic and Republican administrations said they were unaware of previous examples of such a move.”

Advocates for trans people sharply condemned the rollback, which came on the heels of last week’s International Transgender Day of Visibility.

“This sends a chilling alarm that trans students really are a target of this administration,” Shelby Chestnut, executive director of the California-based Transgender Law Center, told the Times. “It’s extremely concerning. Students should be safe to go to school and get an education.”

Shiwali Patel, senior director of education justice at the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement that “there is absolutely no basis for what the Department of Education is doing, and it is unimaginably cruel. Title IX exists to ensure that students are protected from discrimination and treated with dignity so that they can learn and thrive in our schools. It’s always been about that. It’s what students, families, lawmakers, and advocates fought for when Title IX was passed decades ago. But the Trump administration’s Department of Education has spent its limited resources to strip Title IX of that very purpose.”

“Real complaints of discrimination and sexual assault are going unanswered by the Department of Education while conservative lawmakers continue to escalate their attacks on a small minority of students,” Patel noted. “Parents, teachers, and students need the department to focus on addressing real harms on campuses instead of rolling back policies that keep all students safe.”

“We should all be alarmed at the Trump administration’s cruel escalation of their anti-trans agenda,” she added. “When they push laws that explicitly target trans people or attempt to use scientifically inaccurate language to define sex, they are also inevitably targeting all women and girls. They want to control what we do, how we look, and how we act until we are pushed out of public life. But we are not going anywhere.”