Trump demanded trans issues be excluded from sex education. 11 states complied
Sixteen other states have sued the White House over the program, saying it’s trampling on Congress’s authority
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/28/trump-administration-transgender-sex-education"At least 11 states and two territories are capitulating to a recent demand from the Trump administration to strip references to gender identity and the existence of transgender and non-binary people from a federal sex education program, officials confirmed to the Guardian.
The administration set a Monday deadline to remove the references or risk losing millions of dollars of federal funding. Almost all of the states that are complying have Republican-controlled state legislatures and most have Republican governors.
Sixteen other states and Washington DC have sued over the administration’s demand, claiming that it tramples on the authority of Congress, which created the $75m sex education program, the Personal Responsibility Education Program (Prep). All of the states involved in the lawsuit are led by Democratic governors.
In a court order issued late on Monday, a federal judge blocked the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees Prep, from cutting the Democratic states’ funding if they do not comply.
“HHS fails to show that the new grant conditions are reasonable, let alone offer any reasonable explanation, other than pretext, for its actions,” Ann Aiken, a US district judge in Oregon, wrote in her order. “HHS provides no evidence that it made factual findings or considered the statutory objectives and express requirements, the relevant data, the applicable anti-sex discrimination statutes and its own regulations.”
Prep aims to educate adolescents on healthy relationships and how to prevent pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted infections. In April, the Trump administration demanded all states and territories that receive money for Prep send a copy of their curriculum to HHS and its agency the Administration for Children and Families for a “medical accuracy review”.
Four months later, the administration sent letters to 46 states and territories informing them that, in the course of the review, it discovered “content in the curricula and other program materials that fall outside of the scope of Prep’s authorizing statute”. Specifically, the administration said it had uncovered evidence of “gender ideology”, the rightwing shorthand for suggestions that gender is a fluid social construct and that trans and non-binary people exist.
The administration said Illinois had to drop a curriculum that said: “Young people may express themselves in ways that don’t conform with their biological sex.” It told North Carolina to remove a line from a middle school lesson that read: “People of all sexual orientations and gender identities need to know how to prevent pregnancy and STDs, either for themselves or to help a friend.”
It also said sex educators in numerous states could no longer be instructed to “demonstrate acceptance and respect for all participants, regardless of personal characteristics, including race, cultural background, religion, social class, sexual orientation or gender identity”, according to the letters sent to states.
“Accountability is coming,” said Andrew Gradison, acting assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families, in a statement announcing the letters. “Federal funds will not be used to poison the minds of the next generation or advance dangerous ideological agendas.”
The Guardian contacted every state, as well as most territories, that received letters from the Trump administration. Alaska, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming said they would remove the references or had done so already. The US Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands, two territories, said the same.
Two other states, Alabama and South Dakota, said their Prep curricula never included the terminology referenced in the Trump administration’s letters.
Collectively, these states are home to more than 120,000 trans people between the ages of 13 and 17, according to estimates by the Williams Institute, a department of the UCLA School of Law..”
Archived:
https://archive.ph/ctsGm#Trump #USPolitics #TeamTERF #OccupyWoman #GetMenOut #Freespeech #HoldTheLine #KeepWomensSpacesSingleSex #TransCult #PeakTrans #TeamTERF #TransphobeHarder #TransCult #PeakTrans #TheresNoSuchThingAsTransgender