In yet another escalation of the Trump administration’s war on transgender individuals, the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Services on Aug. 26 demanded that dozens of states and territories — including New York — erase all references to gender identity in federally-funded sex education materials.
The Trump administration is specifically targeting State Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) grants, which are administered by the Administration for Children and Families’ Family and Youth Services Bureau and are intended to “educate young people on both abstinence and contraception” to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, according to the federal government’s website.
The program is designed to target young people who are homeless, in foster care, living in rural areas or areas with high teen birth rates, and minority groups — including sexual minorities.
Using offensive and false rhetoric, the Trump administration disparagingly described gender identity as “gender ideology” and said the administration is committed to protecting children from attempts to “indoctrinate them with delusional ideology.”
In a press release on Aug. 26, the Trump administration said it terminated California’s PREP grant “last week” after the state “failed to meet its demand to remove gender ideology from its educational materials.”
“Accountability is coming,” said Andrew Gradison, the acting assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families. “Federal funds will not be used to poison the minds of the next generation or advance dangerous ideological agendas. The Trump Administration will ensure that PREP reflects the intent of Congress, not the priorities of the left.”
The administration sent letters to each state and territory citing examples of which educational materials must be removed within the next two months, or else federal funding will be cut.
In the letter addressed to New York, the administration took issue with several passages in educational materials. One such sentence in New York’s educational materials calls on individuals to “demonstrate acceptance and respect for all participants, regardless of personal characteristics, including race, cultural background, religion, social class, sexual orientation or gender identity.” Another example includes a sentence stating, “Young people may express themselves in ways that don’t conform with their biological sex. There are many ways that youth can express their gender identity.”
The Trump administration’s letter went on to argue that the statute allowing the grant to be allocated “includes no mention of gender ideology, which is both irrelevant to teaching abstinence and contraception and unrelated to any of the adult preparation subjects… The statute neither requires, supports nor authorizes teaching students that gender identity is distinct from biological sex or that boys can identify as girls and vice versa; thus, gender ideology is outside the scope of the authorizing statute and any expenditures associated with gender ideology are not allowable, reasonable, or allocable to the PREP grant.”
The letter also included a paragraph in bold letters stating that the Administration for Children and Families “instructs New York to remove all content concerning gender ideology from its curricula, program materials and any other aspects of its program delivery within 60 days of receipt of this letter and provide a copy of the modified materials to ACF for approval.”
A list of the funds that would be revoked from each state and territory under that program shows that New York State would stand to lose the most funding: $6.028 million. Pennsylvania would be the next most-impacted state ($4.63 million), followed by Georgia ($4.50 million).
The New York State Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Aug. 26.
The directive comes seven months after President Donald Trump signed an executive order aiming to defund K-12 schools for supporting trans students. The executive order, called “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” directed the president’s cabinet to create an “Ending Indoctrination Strategy” containing a plan to eliminate “federal funding or support for illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.” The order further stipulated that the so-called “Ending Indoctrination Strategy” feature a section summarizing and analyzing “federal funding sources and streams, including grants or contracts, that directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology.”
