Think back to a time when the federal government threatened schools over how they approached gender issues. No, it wasn’t Trump’s doing — though now he’s doing it too.

Earlier this week, Trump’s Administration for Children and Families (ACF) sent letters to 46 states, ordering them to “remove all references to gender ideology” from the federally funded Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP), claiming it was necessary to shield “children from attempts to indoctrinate them with delusional ideology”.

PREP includes teaching that every person has a gender identity — an internal sense of being male, female, both, or neither — and that a mismatch between identity and body defines someone as transgender. It covers the right to assert that identity, including asking others to use chosen pronouns. It introduces concepts like non-binary or genderqueer — people who don’t fit conventional gender categories — and explains what each letter in LGBTQIA+ represents. Even in red states such as Alabama and Tennessee, these lessons were being taught. They have been ordered to stop.

Some people may decry this move as erasing transgender people, lambasting it as governmental overreach. After all, much of what happens in schools is usually decided at the local level, by districts and school boards.

But those same people likely cheered nearly 10 years ago, when former President Obama rewrote the federal Title IX act. In 2016, Obama’s Departments of Justice and Education released a “Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students”, which noted that, “as a condition of receiving federal funds,” schools must “treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex”.

That meant that “school staff and contractors will use pronouns and names consistent with a transgender student’s gender identity”, and that “transgender students must be allowed to participate” in sports and sex-segregated facilities “consistent with their gender identity”.

In the name of protecting students, Obama’s staff insisted that every person involved in schools affirm subjective realities. This ultimately led to allowing boys in girls’ sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms, and teaching ideas about gender identity as facts. That meant that anyone pointing out that there are multiple ways of understanding the concept of gender identity was a bigot, a heretic, or a science-denier. And it meant that school employees risked losing federal funds unless they went along, even if they objected to these ideas on moral, philosophical, ethical, or scientific grounds.

Now, Trump is doing the same, but in reverse.

I’ll admit that I am a critic of the way gender identity has been taught since Obama imposed it onto our educational system. My own kids learned that a person can be a boy on the inside and a girl on the outside, as well as a host of myths presented as facts and facts presented as myths. I watched as states passed policies allowing schools to hide students’ gender identities from parents, and as gender teachings grew increasingly strange.

This was not the way to cultivate incisive minds. I would prefer that educators themselves shift the curricula to be more inclusive of diversity — diversity of thought, that is. I would prefer they teach critical thinking, and not belief systems. But they had years to self-correct, and didn’t budge. Thus: the heavy hand of Trump, wiping the slate clean.

The problem is, Trump and his administration are just as censorious. What if someone wants to teach about the history of gender identity, where the idea of a sense of your sex came from, or how different cultures have understood it? What if they wanted a unit on the fight in schools over gender identity, which would encourage spirited debate and critical thinking? They couldn’t do so.

More than erasing gender identity from curricula, we need to reinvent schools as places of deep learning and critical thinking. This directive doesn’t do that. Instead, it muzzles educators once again.

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Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Tomboy. She writes at Broadview on Substack.

LisaSelinDavis

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