By Theo Meranze
Donald Trump has explicitly made it his agenda to demonize and target LGBTQ + people, specifically transgender people, and sadly students and children are no exception.
The president has sent out multiple executive orders declaring his administration’s intent to attack what he has labelled “gender ideology extremism” in schools. For example, this executive order, titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling”, claims that the new secretary of education has 90 days 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.” It’s yet to be seen what that really means, though it shows that the administration will do what it can to pressure schools into abiding by their homophobic vision for school curriculum. Another order, titled “protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation” is a proclamation of intent to stop children (defined in the order as people under the age of 19) from getting gender affirming care. Both of these orders are broad and resultantly unknown in their true material effects, but they are deeply unsettling nonetheless. Their dog whistle language confirms a dangerous culture of aggression towards LGBTQ+ children is being fostered in the Trump administration.
Biden’s extension of Title IX — a landmark civil rights act which established protection from sex based discrimination — to the realm of gender identity was seen as a large win for queer students. Under Trump however, the department of education has revoked Biden’s extension of Title IX protections from gender based discrimination protections to LGBTQ + students, returning to Trump’s 2020 policies. Thankfully, this past weekend California’s state superintendent of public instruction assured state law won’t be impacted. It seems that queer children in the state will be largely unaffected by this as of right now.
One of the other few tangible things Trump has actually been able to implement in his aggression towards queer people so far was his order to bar the state department from giving out passports with the gender “x” and stop the processing of any attempts at changing gender on government documents. The ACLU has warned trans and nonbinary Americans that if they attempt to change the gender of a passport they risk losing it and its supporting documents indefinitely while the policies Trump is attempting to put in place are implemented and debated. This affects LGBTQ + students and non-students.