Your Child’s School Might Still Be Pushing Transgender Ideology Despite Trump’s Orders

Parents, your child’s school might be gearing up to push transgender ideology this fall.

As the first day of school approaches, the pressing cultural issue that continues to rile parents and helped catapult Trump to the White House in November remains alive and well in hundreds of school districts across the country despite the president’s efforts to stamp it out.

During his first weeks in office, Trump signed a pair of executive orders threatening public schools with existential federal funding cuts if they refuse to root out “gender ideology,” including erasing it from the curriculum, banning males from girls’ sports teams and locker rooms, and no longer encouraging children’s “social transitions,” which can include using new pronouns, allowing students to use the bathrooms of the opposite sex, and hiding their transgender identities from parents.

“There’s a sort of coast-to-coast misconception about the fact that the cavalry’s arrived and all of these bad policies are suddenly being rescinded,” said Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president at Defending Education, which fights gender indoctrination in public schools.

“Unfortunately, factually the reality remains something completely different,” Perry told The Daily Wire. “We’ve seen kind of a mixed bag. There are some [districts] that are holdouts. There are some that are going along to get along, and then there are others who are simply hiding what they’ve done by pulling off their particular policies from that educational outlet’s website and essentially passing the buck back to the state.”

In the wake of Trump’s orders, some school districts scrambled to comply and scrapped their transgender policies, which they had adopted a few years ago at the peak of the ideology’s influence.

In deep red Nebraska, Bellevue Public Schools reversed its 2015 policy. The district now allows teachers to disclose a child’s transgender identity to parents and says students must use the bathroom of their biological sex.

The district cannot afford to lose its $10 million in federal funding, and parents were very concerned, according to Superintendent Jeff Rippe.

“We’ve had concerned students, concerned parents, about this policy,” Rippe said. “$10 million is what we get in federal funding. And that means a lot to this school district. Speaking personally, we cannot afford to lose $10 million.”

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On the other side of the political aisle, entire blue states have openly bucked Trump’s orders. The administration is locked in lawsuits with California, Maine, and Minnesota.

Minnesota made the first move in its fight — it sued the Trump administration in April over the transgender sports order. Meanwhile, the Education Department is investigating Minnesota after a trans-identifying male softball player’s shutout pitching helped launch his girls’ team to its first state championship.

California, the biggest player throwing its weight around, said it would follow the liberal state’s laws on males in girls’ sports over Trump’s orders. The Education Department found California in violation of Title IX. When California missed the deadline to comply, the Justice Department sued the Golden State, the next step in terminating its federal education funding.

Governor Gavin Newsom has “not only not read the room right, he’s actually not following what both the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause and Title IX’s actual direct text indicate he needs to do,” Perry said.

The Constitution states that federal law — in this case, Title IX — overrides state law.

A similar situation is playing out in Maine.

Governor Janet Mills infamously snapped, “We’ll see you in court,” to Trump when he called her out in person at a February dinner over Maine allowing males in girls’ sports.

“Good, I’ll see you in court,” Trump told her. “That should be a real easy one.”

The Education Department later found Maine in violation of Title IX over its sports policy, and the Justice Department has sued the state, seeking to end its funding.

The Education Department is also investigating Massachusetts and Oregon over transgender sports policies, as well as the odd school district here and there — Chicago Public Schools, the Jefferson County district in the Denver area, several Connecticut school districts, and Saratoga Springs, New York, which made a show of defying Trump’s executive order disallowing boys to participate in girls’ sports, reaffirming “its unwavering commitment to providing a safe, inclusive, and high-quality education for every student.”

Red states are not immune to such defiance either.

The Education Department is investigating four Kansas school districts for allowing male students in girls’ sports and bathrooms, and hiding students’ transgender identities from parents.

A slew of other blue states have pushed back directly as well, some explicitly telling their schools to ignore Trump’s orders, including New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Michigan, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington state.

“What I would say is, follow state law, follow state law, and then, if you’re not sure, follow state law,” state Superintendent Chris Reykdal told a Spokane area district school board that expressed concern over Trump’s executive order.

Other states, including Colorado, Delaware, Connecticut, Vermont, Hawaii, and Washington, D.C., still have transgender education policies in place.

All of those states and more signed onto a lawsuit opposing Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion ideologies in schools, which includes transgender ideology.

“Unfortunately, it seems to me that a lot of these blue state governors don’t have very good attorneys,” Perry said.

She predicted that the California and Maine lawsuits will eventually end up at the Supreme Court.

“They’re more inclined to take up state lawsuits like this because there are two different interpretations of long-standing federal law,” she said.

Perry noted that last summer, the Supreme Court agreed to block the Biden administration’s radical new interpretation of Title IX, which included gender identity, in 26 states. All nine justices agreed the plaintiffs were entitled to preliminary injunctions.

“I think it was a pretty good indication that once they get the case on the merits, people like Gavin Newsom and Governor Janet Mills are going to be roundly disappointed by exactly how it ends up,” Perry said.

This month, a saga unfolded when five northern Virginia school districts stubbornly clung to their transgender policies, which allow boys in girls’ bathrooms.

The school districts for Loudoun County, Fairfax County, Arlington County, Prince William County, and Alexandria City all announced last week that they would not be changing their policies after the Education Department found them in violation of Title IX.

Loudoun County Public Schools, which became an early flashpoint in the transgender debate after a sexual assault in the girls’ bathroom by a boy in a dress, took the lead in defying the Trump administration. A few days before the deadline, the board voted 6-3 to keep its policy. The other four Virginia districts followed suit with similar announcements.

The Education Department has said it will begin the process of pulling federal education funding from the five Virginia school districts, which receive over $50 million and serve nearly 400,000 students.

“The Virginia districts will have to defend their embrace of radical gender ideology over ensuring the safety of their students,” an Education Department spokesperson said.

While all this was going on, two Loudoun County high school boys were also suspended and found guilty of sexual harassment and sex-based discrimination for questioning why a girl was changing in the boys’ locker room. Their parents are fighting the decision.

Parents did get a win in Loudoun County last month when the district backed down on its pronoun policy after several teachers sued. Loudoun was also previously forced to give a physical education teacher his job back after he was suspended for speaking out against the pronoun policy.

Not every school district flouting the Trump administration is doing it so loudly.

More than 21,000 schools at one point followed a policy to hide children’s transgender identities from parents, according to Defending Education’s database.

Many never changed those transgender policies and are hoping to fly under the radar.

Corey DeAngelis, a prominent school choice advocate, explained that enforcing Trump’s executive orders on thousands of individual local districts has proved to be an unwieldy task.

“Top-down orders aimed at rooting out gender ideology from our schools are welcome developments. They’re a step in the right direction,” DeAngelis told The Daily Wire. “But they are not efficient, because rogue public school employees will continue to skirt the law behind closed doors, and enforcement can prove to be very difficult.”

“We’ve seen the same problem with states banning concepts like Critical Race Theory,” DeAngelis said, noting that public school administrators in red states have been caught on video admitting that they ignored diversity, equity, and inclusion bans.

“It’s a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. That’s exactly why we also need school choice,” he said. “If families get a whiff of something wrong happening in their child’s school … they should be able to vote with their feet to schools that align with their values.”

Parents who wish to keep their children in their public school districts should remain vigilant, Perry said. Thankfully, there is “intense interest” among Defending Education’s 375 parent groups across the country in getting transgender school policies rescinded, she said.

“I would recommend to parents that they need not sit on their laurels and say this is a mission-accomplished administration, but to actually ask hard questions of their local school board,” Perry said. “Will trans-identified males be allowed in their daughter’s bathrooms or on their daughter’s sports teams? Will locker rooms be opened up under gender neutrality?”

“They need to be diligent in enforcing their rights,” she concluded.