Background On Trump Executive Order Attacking LGBTQ+ Students, Their Educators, and the Freedom for All Children to Learn

by Kathryn Smith

Overview

On January 29, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order that attempts to dictate to students, their parents, and educators what they can read, learn, say, and who they can be.  It utilizes inflammatory and dangerous language to bully LGBTQ+ youth and allies who attempt to support them, and attempts to censor fact-based curriculum that teaches about our nation’s history. This order directs the Departments of Education, Defense, and Health and Human Services to work with the Attorney General to develop a strategy within 90 days that includes a plan to eliminate federal funding for K-12 schools that engage in what the order characterizes as “anti-American ideologies,” including education that it says is “based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.” It also encourages the prosecution of teachers and officials who respect a student’s transition. 

This order directs agencies to take necessary administrative action, including promulgating regulations, to implement these directions, but that process will take time.  The provisions relating to curriculum censorship do not take immediate effect, although preemptive compliance by law enforcement officials is possible.

High-Level Analysis

“Radical, anti-American ideologies”:

This executive order uses disturbing, inaccurate, inflammatory rhetoric to describe fundamental ways of supporting LGBTQ+ youth (such as addressing a student by their preferred name) and other marginalized students. It calls the concept of gender identity part of a “radical-anti-American ideology” that encourages students to “question whether to view their parents and their reality as enemies to be blamed.” It calls respect for transgender students and curriculum relating to our country’s history of racism ”anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies.” It falsely implies that educators are “steering” students toward surgery without parental consent or involvement, and states that demanding acquiescence to ‘White Privilege’ or ‘unconscious bias,’ actually promotes racial discrimination and undermines national unity.”

Defining “Discriminatory Equity Ideology,” “Patriotic Education,” and “Social Transition”:

In addition to incorporating the definitions from the Anti-Trans executive order issued on the first day of the President’s term, this order provides new definitions based on very concerning—and often inaccurate—rhetoric: 

  • "Discriminatory equity ideology" is defined at length, and generally means a way of thinking about society which “[minimizes] agency, merit, and capability” and reduces people’s “moral character or status” to factors determined by the individual’s race, color, sex, or national origin. It includes the ideas that some people hold conscious or unconscious bias, that some people should feel psychological distress and experience adverse treatment as a result of the country’s history, or that “the United States is fundamentally racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory.”
  • "Patriotic education" means “an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring and ennobling” presentation of the history of America in which the U.S. has “admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history;” that efforts to continue to do so are “beneficial and justified;” and that “the concept that celebration of America's greatness and history is proper.”
  • "Social transition" is defined as “the process of adopting a ‘gender identity’ or ‘gender marker’ that differs from a person's sex.” This process can include “psychological or psychiatric counseling or treatment by a school counselor or other provider; modifying a person's name (e.g., "Jane" to "James") or pronouns (e.g., "him" to "her"); calling a child ‘nonbinary’; use of intimate facilities and accommodations such as bathrooms or locker rooms specifically designated for persons of the opposite sex; and participating in school athletic competitions or other extracurricular activities specifically designated for persons of the opposite sex.” "Social transition" under this definition does not include “chemical or surgical mutilation.” 

Operative Provisions:

“Ending Indoctrination Strategy” Report. This order directs the Departments of Education, Defense, and Health and Human Services to work with the Attorney General to develop an “Ending Indoctrination Strategy” within 90 days that must include a plan to eliminate federal funding for K-12 schools that engage in what the order characterizes as anti-American, “illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination[,]” including education that is “based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology[.]” The report is also directed to include:

  • All federal funding sources and streams (including grants/contracts) that “directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology[]” in K-12, applying to “curriculum, instruction, programs, or activities[]” as well as “teacher certification, licensing, employment, or training;”
  • Each agency's processes to prevent or rescind Federal funds from being used by covered educational entities “to directly or indirectly support or subsidize the social transition of a minor student,” including through school staff or teachers concealing the student’s transition from their parents, withholding school records, or otherwise violating other relevant federal laws; andA summary and analysis of all relevant agency enforcement tools to advance the policies of this order.
  • The order directs these agencies to convene regularly to confer about these findings.
  • The order claims to be centered on “protecting parental rights” and relies on the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment  as well as on Title IX and Title IV: the implementation of this order could therefore have significant implications for agencies’ enforcement of civil rights laws, as well as on their key data collections that ask about concepts like gender identity and race and have informed much of our knowledge on the lives and well-being of LGBTQ+ and other marginalized youth.

    Directs the prosecution of teachers and officials who “unlawfully facilitate” a student’s transition. The order directs the Attorney General to work with State Attorneys General and local prosecutors to file appropriate actions (presumably under state criminal law) against K-12 teachers and school officials for:

  • “sexually exploiting” minors; 
  • unlawfully practicing medicine by offering diagnoses and treatment without the requisite license; or
  • otherwise “unlawfully facilitating” the social transition of a minor student.

    1776 Commission on Promoting Patriotic Education. The order directs the Department of Education to reestablish this commission within 120 days, to be comprised of a team appointed by the President to serve 2 year terms. During the first iteration of the 1776 Commission at the end of President’s Trump’s first term, they released a report that the American Historical Association called  “a simplistic interpretation that relies on falsehoods, inaccuracies, omissions and misleading statements”;

    Promotion of Patriotic Education. The order directs all relevant agencies to monitor compliance with existing federal law that requires teaching about the U.S. Constitution on September 17, and directs agencies, including the Departments of Education, Defense, and State, to “promote patriotic education,” including in programs like Fulbright.

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