Trump Takes $81 Million In Sex Ed Funding Hostage Over “Gender Ideology”

Youth populations could see an increase in STI rates, unwanted pregnancies, and relationship violence due to Trump’s anti-trans sex education scheme.

RFK Jr // Wikimedia Commons // Gage Skidmore

The Trump Administration is holding the health and safety of millions of young people hostage over his manufactured war on “gender ideology.”

This week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “demanded that 46 states and territories remove all references to gender ideology in their federally-funded Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) educational materials,” a press release from the agency reads. PREP grants help provide sex education to public schools across the country, especially in high-risk areas, which helps curb unwanted pregnancies, STIs, and even relationship violence.

But Trump wants to undermine that in order to scare states, schools, and educators into erasing trans identities from sex education curricula—and then some.

“Gender ideology,” which the press release also dubs “delusional ideology," is a “fantasy of a gender and sexuality conspiracy,” a 2018 report by Human Rights Watch states. The concept has transformed from a buzzword of anti-LGBTQ religious sects to the global right’s Public Enemy Number One. President Donald Trump has used it time and time again to vilify transgender people (and our health care, passports, etc.).

Last week, the ACF said it would terminate California’s PREP grant after the state resisted such anti-trans efforts. Letters were sent out to California officials and those overseeing other states’ grants, totaling $81 million (all of which can be viewed here). The notices were both personalized and tailored to each state—using specific examples from that area’s educational materials—as well as troublingly broad.

“They're not calling out the specific things that they have issues with,” Amy Paris, formerly the nation’s highest-ranking transgender government official and senior worker at the HHS, told Erin in the Morning. “They're block quoting things and they're not saying whether they're modifying them or what's wrong about them.”

At the same time, the letters all cited a routine “medical accuracy review” that suddenly found the contested materials to be “outside of the scope of PREP’s authorizing statute at 42 U.S.C. § 71,” a decade after this law’s initial enactment. Flagged passages included discussions of LGBTQ communities as well as topics like consent or pre-marital sex.

[A screenshot of the ACF PREP letter sent to the State of Arizona, which in turn features an excerpt from a state sex educator handbook.]

Experts also spoke about the chilling effect—intentional or not—this will have on classrooms.

“This is censoring content that acknowledges trans existence," said Khadijah Silver, a civil rights attorney with Lawyers for Good Government, who holds both a Juris Doctorate and a Master’s in Public Health. They called this latest development an “Orwellian capture of medical authority.”

The Department did not respond to Erin in the Morning’s requests for comment.

While what the government calls “gender ideology” isn’t outlawed explicitly by the ACF letters, it does use funding to strong-arm states into compliance.

However, as seen with the funding cuts to universities and hospitals over trans issues and DEI initiatives, appeasement isn’t a winning strategy. When institutions have capitulated, the Administration has followed up with even more civil rights rollbacks.

“This idea of ‘gender ideology’—it's so hard to understand what they're actually getting at,” said Stephanie Lyon, a psychology professor at Rutgers University and executive director of the sex education advocacy and training organization, Answer. “It's this very reductionist, binary portrayal of what gender is, when we know that that is not medically, factually or psychologically accurate.”

Lyon also warned that this attempt to erase LGBTQ people from sex education erodes the health and wellbeing of all young people, not just trans and queer ones. “There's long term data that shows that comprehensive, age appropriate, medically accurate sex education has positive health outcomes across the board,” they told Erin in the Morning.

It’s a sacrifice Trump and his conservative allies seem willing to make.

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For inclusive, evidence-based, and age-appropriate sex education materials for young people, online alternatives exist. Planned Parenthood, Sex, Etc., Magazine, Scarleteen, and Crash Course all work with medical professionals and have youth-tailored options, to name just a few trusted resources.