At least 11 states and two territories are capitulating to a recent demand from the Trump administration to strip references to gender identity and the existence of transgender and non-binary people from a federal sex education program, officials confirmed to the Guardian.
The administration set a Monday deadline to remove the references or risk losing millions of dollars of federal funding. Almost all of the states that are complying have Republican-controlled state legislatures and most have Republican governors.
Sixteen other states and Washington DC have sued over the administration’s demand, claiming that it tramples on the authority of Congress, which created the $75m sex education program, the Personal Responsibility Education Program (Prep). All of the states involved in the lawsuit are led by Democratic governors.
In a court order issued late on Monday, a federal judge blocked the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees Prep, from cutting the Democratic states’ funding if they do not comply.
“HHS fails to show that the new grant conditions are reasonable, let alone offer any reasonable explanation, other than pretext, for its actions,” Ann Aiken, a US district judge in Oregon, wrote in her order. “HHS provides no evidence that it made factual findings or considered the statutory objectives and express requirements, the relevant data, the applicable anti-sex discrimination statutes and its own regulations.”
Prep aims to educate adolescents on healthy relationships and how to prevent pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted infections. In April, the Trump administration demanded all states and territories that receive money for Prep send a copy of their curriculum to HHS and its agency the Administration for Children and Families for a “medical accuracy review”.
Four months later, the administration sent letters to 46 states and territories informing them that, in the course of the review, it discovered “content in the curricula and other program materials that fall outside of the scope of Prep’s authorizing statute”. Specifically, the administration said it had uncovered evidence of “gender ideology”, the rightwing shorthand for suggestions that gender is a fluid social construct and that trans and non-binary people exist.
The administration said Illinois had to drop a curriculum that said: “Young people may express themselves in ways that don’t conform with their biological sex.” It told North Carolina to remove a line from a middle school lesson that read: “People of all sexual orientations and gender identities need to know how to prevent pregnancy and STDs, either for themselves or to help a friend.”
It also said sex educators in numerous states could no longer be instructed to “demonstrate acceptance and respect for all participants, regardless of personal characteristics, including race, cultural background, religion, social class, sexual orientation or gender identity”, according to the letters sent to states.
“Accountability is coming,” said Andrew Gradison, acting assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families, in a statement announcing the letters. “Federal funds will not be used to poison the minds of the next generation or advance dangerous ideological agendas.”
The Guardian contacted every state, as well as most territories, that received letters from the Trump administration. Alaska, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming said they would remove the references or had done so already. The US Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands, two territories, said the same.
Two other states, Alabama and South Dakota, said their Prep curricula never included the terminology referenced in the Trump administration’s letters.
Collectively, these states are home to more than 120,000 trans people between the ages of 13 and 17, according to estimates by the Williams Institute, a department of the UCLA School of Law.
“If our goal is to support youth and give them a safe space, I’m not sure why we are stomping on the most vulnerable youth in the population,” said Cindi Huss, who leads Rise, an organization that provides sex education in Tennessee. “When the government says that there’s something wrong with you and the teachers aren’t allowed to tell you things or they have to out you to your parents – when you know that that’s not safe – that’s horrible for mental health.”
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Nearly half of trans and non-binary youth seriously considered suicide in the past year, according to a 2024 survey from the Trevor Project, a suicide-prevention group. School support for these youths is linked to lower rates of attempted suicide, the group found.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration ordered California to cut references to gender identity from its Prep curriculum.
When the Democratic-led state refused, the administration yanked its Prep grant, eliminating about $12m in federal funding and halting sex education programs in schools, juvenile detention facilities and group homes for foster children.
The California health department is appealing the termination. So far, it has been unable to make up for its lost funding.
The Trump administration has also told educators who receive money from two other federal sex education initiatives, the $50m Sexual Risk Avoidance Education (SRAE) and the $101m Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPPP), that they cannot teach about “gender ideology”.
An early October court order blocked the administration from changing TPPP, while the Monday court order stops it from changing SRAE in the Democratic states that sued over Prep.
The Administration for Children and Families did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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