California Attorney General Rob Bonta Wednesday as part of an ongoing dispute over whether schools should proactively notify parents if their children change their gender identity.��

The lawsuit comes in response to Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s��a concluding that the state violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and in her words, “egregiously abused its authority by pressuring school officials to withhold information about students’ so-called ‘gender transitions’ from their parents.”�� Her letter cited a 2025 law that prohibits��districts from forcing educators to “out” students against their will.

The agency has threatened to revoke all of the state’s federal education funding, nearly $5 billion annually. But in the filing, Bonta said the department has “failed to demonstrate even a single violation of FERPA,” which gives parents the right to review education records. The potential loss of funding, he wrote, “presents an imminent and irreparable injury to California and infringes upon the state’s substantial interests.”

The Trump administration says California schools violated parents’ rights by pressuring schools to keep students’ gender transitions a secret.

In announced Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Education told state officials that they can resolve the dispute by treating any school “gender support plans” as education records available for parents’ inspection and let districts enforce “pro-parental notification approaches.”

“Under Gavin Newsom’s failed leadership, school personnel have even bragged about facilitating ‘gender transitions,’ and shared strategies to target minors and conceal information about children from their own families,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. The department referenced a public records request by a showing that six California districts changed the names or pronouns of 300 students in the 2023-24 school year. The announcement doesn’t spell out what penalties, if any, the state might face if it doesn’t comply.

But most student privacy experts say the department is misinterpreting the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act. While FERPA gives parents the right to inspect their children’s education records, it doesn’t compel districts to notify a parent if their child changes their gender identity at school.

The department launched last March, based on a request from Julie Hamill, a conservative attorney who argued that state policies and guidance amounted to a “scheme” to conceal students’ gender identity from parents. Now an assistant U.S. attorney, Hamill cited a Q&A document, later rescinded, that to consult students before deciding whether to share information on their gender identity, including with their parents. Some districts, she wrote, would change students’ names and pronouns in school databases, but parents would see legal names when they logged in. 

Federal officials also took aim at a California law, passed in 2025, which says districts can’t force educators to “out” students against their will. Liz Sanders, spokeswoman for the California Department of Education, said officials were reviewing the department’s findings and referred The 74 to previous statements. In October, the the new law, known as the SAFETY Act, doesn’t prohibit school staff “from sharing any information with parents” and doesn’t override FERPA. 

The department’s determination further escalates an ongoing, emotional debate between state leaders who say students have a right to privacy and an administration that holds such decisions are the responsibility of parents. Advocates for LGBTQ students and many educators say they’re trying to protect students who might face rejection or abuse at home. But others call such actions “parental exclusion” policies that violate parents’ constitutional rights to direct the upbringing of their children. 

“If a student is contemplating life-altering changes, the least a school can do is notify their parent or guardian,” McMahon .

Lydia McLaughlin, the parent whose experience Hamill cited in the letter to federal officials last January, called the news “bittersweet.” She seeking emails and schoolwork from the Hart Unified High School District, north of Los Angeles, that would demonstrate how school staff were socially transitioning her child from female to male. Administrators initially refused to meet with McLaughlin and cited a that protects trans students’ access to programs, sports and facilities that align with their gender identity. 

McLaughlin never filed a formal FERPA complaint with the Education Department’s Student Privacy Policy Office because she ultimately got the records she was seeking after threatening to sue the district. She told The 74 last year that she believed a lot of the communication between staff members using the student’s preferred male name wasn’t in writing.

Now in college, her child identifies as a girl, “loves feminine clothes again” and has returned to ballet dancing after a five-year break.

“It’s been a long road to this moment,” McLaughlin said. “I only dreamed that there would be some sort of justice for what the school district did.”

FERPA experts disagree with the department’s conclusion. Elana Zeide, a law professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said officials didn’t point to a specific violation in which a parent was denied access to education records. And many districts still follow a legal precedent that doesn’t consider staff emails to be part of a student’s official record. 

“You could not like these policies at all. You can be vehemently opposed to them,” Zeide said. “But that doesn’t mean you can accuse the state of a violation when there aren’t the facts to support it .”

But Lance Christensen, vice president of the conservative California Policy Center, called the department’s announcement. a “big deal.”

“We’re thrilled that the federal government is finally taking federal law seriously and is interested in protecting the natural rights of parents,” he said.

Jorge Reyes Salinas, a spokesman for Equality California, an LGBTQ advocacy group, called the decision “part of a broader, deliberate campaign to attack transgender young people and undermine their ability to learn and thrive in school.”

Cases before the Supreme Court

The department’s demands come as the U.S. Supreme Court considers whether to hear three different cases, including one from California, focused on the same issues.

In a , U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez ruled in December in favor of two teachers from the Escondido Union School District, near San Diego, who said that requiring them to keep a student’s gender identity private violated their Christian faith. Parents later joined the lawsuit against the state. 

Benitez’s broad ruling said that California schools must prominently display wording that says parents “have a federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school student child expresses gender incongruence” and that school staff also have a right to “accurately inform” parents. 

Attorney General Rob Bonta appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which blocked the ruling. The teachers are now asking the Supreme Court to overrule the lower court, but the justices have not yet said whether they’ll get involved. Florida, Montana and West Virginia filed a brief in support of the teachers and parents, saying the “Constitution places the burden on states to respect fundamental rights, not on citizens to claw back the right to parent their own children.”

But Bonta told the court that the consequences of compelling the disclosure of gender identity would be “irreversible” for many students. Benitez’s ruling, he said, would leave teachers and other school staff confused about what they can and can’t do.

The high court is also debating whether to hear two other cases in which parents allege that educators supported students’ gender identity changes at school without their knowledge. It takes only four justices to decide whether to hear a case. 

Jeff and January Littlejohn of Florida the Leon County district, alleging that Deeklake Middle School violated their rights by supporting their child’s gender transition from female to male behind their backs. 

Officials said educators were following guidance, which discourages “outing” LGBTQ students..

A federal district court dismissed the case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit also ruled for the school system, saying that educators’ actions did not “shock the conscience,” in a legal sense.

“Defendants did not act with intent to injure,” the court said. “To the contrary, they sought to help the child.”

The First Circuit Court of Appeals issued a in Foote v. Ludlow School Committee. In that case, parents said staff at Baird Middle School in Ludlow, Massachusetts, concealed that their 11 year-old identified as genderqueer at school and was using a new preferred name. 

The three-judge panel wrote that while they sympathized with the parents’ desire for information about their children, the law doesn’t “require governments to assist parents in exercising their fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children.”

The U.S. Department of Education launched 18 Title IX Wednesday, a day after the Supreme Court heard two challenges to state bans on transgender girls competing in sports consistent with their gender identity.

The probes are based on complaints to the Office for Civil Rights that accuse colleges and school districts of violating the law because they allow trans students to participate on girls’ sports teams.

“We will leave no stone unturned in these investigations to uphold women’s right to equal access in education programs—a fight that started over half a century ago and is far from finished,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in a statement.

The list includes the New York City schools, the Tacoma and Vancouver districts in Washington and the Hawaii State Department of Education. 

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared to support allowing states to decide whether to ban transgender athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s sports — an issue that has dominated the Trump administration’s education policy for the past year.

In two separate cases, attorneys for track athletes from Idaho and West Virginia argued that such restrictions violate trangender students’ constitutional right to equal protection under the law. They say that through medication, these athletes have reduced any sex-based physical advantages that would create unfair competition. The West Virginia case also questions whether the state’s ban violates Title IX’s right to equal educational opportunities for women and girls.

West Virginia’s law treats Becky-Pepper Jackson, a transgender 10th grader, “differently from other girls on the basis of sex,” Joshua Block, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney, told the court. The Bridgeport High School student, he said, took puberty blockers and went through “female puberty.” It’s “absolutely reasonable,” for states to separate teams based on a biological definition of sex, he said, but argued that the states’ position is “invalid as applied to a discrete subset” of people who have mitigated physical advantages.

But the conservative justices seemed reluctant to carve out an exception for trans students, even those who have taken steps to reduce any competitive advantage.  

“If we adopted that, that would have to apply across the board and not simply to the area of athletics,” Chief Justice John Roberts said.

The court’s decision in the case could impact all with similar laws that prohibit trans girls from competing on teams consistent with their gender identity. 

Upon taking office, President Donald Trump moved aggressively to place restrictions on trans athletes and highlight the experiences of those who said they were either injured by a trans competitor or put at a competitive disadvantage. Through executive order, he said Title IX only applies to cisgender women and girls, while the Department of Justice is now suing and over allowing trans students to compete on teams consistent with their gender identity. LGBTQ advocates want the court to base its decision on the 2020 majority opinion in in which the court found that transgender employees are a protected class in the workplace. 

“This is unfair to me and every transgender kid who just wants the freedom to be themselves,” Pepper-Jackson said in a recorded message last week. “I’ve had my rights and my life debated by politicians who’ve never even met me.”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who attended the more than three hours of oral arguments, discussed the stakes for many women outside the court. 

“Americans have had enough of women and girls losing opportunities and being subjected to the indignity and danger of unfair competition due to the left’s warped application of federal law,” she said.

The department pressured the University of Pennsylvania, for example, to no longer allow trans women to compete on women’s teams. As part of a , the university erased trans swimmer and issued apologies to swimmers who lost to her.  

Attorney Kathleen Hartnett, who represents Boise State University student Lindsay Hecox, who takes drugs to suppress testosterone, told the court that some trans students might even be at a disadvantage.  They have “this larger frame with weaker muscles and no testosterone,” she said.

But conservative advocates disagree. 

“Physiologically, males have a larger heart, lungs, more bone mass, more muscle mass and are taller than females,” Beth Parlato, senior legal counsel at the conservative Independent Women’s Law Center, told The 74. “It is undisputed that males retain significant physical advantages over females, making sex-based categories essential to fairness and safety in women’s sports.”

‘Treated as individuals’

Inside the court, Hashim Mooppan, principal deputy solicitor general, argued for the Trump administration, saying that denying a “special accommodation” to a trans woman or girl is not discrimination.

But Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the liberal justices, questioned why Hecox didn’t have a claim. 

“In equal protection law,” she said, “We say all the time things like ‘People need to be treated as individuals and not as just as members of a group.’ ”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of the six conservatives on the court, said he “hates” that trans students might be denied an opportunity to participate in sports. He also questioned whether it’s right to “constitutionalize a rule for the whole country” when the science is still evolving. But making a team or a starting lineup is a “zero-sum game,” he said. “Those things matter to people, big time.”

Observers believe the outcome could rest on how either Roberts or Justice Neal Gorsuch, who wrote the Bostock decision, rule. During Tuesday’s back-and-forth, Gorsuch asked whether transgender status could be considered an “insular class,” considering the history of discrimination against them. But he joined the majority opinion that allowed Tennessee to restrict gender-affirming care for minors. 

‘Not going to be satisfied’

The court heard the arguments in the the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit is set to take up another federal case involving trans athletes. , a nonprofit that opposes trans students participating in women’s sports, sued Minnesota officials over the state’s policy allowing athletes to compete on teams based on their gender identity.

“Their argument is that Title IX demands exclusion of trans athletes from girls’ teams, which is not going to be our position,” said Brian Dittmeier, director of LGBTQI+ Equality at the National Women’s Law Center, which filed a brief in support of Minnesota. 

The decision in the Eighth Circuit case, he said, is likely to come before the Supreme Court rules in the Idaho and West Virginia lawsuits, and could “inform the narrative” in future cases. The Female Athletes United lawsuit, he said, shows that those opposed to allowing trans athletes to compete with women are “not going to be satisfied with a compromise of letting the states decide.” 

But while political activism is linked to positive mental health outcomes for most young people, the picture is more complex for LGBTQ teens and young adults. Two in five reported having at least one concern impacting their lives, prompting them to��consider whether to move to a different state or cross state lines to obtain health care.��

“It’s a complex situation in that LGBTQ+ youth might feel more motivated to be engaged with political conversations or be civically engaged because they’re also more impacted by those anti-LGBTQ+ policies,” says Tiffany Eden, lead researcher on the report. “But at the same time, they’re also living with the repercussions.” 

The survey was administered between the fall of 2022 and fall 2023, before President Donald Trump’s inauguration and his immediate attempts to roll back LGBTQ rights, Eden notes. More recent data, including dramatic increases in the number of calls to suicide prevention hotlines, indicate politics’ negative impact on queer youth has likely spiked since then. 

Transgender and nonbinary youth were more likely to say they were motivated to take action than their cisgender peers: 63% versus 55%. Half of gender nonconforming youth reported having at least one LGBTQ-related political concern, compared to 35% of cisgender young people. 

These political concerns can lead to mental health challenges, the survey showed. About 70% of those with at least one LGBTQ-related political concern reported recent anxiety, versus. 63% of those without worries. More than half of those with concerns, 56%, reported recent depression, compared to 50% of those without.  

The problems were more significant for young people who said they were unable to meet their basic needs, with 52% harboring concerns compared to 43% whose needs are met.. Half of transgender and nonbinary young people had political concerns, versus 35% of cisgender peers.

Researchers also found geographic differences that frequently mirror the country’s political landscape, with 54% of those in the South saying they have concerns, vs. 47% in the Midwest, 37% in the West and 30% in the Northeast. 

Differences in young people’s ability to get their needs met shows up in the data regarding specific types of civic engagement. For example, the vast majority of LGBTQ 18- to 24-year-olds were registered to vote, but the proportion drops for those facing barriers. 

“That might be because they’re having more challenges or obstacles obtaining identification that aligns with their gender identity so that they can register to vote, and things like that,” says Eden. “That is probably one of the most important takeaways: That it looks different in LGBTQ+ youth in general, but even within that we see disparities and different groups that might need more support in order to be more engaged in the civic process.” 

Political engagement among those too young to vote was lower at 55%, compared to 64% of 18- to 24-year-olds. But even with more limited opportunities for engagement, the impact of recent policy changes is disproportionately felt by queer youth, says Eden. 

“When you think about anti-LGBTQ plus policies that would impact young people, they’re impacting kids that are actually in schools,” she says. “These are bills about using bathrooms that align with your gender identity and playing on sports teams — things like that.” 

Policies enabling in-school support are particularly important to LGBTQ youth. Slightly more than half say they are accepted by peers or teachers at school, compared with 40% who are supported at home.

The report is part of a series of analyses of longitudinal data Trevor compiles — which have taken on a more critical importance as some states ban or opt out of LGBTQ youth welfare data collections such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey. 

At the same time, the number of young people affected has risen sharply in recent years. Estimates vary depending on how data is tabulated, but in a recent Gallup survey, almost 2 million — or 9.5% — of teens ages 13 to 17 now identify as something other than straight or cisgender. That’s nearly twice as many as in 2020. 

The Fairfax and Arlington school districts in Virginia sued Education Secretary Linda McMahon Friday over her move to classify them as “high-risk” over their transgender policies.

Their complaint noted that the additional oversight of spending came just two days after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in a , reaffirmed its ruling in Grimm v. Gloucester County Board of Education, which gives trans students the right to use restrooms that align with their gender identity.��

That decision “remains the law in Northern Virginia as well as the rest of the Circuit,” they wrote.����

In a statement, Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Michele Reid called the lawsuit a step toward ensuring “that hungry children are fed and that student access to multilingual, special education, and other essential services is not compromised.”

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has tried since 2022 to get the suburban D.C. school districts in his state to end their policies accommodating transgender students.

Last week, the Trump administration offered considerable firepower to his cause when it announced it would require the five districts to justify every dollar they spend in order to receive federal funding. In a stern , Education Secretary Linda McMahon said Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William — the five northernmost districts closest to the nation’s capital  — are “choosing to abide by woke gender ideology in place of federal law.” 

But even as McMahon placed them on “high-risk” status, their leaders policies that allow students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity, meaning the Republican governor might leave office in January without accomplishing his goal.

Grace Turner Creasy, president of the Virginia Board of Education, said it’s “anyone’s guess” whether the department’s move will change the outcome. District leaders say they are following state law and the most current federal court opinion on the issue. 

The state’s position on the matter might also shift in the next few months with Youngkin ineligible to run again in November. Democrat Abigail Spanberger, who is , hasn’t addressed the controversy, while  Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears has , much as Youngkin did in 2021 when he appealed to parents angry over pandemic school closures and “critical race theory.” 

The department’s action against the Virginia districts is part of an effort by President Donald Trump to force states and districts to comply with his stating that the federal government only recognizes two sexes. Following that move in January, the Education Department said it wouldn’t enforce the Biden-era Title IX rule, which expanded protections for transgender students.

On Thursday, Trump to pull all federal funding from “any California school district that doesn’t adhere to our Transgender policies.” The administration is already suing and on trans students’ participation in women’s sports. 

The conflict with the Virginia districts has been building since February when the department launched a probe into their policies. In July, officials found them in and gave them 10 days to change their rules and “adopt biology-based definitions of the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ in all practices and policies relating to Title IX.”

They refused, and with roughly $50 million for low-income students, special education and other programs at risk, last week’s move escalated the dispute to a new level.  

“You’re going to continue to see the Trump administration put … pressure in a variety of ways that affect funding. It feels like all options are on the table,” said W. Scott Lewis, managing partner with TNG Consulting, which trains districts across the country on Title IX. He added that where the Education Department directs its enforcement “may vary by state, depending on gubernatorial and state house control.”

‘Totally atypical’

The penalty is severe, experts said. The high-risk label is usually reserved for districts or states in serious financial trouble. 

In 2006, the Education Department slapped that designation on the for mismanaging money, including federal grants and charter school funds.

In another example, the Michigan Department of Education placed the in high-risk status after a found the district misused over $53 million. The district spent Title I funds, for example, on equipment and building improvements the state didn’t approve, paid vendors more than the amount of their contracts and couldn’t produce invoices and receipts for multiple transactions. The district remained under federal oversight for five years. 

In this case, the added layer of scrutiny isn’t because of suspected mismanagement of the grant funds themselves; it’s an ideological disagreement. David DeSchryver, senior vice president of Whiteboard Advisors, a consulting firm, called the action “totally atypical in terms of scale.”

With the school year just starting, the question is whether any “new hurdles” might slow down the reimbursement process, said Dan Adams, spokesman for the Loudoun County Public Schools. In a statement, the Virginia Department of Education said it “will closely scrutinize any future requests” for funding. 

At least one of the five superintendents, Arlington’s Francisco Durán, told the public at a that he’s prepared to take legal action if the district’s funding is challenged. 

But conservatives view McMahon’s approach as accountability for districts that are defying the president. 

“By refusing to reverse your reckless policies, you are failing our daughters and risking losing millions of dollars in funding,” Earle-Sears said at Arlington’s board meeting. “As governor, I will not stand by while political correctness tramples over science, fairness and safety.”

The district has faced criticism over in which a registered sex offender identifying as a transgender woman used a women’s locker room at Washington Liberty High School. The school’s indoor pool is open to the public after school hours, and Durán said officials were unaware the person was a registered offender. 

Ginny Gentiles, an Arlington parent and a school choice expert at the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute, said the districts are “clinging to activist-drafted policies that allow males to self-ID into female spaces,” but that she hopes officials will listen to those concerned about women’s and girls’ safety.

She urged community members to closely monitor expenditures.

“School board leaders clearly intend to spend taxpayer dollars on inevitable court cases and likely expensive legal fees,” she said. 

Earle-Sears also joined on Wednesday, where district officials threatened to suspend two boys for sexual harassment and sex discrimination. They complained last spring when a student identifying as a trans boy used the locker room to change and videotaped them.

‘Federal overreach’

Some observers say the battle between Washington and its neighboring districts is more than a culture war. Kristen Amundson, a former Democratic state lawmaker and Fairfax County school board member, said the administration is trying to exert control over blue cities. 

“This is not about trans kids; this is about federal overreach,” she said. She cited patrolling Washington and of the Kennedy Center Honors as further examples. “Do you see the pattern here?”

The impasse also comes at a difficult time for the state’s Republicans, which tend to elect governors from the party that’s . Northern Virginia already votes predominantly blue, and residents, Amundson said, are especially angry at Washington. 

“They have seen thousands of parents lose their jobs” because of and “parents snatched off the streets” in , she said. 

For Earle-Sears, a , the debate over trans students is a key campaign issue. In contrast, Spanberger, who has three school-age daughters, has an focused on improving instruction in public schools and addressing teacher shortages. 

Anne Holton, former secretary of education under Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, called the issue a distraction “from the issues that parents really care about,” like employing high-quality teachers and preparing kids well for college or a career. 

For now, districts say they are complying with the . Enacted in 2020, it allows anyone to use facilities that align with their gender identity.  In addition, the Trump administration’s policies, they say, conflict with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit’s opinion in Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board. 

That’s been their position since 2022, when Youngkin issued stating that students must use bathrooms and locker rooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth. A year later, Jason Miyares, the state’s attorney general, that the governor’s rules didn’t violate state or federal anti-discrimination laws. Yet district policies remain unchanged.

In Grimm, the court ruled that the district’s transgender bathroom ban was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2021 in that case. In its upcoming term, the Supreme Court will hear lawsuits from West Virginia and Idaho that test whether states can ban transgender girls from competing in female sports.

Those cases “will further clarify Title IX’s application,” Arlington’s Durán said at last week’s board meeting. “But in the meantime, our policy will remain in place in alignment with state and federal law, and we are prepared to defend it and our federal funding if challenged.” 

This  was originally published on .

Just days after the California Department of Education and California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) leaders refused to ban transgender athletes from high school sports, the Trump administration sued the state’s Education Department, the .

The U.S. Department of Education on June 25 said that the state Education Department and the CIF, which governs high school athletics, violated federal law and  to bar transgender athlete participation in sports or face legal action. 

On Monday, the California agencies . 

As threatened, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit, saying California’s transgender athlete policies violate Title IX, the landmark federal civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education. 

California’s high school athletics guidelines allow athletes to participate in sports aligned with their gender identity — a policy that is consistent with 2013 state legislation that allows students to participate on sports teams . 

According to AP, the federal Justice Department said California’s rules “are not only illegal and unfair but also demeaning, signaling to girls that their opportunities and achievements are secondary to accommodating boys.”

But California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said state law does not align with this interpretation of the federal law. 

The issue is the latest fight in a nationwide battle over the rights of transgender youth, AP reported. For example, some states have limited transgender girls from participating on girls sports teams. 

California’s policy for high schoolers does not have a legal or medical requirement, such as a documented name change or gender-confirming care, for transgender students to compete, . Student participation is based solely on their gender identity or expression.

In two cases from and , trans girls challenged state bans that would have prevented them from competing on women’s teams. Lower courts sided with the students, allowing them to continue competing on their existing teams as their cases progressed. ����

Encouraged by the Trump administration’s aggressive actions — and the court’s recent ruling upholding Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth — conservatives see the court’s decision to hear the cases as an opportunity to settle a heated national debate and say definitively that Title IX does not pertain to gender identity. 

The Independent Women’s Forum called the news “a watershed moment for women and girls across America.” 

Advocates for LGBTQ students want the lower court decisions to stand. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth and Ninth circuits said Lindsay Hecox, a Boise State University student, and Becky Pepper Jackson, now in high school, would likely succeed in their arguments against the states.

With its 2020 , Idaho became the first state to bar trans girls from playing sports consistent with their gender identities. Idaho’s law includes a provision that requires students to submit to a physical exam to verify their sex in the event of a dispute. That’s a “broader concern” for all girls, said Brian Dittmeier, director of LGBTQI+ Equality at the National Women’s Law Center.

West Virginia’s came a year later. Twenty-five other states have , according to the Movement Advancement Project; two states, Virginia and Alaska, have regulations that also exclude trans girls from girls’ sports. President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon have further elevated the issue with efforts to withhold federal funds from blue states and schools that include trans girls in female sports. 

“The dignity afforded to transgender people is under attack,” Dittmeier said. A ruling in favor of West Virginia and Idaho, he said, would “provide opportunities for states to justify discriminatory laws.”

The court’s decision to hear the cases came the same week the University of Pennsylvania, under pressure from McMahon, to no longer allow trans women to compete on women’s teams. As part of the deal, the university erased trans swimmer and issued apologies to swimmers who lost to her.  

States not backing down

The administration’s case against Maine over its will go to trial next year, and California on Monday its trans-inclusive sports policies or issue apologies. The state drew in May when a trans girl took gold in two events at a state track and field championship. 

The state, however, also created a temporary rule that allowed other girls to compete even if they did not initially qualify. The rule allowed cisgender girls to earn whatever medal they would have received if trans athletes had not competed. As a result, A.B. Hernandez, the trans competitor, shared the podium with other first-place winners. 

That’s the kind of accommodation more states might explore, depending on the outcome of the cases, said Doriane Coleman, a Duke University law professor. She supports , but thinks that elite sports require special consideration.

She argued that while it’s hard to justify excluding a trans girl from afterschool sports teams, restrictions make sense in competitive athletics. 

“We’ve been in a period where trans girls, their parents, their doctors and their coaches haven’t been allowed, by the advocates, to want anything other than being in girls and women’s sports,” she said. 

She pointed to showing that while puberty blockers and hormones diminish some of the physical advantage trans female athletes have over cisgender girls, “the overall advantage is always retained.” 

Others argue that there’s to say trans girls have a consistent advantage and that socioeconomic issues, such as access to better coaching and training opportunities, also play a role.

The Biden administration tried to strike a compromise in the debate with a draft of a Title IX sports rule in 2023. It would have allowed elementary-age students and most middle schoolers to play sports consistent with their gender identity. In high school, the plan said districts could make a case for excluding trans athletes if they could show how that decision would have achieved an “important educational objective.” Officials the proposed rule before Trump took office.

Just days after his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order saying that Title IX — and the federal government in general — recognizes only two sexes and that they can’t be changed. 

Now the Supreme Court, which said in 2020 that discrimination against LGBTQ employees on the basis of sex is wrong in the workplace, will wrestle with the issue. Both Idaho and West Virginia ask the court whether requiring students to compete with the sex they were assigned at birth violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. The West Virginia case also asks if Title IX allows states to exclude trans girls from girls’ sports.

Dittmeier, at the National Women’s Law Center, said there are clear differences between the trans sports cases and In that case, the court upheld a ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth, allowing states to make their own decisions on the issue. Advocates for trans youth argued that the treatments can be medically necessary and that a ban violates the Equal Protection Clause.  

When the court ruled in favor of Tennessee, it didn’t consider whether the law discriminated against children and teens based on their sex. The court accepted the state’s argument that the ban was based on age or how puberty blockers or hormones were used.

The court won’t be able to avoid the issue of sex in the sports cases. The states, Dittmeier said, have to “meet a higher burden to justify the discriminatory action.” Pepper-Jackson, for example, has an amended birth certificate and has identified as a girl since the third grade. When the Fourth Circuit ruled in the case last year, Judge Toby Heytens wrote “Offering B.P.J. a ‘choice’ between not participating in sports and participating only on boys teams is no real choice at all.”

In a 6-3 ruling, the conservative justices said the Montgomery County Public Schools must reinstate its opt-out policy. The opinion puts districts nationwide on notice that parents should have a greater say over whether their children are exposed to views that conflict with what they learn at home. 

“We conclude that the parents are likely to succeed in their challenge to the board’s policies,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. “A government burdens the religious exercise of parents when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill.”

The case, , now returns to a lower court, which will consider whether the district violated the parents’ First Amendment rights. Eric Baxter, an attorney with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represented the parents, said he expects the district to settle.

“The court’s ruling clearly will extend through the end of this case,” he said. “I don’t think there are any facts the school board can produce that will change the court’s mind.” 

In , the district said it “will determine next steps and navigate this moment with integrity and purpose.”

‘The assault on books’

In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed sympathy for district officials’ decision to stop allowing families to opt out. 

“The result will be chaos for this nation’s public schools” and “impose impossible administrative burdens on schools,” she said in the minority opinion, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan. What would happen, she asked, if a school had to alert parents any time a lesson or story might contradict what parents believe. “Next to go could be teaching on evolution, the work of female scientist Marie Curie, or the history of vaccines.”

PEN America, a free speech organization that advocates against restrictions on books, criticized the ruling, saying that it lays the “foundation for a new frontier in the assault on books of all kinds in schools.” 

The case reflects an ongoing clash between efforts to represent LGBTQ families in the curriculum and the rights of religious parents. The families who sued — Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox Christian — argued that simply having the books in the classroom offended their beliefs. But rather than demanding the district remove them outright, they asked that their children be allowed to leave class when teachers read the books. The Trump administration, 26 GOP-led states and 66 members of Congress sided with the parents.

“This ruling is more than just a legal win. It is a moral and spiritual triumph that acknowledges the sacred responsibility entrusted to parents,” said Billy Moges, a Christian mother of three and board member for Kids First, an advocacy group that formed to oppose the district’s move.

In a call with reporters Friday, Baxter called the ruling “a win-win” because it shows parents with religious disagreements “don’t get to veto everyone else’s practices.”

In 2022, the 160,000-student Montgomery district added LGBTQ inclusive books like “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” about a girl’s uncle who marries another man, and “Born Ready,” about a transgender boy, to its elementary curriculum. In March 2023, officials announced they would end their policy of allowing parents to opt their children out of listening to the stories and any classroom discussions about the books. They argued that the policy applied to all parents, not just those wanting opt outs for religious reasons. 

The books were not intended to influence students’ beliefs about sexual orientation and gender identity, officials argued, but to reflect the diversity of the community. That didn’t satisfy the parents who sued, some of whom left the district over the issue.

“I would have loved to keep my children in public school, … but I just didn’t have that choice,” Moges told The 74 before the oral arguments in April. 

‘Need not wait for the damage’

The conservatives rejected the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit’s opinion that there was insufficient evidence of how teachers were actually using the books in the classroom to determine whether students were coerced into adopting the views they represented. 

“When a deprivation of First Amendment rights is at stake, a plaintiff need not wait for the damage to occur before filing suit,” Alito wrote. The books, he said, “are designed to present the opposite viewpoint to young, impressionable children, …present same-sex weddings as occasions for great celebration and suggest that the only rubric for determining whether a marriage is acceptable is whether the individuals concerned ‘love each other.’ ” 

The ruling came a day after the of the court’s landmark ruling in that made gay marriage legal nationwide. Alito, along with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented from the majority in that case. 

In the Mahmoud ruling, the court also shot down the suggestion — one that Jackson elaborated on during oral arguments — that parents who don’t like what public schools teach can put their children in private school or homeschool them.

“Public education is a public benefit, and the government cannot ‘condition’ its ‘availability’ on parents’ willingness to accept a burden on their religious exercise,” Alito wrote.

The ruling means that schools will have to give parents, especially those with young children, more advance notice when lessons are planned that touch on religious beliefs.

“The court drew a clear line: simple exposure to ideas is allowed, but instruction that pushes a particular moral viewpoint — especially without room for dissent — can cross into a constitutional burden,” said Asma Uddin, a Georgetown University law professor who focuses on religious liberty.  

Some faith leaders argue the books never should have been viewed through a religious lens and that the court’s decision will further marginalize LGBTQ students and families at a time when the Trump administration is seeking to remove their legal protections.  

The ruling “is just the latest example of religion being used as a tool of discrimination and misappropriated to harm our neighbors,” Rev. Shannon Fleck, executive director of Faithful America, a Christian social-justice organization, said in a statement. “The truth is that there is no scripture or religious doctrine that denies the existence of LGBTQ people.”

While scrolling through Instagram, the mother noticed her child’s friends also called the teen Toby. So she began digging for further evidence of something she had started to suspect — that the ninth grader, with the school’s support, was transitioning from female to male.

“I’m like ‘Hey, you can’t deny it anymore’ ” said Lydia, who did not want to use her last name out of a desire to protect her child, now 17.

The school’s principal, following guidance that allows students to decide whether to inform parents of their gender identity, refused to meet with her. But she found clues elsewhere — an alternate ID card with the name Toby stuffed in a backpack, and emails between district staff discussing which name to use in the yearbook.

Over time, she discovered her child’s transition was an open secret at school — one kept by staff, administrators, a district equity officer, the superintendent, even the president of the local teachers union.

“They were strategizing against me,” Lydia said.

Her experience now lies at the center of a major push by the U.S. Department of Education to clamp down on policies that allow schools to conceal changes in students’ gender identity from parents.  

In a March press release announcing an investigation into , Education Secretary Linda McMahon said teachers and counselors should stay out of “consequential decisions” about children’s sexual identities. Officials are probing similar allegations in and .

In an unprecedented move, the department is threatening to pull millions of dollars in federal education funding from all three states. 

But it’s putting all schools on notice. In , federal officials warned states and districts that their support of student “gender plans” had become a “priority concern.” For educators, the message was as stunning as its rationale. The department is relying on a novel, and according to some critics, incorrect, interpretation of a 50-year-old student privacy law known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA.

The law is typically used to safeguard student records and allow parents to inspect them. But it doesn’t compel schools to inform parents how their children identify in the classroom. If schools link a record to a student, “the parent has a right of access to it if they request it,” said LeRoy Rooker, who oversaw compliance with FERPA at the Education Department for over 20 years. But “the school doesn’t have to be proactive and call and say ‘Hey, we did this.’ ”

Department leaders appear to be stretching the reach of the law in an attempt to bolster conservative arguments that schools are meddling in deeply personal decisions that should be left to parents. In response to the Washington investigation, state Superintendent Chris Reykdal said in a statement that his state is the “latest target in the administration’s dangerous war against individuals who are transgender” and that officials are twisting student privacy laws “to undermine the health, safety and well-being of students.” 

To Julie Hamill, a Los Angeles-area attorney who to investigate, Lydia’s story demonstrates that a law designed to keep parents informed is now working against them.

”The parents are in the dark,” said Hamill of the conservative California Justice Center. “Parents will not know student records are being withheld unless they’ve somehow discovered it on their own.”

In tackling the role of schools in student gender transitions, the department is dipping into one of the more emotionally fraught issues in the culture war, one that President Donald Trump campaigned on and weaponized once he was back in the White House. 

In one of his first , Trump said, without evidence, that schools are “steering students toward surgical and chemical mutilation.” In March, who reversed their gendering processes. She criticized the “lengths schools would go to in order to hide this information from parents.”

To many experts, the administration’s scrutiny is out of proportion to the scope of the issue. In the overwhelming majority of cases, schools and students are just navigating preferred names and pronouns, and even those situations are infrequent. Multiple estimate that about 3% of teens are transgender. Far fewer are likely to approach school officials with a request for a name or pronoun change, said Brian Dittmeier, the director of public policy at GLSEN, which advocates for LGBTQ students.

Loretta Whitson, executive director of the California Association of School Counselors, said it is “rare” for school officials to discuss transitioning with students, and that her group’s members say the only gender plans they’ve completed were done at the request of parents. 

At the same time, most Americans agree that schools should get parents’ permission before changing a child’s pronouns in school records. Polls in and found that roughly three-quarters of adults support mandatory parental notification.

‘This is not real’

Lydia’s story exemplifies that loss of trust in the system.

The artist and former ballerina she thought of as her daughter began identifying as transgender upon entering Academy of the Canyons, a public high school in Santa Clarita, an upscale suburb of Los Angeles. Homeschooled since kindergarten, the teen wanted to pursue art and take advantage of options in their district. The school is located on a college campus where students can attend post-secondary classes while earning their high school diplomas.

“I thought it would be a good opportunity,” Lydia said.

In the fall of 2021, while cleaning the ninth grader’s bedroom, Lydia flipped through some art journals. But instead of schoolwork, she found disturbing sketches of bloody body parts and notes about wanting a chest binder, top surgery and a new name. 

“Shocked and scared” that her child might be suicidal, her thoughts turned immediately to a friend of her son’s who’d recently taken his own life, apparently without warning. 

“No suicide notes. No threats,” she recalled. “The ones that never use it as a weapon are the ones that follow through.”

She began searching for answers online. Initially, she only found sites about supporting a child’s transition  — advice she rejected.

Unlike many parents in her shoes, she’s neither conservative nor religious. In fact, she quipped, an outsider might have assumed she was  “the poster mom for transitioning my kid.”

She described her own parents — a Black father and a Jewish mother — as “hippie artists” who raised her to be a “free thinker” without religion. Lydia’s mother changed her name to Michael in the 1960s because it was easier to make it in the art world with a man’s name. A lifelong Democrat, Lydia voted against a ban on gay marriage when it was on the state ballot in 2008.

But when it came time to have kids of her own, she embraced more conservative values, wanting to “protect their childhood.”

Speaking as a liberal, Lydia said, “I really should have been like ‘Yeah, sure, explore your transgenderism.’” But instead, she did the opposite, taking a hard line against the shift. “I said ‘ I love you, but I’m not affirming you. This is not real.’ ” 

That view belies a that some children can identify differently as young as 3 or 4. Other research shows children can experience due to gender dysphoria — feeling that their sex was misassigned at birth — starting at age 7. 

In attempting to explain what was happening with her child, Lydia turned to a controversial theory of researcher Lisa Littman. In a , the former Brown University scientist described the rise in rapid onset gender dysphoria among  as a “contagion” driven by peer pressure and social media.

“I did what every parent did during the pandemic — let their kid be online way too much,” Lydia said. 

Littman’s research methods from her own university and the broader research community because she based her conclusions largely on reports from self-selecting parents recruited from online forums that were unsupportive, or at least skeptical, of gender transition. They included , which labels itself as “a community of people who question the medicalization of gender-atypical youth.” 

Littman later published an amended of the paper, responding to the controversy and clarifying that the behavior she observed did not amount to a formal diagnosis. Her work, however, continues to drive trans-inclusive policies in school and the views of the Trump administration — and Lydia.

“There is no such thing as a trans child,” Lydia said. 

‘A lot of weight’

It is a debate where the voices of kids directly affected are often absent. J.J. Koechell, a Wisconsin 20-year-old, transitioned in sixth grade after a suicide attempt. He now advocates for other LGBTQ students he says are “entitled to some privacy and consent.”

“They’re trying to figure things out and they don’t want to get it wrong. To disappoint parents is a lot of weight on a struggling youth.”

He watched the school district he attended, Kettle-Moraine, and “safe spaces.” In 2023, as the result of , leaders stopped allowing staff to refer to students by different names and pronouns without parents’ permission. Some staff members over the controversy, including a librarian Koechell trusted. Koechell dropped out and is now finishing high school online.

“My teachers were all I had at school. I didn’t have any friends,” he said. “Coming out was a matter of life and death for me. My identity wasn’t and still isn’t optional.” 

Protecting students like Koechell is the purpose of a new California law — , also known as the “SAFETY Act.” It prohibits schools from requiring staff to disclose a child’s gender identity to their parents. 

In announcing the Department of Education’s investigation of the state, Secretary McMahon said the law “appears to conflict with FERPA.”��But GLSEN’s Dittmeier highlighted that the legislation still requires schools to comply with the federal privacy law — and honor parents’ requests for records.��

One department staffer is worried where the investigation could lead. 

“This is irregular, based on our history — to take up an allegation [with] no official complaint, but one that is motivated by an attorney group that is bending the department’s ear about something,” said an employee familiar with the case who asked to speak anonymously to protect his job. He said the administration’s goal is to pressure states and districts into rescinding policies that allow students to decide when to go public with their gender identity. “This will result in districts adopting forced outing and will result in harming children.”

‘Life-altering decisions’

In , the was raging long before the current controversy. 

, police removed state Superintendent Tony Thurmond from a meeting in the Chino Valley Unified School District after a tense exchange with board members over the district’s parental notification policy. He warned the board that their policy could “put our students at risk because they may not be in homes where they can be safe.” The state later against the district as well as others that passed similar measures. 

Continuing its battle with Thurmond, Chino Valley is now the state over the SAFETY Act, saying that minors are “too young to make life-altering decisions” without their parents. 

National data show that of trans and nonbinary students say their home is gender-affirming. found that transgender adolescents assigned female at birth were more likely than other teens to report being psychologically traumatized by parents or other adults in the home. 

“There have been kids whose parents have physically abused them and kicked them out of the house when this information is disclosed,” said Amelia Vance, president of the Public Interest Privacy Center and an expert on student privacy. 

Even before California passed the SAFETY Act, the state education agency and the urged schools to get students’ permission before informing parents about changes in their gender identity.  When officials at Hart Unified High School District refused to meet with Lydia, they cited a that protects trans students’ access to programs, sports and facilities that align with their gender identity. 

On the advice of an advocacy group, Lydia initially filed a public records request in search of a “secret social transition” plan she believed Academy of the Canyons maintained. She also asked for communications between her child and teachers using the “non-birth name.”

The district turned her down.

Contacted by The 74, Hart Unified spokeswoman Debbie Dunn declined to answer questions about the investigation or Lydia’s experience, but said officials would “continue to follow the laws and procedures applicable to the district.”

In January 2023, Lydia spoke at a school board meeting about being shut out by the district. Her story caught the attention of Board Member Joe Messina, a conservative radio talk show host.

“She came up to the podium one night and she was crying,” he said. “She looked at the superintendent and said, ‘I’ve reached out to you. You’ve not called me back’. She looked to the trustee who handles her area and she said, ‘I’ve left you four messages. You’ve never called me back.’ ”

Messina and Lydia talked after the meeting, and he connected her with the Pacific Justice Institute, a right-leaning law firm.

He noted that the issue transcended their political differences. “Lydia’s a lifelong Democrat, and I’m an outspoken Republican,” Messina said. “For her and I to come together — the rest of the world would say, ‘What’s wrong with you people?’” 

Even with advocates on her side, Lydia continued to face obstacles. For months, the Academy of the Canyons declined to release an autobiographical English essay written by her child under the name Toby.

The district finally turned it over on advice from their lawyers. The essay revealed the child’s trepidation about coming out to Lydia. The piece recounted a moment before the pandemic, when the student, then 11, broached the subject of being queer. Lydia said her child was first exposed to LGBTQ issues while participating in a homeschool theater group. 

“The weather was overcast, and we were driving home from theater rehearsal,” the then-10th grader wrote. “Once again summoning all my courage, I mentioned to her that one of my friends had confided in me about their attraction to girls, and that I too might be queer. Unfortunately, my mom’s immediate response was dismissive and critical.”

As parent-child confrontations often go, Lydia remembers it differently. She said she treated the declaration as a teachable moment.

“We talked about what that word meant,” she said, “and why I felt she had time as she grew up to really know what sexual orientation she would be.”

In a memo, the district’s lawyers also named the elephant in the room — that officials had been withholding the essay out of a desire to shield the child’s shifting gender identity.

“In general, parents have the statutory right to review a student’s classwork/homework,” the memo stated. “This issue becomes clouded … if the classwork could reveal a student’s gender identity/expression.”

Despite refusing to accept that her child was transgender, Lydia said she tried to stay connected. In 2023, they attended over a dozen concerts together, seeing Hozier, Bastille and Penelope Scott — experiences that Lydia called “part of the healing process.” The two went on a long-promised trip to Europe, during which Lydia gave her child an ultimatum: stop identifying as a boy or go back to being homeschooled. That fall, the school agreed to honor Lydia’s wishes to cease social transitioning, but her child still resisted, asking teachers to continue using the name Toby.  

This time, the district let Lydia know. 

Lydia did not make her child available for an interview, saying “she isn’t ready to tell her side of the story.”

Nearly two years later, she says her child, who graduated from high school last week, “wants to put it all behind her.” While the teen identifies as a girl, the changes have been subtle. There are days when she dresses in what her mom called “oversized, ugly boy shirts” and others when she does her makeup and wears more feminine clothes. Recently, she switched back to her birth name on all of her social media accounts.

“I get a little choked up,” Lydia said, “but that’s pretty huge.” 

PROTECT Kids

The story might have ended there, but Lydia’s two-minute plea to the Hart school board, across social media, reached other parent rights advocates just as Trump renewed his campaign for the White House. When the president took office, Hamill, with the California Justice Center, seized the opportunity to file a complaint with an administration guided by , the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the president’s second term.

Requiring schools to notify parents if a student changes their gender identity, which already do, is one of the tenets of the plan. Heritage expert Lindsey Burke, who joined the department Friday, also wants Congress to give FERPA more teeth by allowing parents to sue under the law. Currently, parents can only file a grievance with their state or the Education Department’s privacy office — for years. 

Privacy laws “are a core part of [the administration’s] arguments for how parental rights need to be respected and strengthened,” said Vance, the privacy expert. But the potential for lawsuits under FERPA, she added “would be extremely messy and expensive for schools.” 

In April, the House education committee advanced a bill —  the — that would require elementary and middle schools to secure parental consent before students change their pronouns or preferred names or use different bathrooms or locker rooms. 

The committee debate demonstrated the deep divisions over gender identity and how schools should accommodate LGBTQ students. Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat who is gay, offered a personal story.

“When I came out to my parents, it was at a time, place and manner of my own choosing,” he said. “I would not have wanted anyone else to make that decision for me.”

To Hamill, gender transition is much more than “coming out” because it can lead to physical changes that later regret. Research shows that figure is , a fraction of those who undergo surgery. Even so, she said California’s policies add up to an elaborate “concealment scheme” that pits children against their parents. 

“If you suspect the parents are abusive and they’re going to harm the child, you have to report that to [child protective services],” she said. “But the government cannot by default assume that every parent is harmful and is going to reject and hurt their children.”

They appeared to favor leaving such consequential matters up to lawmakers, but also wrestled with the possible implications of doing so.

“There are risks both ways in allowing the treatment or not allowing the treatment,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said after hearing arguments over a Tennessee law that prohibits gender-affirming medication or surgery for trans minors. “There’s no kind of perfect way out … where everyone benefits and no one is harmed.”

In her comments, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued that the ban discriminates on the basis of sex and violates the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection. 

“There is a consensus that these treatments can be medically necessary for some adolescents,” she said, noting that they can reduce suicide attempts. The Tennessee legislature, she added, has “completely decided to override the views of the parents, the patients, the doctors who are grappling with these decisions.” 

Justice Samuel Alito asked if she wanted to change her view that there’s a strong research basis for the procedures in light of moves by Britain, Sweden and other European countries to dial them back. Kavanaugh noted that these countries were “pumping the brakes on this kind of treatment.”

She replied that, unlike Tennessee, those countries haven’t banned the practice. The Biden administration is asking the justices to send the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to reconsider whether a blanket ban is appropriate.��

But J. Matthew Rice, Tennessee’s Tennessee Solicitor General, argued that the state isn’t discriminating based on a patient’s birth sex, but holding that such treatments cannot be used for the purpose of transitioning.

“Just as using morphine to manage pain differs from using it to assist suicide, using hormones and puberty blockers to address a physical condition is far different from using it to address psychological distress associated with one’s body,” Rice said. 

The liberal justices agreed with Prelogar that the state is treating youth differently based on sex because such treatments would be allowed, for example, in the case of a boy or girl who started puberty too early.

“I’m worried that we’re undermining the foundations of some of our bedrock equal protection cases,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said.

The challenge to comes amid questions over what President-elect Donald Trump’s reelection means for both gender-related health care and, more broadly, the future of anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ youth. During the campaign, in which the issue became highly politicized, Trump vowed to for schools that he says push “radical gender ideology.” He repeatedly warned, , that schools secretly arrange gender transition surgeries for students without their parents’ consent. And with Republicans taking control of both houses of Congress, it becomes more likely that anti-trans laws like those passed by many states could be enacted nationwide.

A showed that a majority of voters think activism over trans people’s rights in government and society has gone too far. That includes some , who have voiced new reservations about trans girls competing on teams that match their gender identity. 

In Wednesday’s hearing — which included American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Chase Strangio, the first known openly trans lawyer to argue before the court — the conservative justices struggled with whether it’s the court’s place to rule in an area where the science is unsettled.

The court’s decision in this case is likely to have a broad impact: Tennessee is one of 26 GOP-led states with banning puberty blockers or hormones for trans youth.

Dr. Susan Lacy, a Memphis gynecologist, and three families, sued the state, claiming the ban violates the Constitution because it treats trans youth differently and violates parents’ rights to make medical decisions for their children. The Biden administration joined the case in support of their arguments.

In 2020, the Supreme Court decided in Bostock v. Clayton County that LGBTQ employees are a protected class in the workplace. Prelogar said the same standard should apply in this instance. 

While the Tennessee case doesn’t directly pertain to schools, court documents detail the educational struggles of its teen litigants. One identified as John Doe “would have an incredibly difficult time wanting to be around other people and go to school” without gender-affirming medical care. Another trans boy using the pseudonym Ryan Roe would throw up before school because of anxiety over puberty and didn’t want to speak with a feminine-sounding voice. After receiving hormone therapy from Vanderbilt University, Ryan began participating more in class. 

The American Academy of Pediatrics such care for transgender and “gender diverse” youth, restating its position as recently as last year in the face of widespread GOP to criminalize the practice. A of 220 trans youth found that the majority who received gender-affirming care were highly satisfied with the treatment at least three years later. Nine regretted taking puberty blockers or hormones, and four stopped taking the medication.

But call the treatments child abuse and reject the phrase “gender-affirming care.” They say the procedures cause irreversible physical harm and that most children would of gender dysphoria if they don’t transition. An from Britain’s National Health Service reinforced their view. Dr. Hilary Cass, the report’s author, concluded that there is insufficient research to determine if the treatments have positive or negative effects, and largely discouraged them. Based on her review, the NHS no longer prescribes puberty blockers or hormones outside of clinical trials.��

“For the majority of young people, a medical pathway may not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress,” the report said. “For those young people for whom a medical pathway is clinically indicated, it is not enough to provide this without also addressing wider mental health and/or psychosocially challenging problems.”

In with The New York Times, she said she disagrees with the American Academy of Pediatrics over the issue and suggests the organization could be “misleading the public.”

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, incoming chair of the education committee, pointed to the Cass report when he for the Academy to explain why it continues to support the treatments for minors. A spokesman for Cassidy said they have not received a “substantive response.”

As legal challenges to the bans on those treatments reached the federal courts, the and circuits ruled that such practices don’t discriminate against trans youth, allowing the restrictions to stand. But the and circuits sided with opponents of the laws.

On such a divisive issue, Prelogar argued compromise is possible, pointing to a that stopped short of a ban and allows treatment when at least two doctors agree that a patient has gender dysphoria and is at risk of self harm.

“I do think that there is room here for states to enact tailored measures to try to guard against the kind of risk that you’re concerned about,” she told the justices.

Department civil rights officials eschewed either blanket inclusion of trans students in teams consistent with their gender identity or banning such policies altogether.

In a sign of the controversy the issue has generated, the department received over by Monday’s deadline. But if those remarks are any indication, a hoped-for compromise could remain elusive.

“No young person should ever be excluded just because of who they are — especially students who just want to play sports,” wrote Tim Turbiak, a board member for the Ballston Spa Central School District, north of Albany, New York. 

North Carolina state Superintendent Catherine Truitt, meanwhile, said the proposal undermines Title IX’s intent.

“Under no circumstance can we assume that Congress, when crafting this important law 40 years ago, fathomed a biological male playing competitive sports in an all-female league or competition at any level,” she wrote.

Such views are among the many the department must reconcile before issuing a final rule. The existing draft largely puts interpretation of the policy in the hands of individual districts. But several experts said it lacks clarity on several key issues and leaves school systems in a legal no man’s land if they’re in one of with a categorical ban on trans students in sports. 

In a state with a ban, “What does [the Education Department] expect the recipient to do?” the Association of Title IX Administrators, a national membership group, asked in an 11-page comment. 

Nineteen states have already in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit opposing the Biden administration’s interpretation of Title IX. A involving a transgender West Virginia middle schooler who runs track is before the 4th Circuit.

In general, the draft rule would allow elementary-age students to play sports consistent with their gender identity and likely continue in middle school. In high school, however, districts could make a case for excluding trans athletes if they can show how that decision achieves an “important educational objective.”

District leaders will need clearer guidance than the department has provided so far to write those policies, according to the Title IX association’s .

In general, the organization wants a plainly written rule allowing students to participate in athletics consistent with their gender identity. At this point, the draft addresses a “phantom fear” that trans female athletes would dominate competitive sports, wrote board Chair Brett Sokolow and President Daniel Swinton.

If the department fails to heed that advice, the association urged officials to provide examples of restrictions that would and would not comply and offer clarity on specific scenarios that are likely to arise if the draft becomes official policy. 

For example, if a trans student makes a team, but is “benched” and never gets to play, would that qualify as discrimination on the basis of gender identity? They want the department to clarify exactly what rights Title IX protects. 

“Is it the right to be on a team, the right to compete, the right to have the opportunity to win or play, etc.?” they asked.

‘Case-by-case basis’

With the issue likely to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court, Max Eden, a research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who opposes the change, said the political debate currently favors those who oppose any restrictions on trans students in sports.

Democrats, he said, “will publicly argue that Republicans are going to the Supreme Court to defend sex segregation in mostly non-existent elementary school sports.”

He argues that the administration’s attempt to bridge the divide over the issue has failed.

“It appears to concede everything, because high schools can adopt policies that predicate competitive sports participation on biological sex,” he said. “But actually, it concedes nothing, because [the Office for Civil Rights] reserves the right to insist that those policies change on a practically arbitrary and case-by-case basis.” 

When Sandra Hodgin, founder and CEO of the Title IX Consulting Group, first read the draft, her initial thought was, “Oh boy, the conservative side is going to have a heart attack.” She said she’s heard some district leaders in more conservative parts of California, where she’s based, discuss rejecting federal funds rather than comply.

Progressive districts, she said, seem more willing to balance inclusion with respecting the concerns of conservative parents. 

“They don’t want to make it seem like they are just jumping on the Biden bandwagon,” she said.

Co-ed teams

While debate over the issue focuses mostly on trans girls, an incident last fall in Florida demonstrates some of the confusion over the issue. The Duval County Public Schools to play on the boy’s soccer team, citing the state’s ban on trans girls playing on a girls team. But the district later reversed its decision and apologized.��

Six states — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, New Mexico and Texas — require students to compete on teams consistent with the sex listed on their birth certificate, according to the advocacy group . Several more require documentation that a student’s gender has changed before they can play on a team where they feel most comfortable.

Rules for middle school students, who often enter puberty during those years, should be more explicit, the Title IX association said, since only about a third of state athletic associations have policies governing middle and junior high school sports.

“Given the changes the body undergoes during puberty, educational objectives like injury avoidance or fairness may increase in significance after puberty,” they wrote.

Finally, the association wants the department to explain vague terms such as “minimize harms to students” and clarify whether districts would have to organize or pay for alternative opportunities for trans students to play. 

Districts stuck in limbo between the federal government and state law should consider adding a co-ed team, Hodgin recommended. 

“I’ve been saying this for well over a year. It costs money, time and attention. Who is going to coach it? And who are they playing against?” she asked. “But if we’re really looking at equity and ensuring there’s no discrimination, that would be my suggestion.”

Advocates for LGBTQ students agreed that the draft rule should be more straightforward. While the introduction notes that across-the-board bans in sports would violate the law, Olivia Hunt, policy director at the National Center for Transgender Equality, wants that statement reflected throughout the text.

Any case where a trans student is excluded has “to address a well-founded concern and not be based on over-broad generalizations. The regulation should spell that out,” she said. “This is an issue where there is a lot of confusion among policymakers at the state and district level.”

While large districts may have legal teams prepared to advise board members and administrators as unexpected challenges arise, the final rule, she said, “needs to be something that can apply in large and small districts.”

But in a moment of déjà vu, 7,339 of those Title IX complaints were filed by a single person — the same one who directed 6,157 similar claims to OCR in 2016, according to the civil rights office, which declined to name the filer, citing privacy rules. That person would have had to file an average of 20 complaints a day — or nearly one an hour — in 2022.

“This individual has been filing complaints for a very long time with OCR and they are sometimes founded,” Catherine Lhamon, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, told The 74. 

She noted anyone can file a complaint for any perceived violation.  

“It doesn’t have to be about their own experience,” Lhamon said. “There’s not a lot I can tell you about the person.”

In , the office received 18,804 complaints, the highest number in its history and a figure that exceeds by 12% its previous record of 16,720 set in . Lhamon has talked on multiple occasions about how is straining its limited resources, with 2022’s being particularly challenging. 

“We investigate every complaint over which we have jurisdiction,” the assistant secretary told The 74. “So the 7,339 complaints from that single individual last year took a very substantial amount of time for my staff.”

And while Lhamon did note her office has found in the complainant’s favor in the past, she didn’t immediately know how often or if this happened in 2022. 

In 2016, the more than 6,000 complaints filed by that same individual alleged discrimination in school athletic programs, according to the civil rights office. Fiscal year 2022 followed much the same pattern when the office logged 4,387 allegations of Title IX discrimination involving athletics. 

One complaint could include more than one type of alleged Title IX violation, encompassing, for instance, both athletics and gender harassment. 

The 2022 athletics-related claims far outpaced the 1,030 related to sexual or gender harassment or sexual violence. The figure also swamps similar claims from when just 2,093 complaints included Title IX-related claims — with just 101 focused on athletics. More than 500 cases concerned sexual or gender harassment or sexual violence that year. 

Some wonder about the type and validity of complaints filed by one person. 

“When you see that almost 80% of Title IX complaints filed with the Education Department were filed by a single person — and this person filed nearly 8,000 complaints in a year — it raises questions about whether at least some were filed in bad faith,” said Elizabeth Tang, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center. 

It’s possible too, Tang said, that the uptick can be a response to increased awareness about student’s rights. It might also reflect a perception that the Biden administration is more receptive to these complaints than the prior one which, under the leadership of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, looked to roll back more stringent investigations of campus sex assault and discriminatory discipline claims.

Liz King, senior program director of education at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said she hopes greater awareness is at work, but is concerned about ongoing and possibly increased civil rights violations against students. 

“Any single instance of discrimination is one instance too many,” she said, adding that the civil rights office does not have the staff to meet the task it’s been given. 

The surge in complaints comes at a time when the agency faces significant challenges: It shrank from nearly 1,100 full-time equivalent staff in FY 1981 to 546 last year and is dealing with a host of issues that reflect by the pandemic.

Biden, in his March budget address, sought — to $178 million — for the civil rights office to meet its goals. Lhamon, whose 2021 confirmation Senate Republicans tried to block, said she’s grateful for the president’s support and hopes Congress approves the increase. 

Race, color, or national origin discrimination claims made up 3,329 of all complaints received in FY 2022, according to the civil rights office’s annual report, which was released last week. That’s up from 2,399 the year prior. Disability-related complaints comprised 6,467 of the total compared to 4,870 in FY 2021.  

At the same time, age discrimination claims, which made up 666 complaints in the most recent report, were down from 1,149 the prior year. The office notes the majority of these claims were also filed by a single person in both years.

The civil rights office fielded 8,934 complaints in FY 2021 and more than 9,700 the year before that, according to its annual reports. 

Lhamon said a number of cases this year involved the LGBTQ and transgender community, a student population that has become the focus of hostile legislation in multiple conservative states. The complaints can cover a wide swath of issues, she said, from the prohibition of same-sex prom kings and queens to a school’s refusal to allow an LGBTQ student group to form on campus. 

“It could be that students are not allowed to use the bathroom consistent with their gender identity or are not allowed to play on a particular sports team,” she added. 

The first resolution agreement crafted by her office on behalf of a transgender student was in 2013: It developed fewer than 20 such agreements for these children in FY 2022, Lhamon said. 

Among the allegations made against schools, the civil rights office found in April 2022 that Chino Valley Unified in California violated Title IX by failing to properly respond to a complaint of sexual harassment of students on a high school athletic team. 

This included the “videotaped assaults of teammates, students forcibly physically overpowering other students and sharing photos of their genitals among the team and on social media, and students placing their genitals on and near other students’ faces and bodies.”

The response from district administrators and coaches failed to end the behavior. According to the office, Chino Valley agreed to reach out to all former athletes from the offending school’s fall 2017 team and offer counseling services or reimbursement for such services.

It also was made to conduct a climate survey of the school’s athletics teams and train district leaders, school administrators and coaches about their responsibilities for responding to such claims. 

In another case, this one involving the San Juan Bautista School of Medicine in Puerto Rico, OCR found the school failed, over the course of several years, to investigate a student’s report that another student sexually assaulted her. 

The office concluded that the school’s procedures for resolving sexual harassment complaints did not comply with Title IX. As a result, it agreed to conduct the investigation, reimburse the complainant for some coursework, train employees and align its grievance procedures with the law. 

In a third case, Tamalpais Union High School District in California was faulted by OCR for failing to investigate allegations that a transgender student was harassed about her appearance, voice, body, name and pronouns. 

The office found in June the district’s inadequate response allowed for a hostile environment for the student. The district agreed to reimburse the student and her family for counseling costs and review its policies and procedures among other measures.

If adopted, school systems in that “categorically” ban transgender athletes could find themselves caught between state and federal laws, a tension that is likely to play out in the courts.

Under the proposed rule, however, schools and colleges could “adopt policies that limit transgender students’ participation” in specific sports — particularly at the more competitive high school and college levels. That would effectively bar some transgender girls from participation.

“Some sex-related distinctions in sports are permissible as long as the school ensures overall equal athletic participation opportunities,” a senior administration official said in a briefing with reporters, noting the department’s effort to address the shifting legal landscape on an issue that has sharply divided the country since President Joe Biden took office. 

The rule will be published in the coming weeks, the official said, and available for public comment for 30 days.

“Every student should be able to have the full experience of attending school in America, including participating in athletics, free from discrimination,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement. 

The proposed rule makes good on a promise Biden issued on his first day as president, when he released an stating that Title IX protections against discrimination extend to students based on their gender identity and sexual orientation. Since then, banning transgender students from competing in girls sports has become a defining issue for Republicans. Just this week, Kansas lawmakers overrode the veto of Gov. Laura Kelly and imposed a ban on transgender athletes competing in kindergarten through college. And 17 states that they would sue if the department went through with efforts to “redefine biological sex to include gender identity.” 

But administration officials believe they’ve struck an appropriate compromise. “The proposed rule that we offer today is our best judgment,” the department official said. “We are confident in our legal opinion.”

The proposal would require schools to carefully balance issues of inclusion and fairness, and nods toward evolving understanding of how children’s bodies develop during puberty. It states that most students in the elementary grades would be able to play sports consistent with their gender identity and likely be able to continue doing so in middle school. At higher levels, schools would have to consider the specific sport and competitiveness level before determining if transgender students should be excluded. Schools would be allowed to decide for themselves, the official said, whether limiting trans students’ participation meets an educational goal.

“This is a high, demanding standard that will be difficult for schools to meet,” said Scott Skinner-Thompson, an associate law professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder. 

The administration’s measure may not go far enough for transgender student activists or those who think inclusion hinders the goals of women’s sports.

Conservatives who have opposed the administration’s stance on the issue said it puts school districts in the middle. The proposal, according to , places “the onus on school districts” to determine whether their policy would violate the law.

Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. went further, promising in a statement that “we will never allow boys to play in girls’ sports. We will fight this overreach tooth and nail. And we will stop at nothing to uphold the protections afforded women under Title IX.” 

LGBTQ advocates say conservatives are discriminating against vulnerable students who make up just . 

Some advocates welcomed the proposed rule’s language that across-the-board bans on trans girls participating in girls and women’s sports violate the law, but expressed concern that some trans students would still face discrimination.

Title IX “protections don’t stop when a student leaves the classroom to go out onto the soccer field or a volleyball court or into a bathroom,” said Sasha Buchert, nonbinary and transgender rights project director at Lambda Legal, a law firm and advocacy organization. 

The draft rule also comes as the GOP-led House prepares to vote on — the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act — that would essentially turn state bans into federal policy. The legislation is not expected to pass in the Senate. 

The state bans have been the subject of numerous legal challenges. The release of the rule late in the afternoon before a holiday weekend coincided with the Thursday of West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrissey’s emergency request to allow its 2021 Save Women’s Sports law to go into effect. Becky Pepper-Jackson, identified male at birth, and her mother Heather Jackson to prevent the law from being implemented, saying that it violates Title IX and the U.S. Constitution. 

The court’s ruling means that Pepper-Jackson, 12, can continue participating on her school’s cross country and track teams while the U.S, Appeals Court for the 4th Circuit considers her case.

The American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia and Lambda Legal called the state’s request “a baseless and cruel effort to keep Becky from where she belongs — playing alongside her peers as a teammate and as a friend.”

The draft is the second part of the administration’s rewrite of Title IX. Released last year, the initial draft extended Title IX protections to LGBTQ students but left unanswered questions about school sports.

The administration largely aims to reverse a Trump-era rule that required live hearings as part of investigations into sexual harassment and misconduct. The proposed rule also removes a requirement that defines harassment as “severe, pervasive and objectively offensive.” 

The department had to review nearly 350,000 comments on Title IX, with many focusing on sports. 

“We’ve been very grateful to be able to take account of the very wide variety of views on this topic,” the official said. Comments from students, professional athletes, teachers and others were incorporated to “inform that proposed law.” 

It was three years after Title IX — the federal civil rights law banning sex discrimination in education — was signed into law. “The issues we are discussing here were the same ones people, including me, were grappling with when the original Title IX regulations regarding single-sex teams were being written,” she said.

The latest debate, about whether Title IX should codify transgender rights — something that could happen when revised regulations are released in the coming weeks — has caused deep divisions, and in some cases, pitted natural allies against each other.

But while the issue is difficult, especially in sports, it’s a mistake to think that things were less complicated when President Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law 50 years ago on June 23, 1972.

“Looking back, things always seem simpler, but I remember how fraught the arguments were, and how difficult it was for people to reconsider their beliefs about boys and girls,” said Susan Bailey, who helped implement Title IX while working at the Connecticut Department of Education. The transgender question “is very polarizing, and people once again want a single, simple solution.”

‘Title IX shook all that up’

The fact that it took three years from the time the law was passed to draw up regulations showed that “the Nixon administration did not have the slightest interest in enforcing this law or equality for women and girls,” said Holly Knox, who was a legislative aide in the then-U.S. Office of Education, covering Congressional hearings on sex discrimination. After the law passed, she became disillusioned with government education and enforcement efforts and established the Project on Equal Education Rights at the National Organization of Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Although most of the high-profile disputes involving Title IX — which applies to education programs and activities that receive federal funds — now involve sports or sexual harassment and assault cases, the original impetus was much broader. 

Employment of women teachers and coaches, pregnancy discrimination and admissions to graduate schools, including law and medicine,were all major issues, said Jean Peelen, who was part of the group drafting the final policy for intercollegiate athletics in 1979. 

To demonstrate the law’s impact on graduate admissions, Peelen noted that in 1974, two women were admitted to the University of Alabama’s law school. In 1975, when she entered, 25 percent were women, increasing to 50 percent in 1976. 

In elementary and secondary schools, the legislation affected issues from class assignments to textbooks. As just one example, many K-12 schools scheduled advanced math and advanced English at the same time, so boys were steered toward math and girls toward English. “Title IX shook all that up,” said Bailey, who became a professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and Education at Wellesley College.

One of the most complex questions at the time was what could remain single-sex and what couldn’t, from choirs to gym classes to colleges. In that sense, the transgender debate is “a second-generation issue,” said Dunkle, who worked with both the Association of American Colleges’ Project on the Status and Education of Women and the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education.

While the latest round of Title IX revisions includes important issues for transgender students beyond athletics, one of the major sticking points is whether allowing trans women to compete on women’s teams discriminates against athletes identified as female at birth.

The arguments and solutions proffered today echo many of those Dunkle grappled with in a 1974 paper she authored: “What Constitutes Equality for Women in Sport?” 

The paper discusses both competitive and non-competitive college sports and highlights discrimination that was almost universal. Examples included one college that didn’t allow women to use a handball court unless a man signed up for her and a large midwestern university that reserved two hours of pool time for “faculty, administrative staff and male students.” There was no reserved time for female students.

Then it tackled how sports teams should be configured, the very issue at the core of the current debate. Dunkle laid out the options: Should competitive sports teams in college be co-educational? Single sex? A women’s, men’s and mixed-sex team? Should teams be based on height and weight? Should top women athletes should be able to apply for a position on the men’s team? While this might allow elite female athletes stronger competition, critics argued it would be administratively unwieldy and result in skimming the best athletes off women’s teams.

 “It is almost painful to read the old paper,” Dunkle said. “There were all these choices and all were imperfect.”

Ultimately, a kind of “separate but equal” option won out for most competitive teams. Of course, decades later there are many of women athletes treated as second-class citizens, but the idea of girls and women playing separately from boys and men on most competitive teams has become the norm.

Backlash to Lia Thomas’s victory

The tell the story of Title IX’s success: Before the law’s passage, there were 300,000 girls and women playing high school and college sports nationwide. Today, there are more than 3 million.

But the transgender issue has unsettled what once seemed resolved. University of Pennsylvania  swimmer heightened the debate after placing first in the 500-yard freestyle event in March. She became the first openly transgender woman to win an NCAA Division I national championship, but as a man, ranked 65th in the event. 

The emergence of the issue as culture war fodder, particularly among Republicans, makes it all the more uncomfortable for those who have fought for women’s equality and back transgender rights in employment, housing and education.

have already passed bills prohibiting trans girls from competing on girls high school sports teams. Most recently, the Ohio House of Representatives passed a bill called ” that bans anyone not identified as female at birth from participating in women’s sports in high school and college. If an athlete’s sex is questioned, she would be required to produce a doctor’s note that includes an examination of her “internal and external reproductive anatomy.” The Senate has not yet voted on it.

The American Civil Liberties Union has taken a stand unequivocally the right of trans women to play on women’s teams, and the International Olympic Committee last November issued a that states athletes should not be excluded solely on the basis of their transgender identity or sex variation.

But Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who won three gold and one silver medal for swimming in the 1984 Olympics, argued that allowing trans women to play on women’s sports teams means most women will lose out — which, she said, goes against everything Title IX stands for. 

For Hogshead-Makar, it all comes down to biology. Science, she said, has shown that transgender women — in particular those who have gone through male puberty — will almost always have a substantial physical advantage.

“Equality requires separation,” said Hogshead-Makar, now a lawyer who runs Champion Women, an organization aimed at supporting women and girls in sports and educating about Title IX. In 2020, Sports Illustrated listed her as one of most influential and powerful women in sports. Understanding of the biological differences in trans women is , but shows that there may be residual muscle mass and strength advantages even a year after testosterone suppression.

Hogshead-Makar swam competitively at a time when trainers and coaches gave elite East German athletes disguised as vitamins. The scandal was exposed after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

“They were doped to the gills and everybody knew it,” she said. “And it felt like nobody cared about us. We were expected to be feminine, gracious losers.” She was victorious in the 1984 Olympics, she said, only because the Soviets and much of eastern Europe didn’t compete. The U.S. had boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow to protest the Russian invasion of Afghanistan; four years later, the Soviet Union and its allies said they would not attend the Los Angeles-based Olympics because its competitors would not be safe amid anti-Russian hysteria. 

‘I’ve come to the conclusion it’s not ok’

The move to allow trans girls and women to compete on female teams leaves her and many other women athletes feeling the same way they felt during the doping scandals, she said — forsaken and undefended.

Donna Lopiano, an all-American softball player who heads a sports consulting company, said one option will not fit all trans women. It depends on when they went through puberty, if they received hormone therapy and what sport they’re playing.

She suggested multiple choices need to be considered, some of which mirror those considered by Dunkle in 1974. Should there be men’s and women’s teams, and a third class  open to everyone, including transgender athletes? Should inclusion depend on the sport and whether it requires strength or speed? Should there be handicaps like in golf? Separate scoring?

“We’ve gone through this with athletes with disabilities,” she said. “Fair competition has to outweigh social justice if the idea is identical head-to-head competition.”

Peelen and Knox, both of whom are quick to acknowledge they have no special expertise in transgender issues, have landed on different sides of the question. Peelen said she first agreed that trans girls and women shouldn’t play on female teams.

But once she realized how small the number of such athletes are — estimated at less than 1 percent of the population — she changed her mind.

“In any high school, you could have a girl 14 or 15 years old who is six feet tall, and they let her play,” she said. “If the fear is that trans women are going to take over because they are faster or stronger, that’s true with anyone who doesn’t fit in with the norms.”

She initially contemplated what rules could be applied to even things out, such as factoring in weight and height, but decided, “This is absurd. Why not just recognize for some very small group of people on a sports team in a high school or a college somewhere in the U.S., it could seem unfair?”

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, in that banned transgender athletes from playing in girls’ sports, was moved by the same reasoning: Of 750,000 students playing high-school sports in Utah, only four were trangender, and just one played for a girls’ team. He also cited research showing that can reduce the risk of among transgender teens.��

The legislature overrode his veto. 

The numbers of trans athletes could increase as the transgender population as a whole grows. While still a very small minority, the trans population has doubled in recent years. The Centers for Disease Control recently that 1.4 percent of 13 to 17-year-olds identify as transgender and 1.3 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds do so.  

Knox ultimately took the opposite path from Peelen, first believing trans women should be allowed to compete on girls and women’s teams, then reconsidering after learning more about the science.

“I’m delighted Title IX protects LGBTQ people from discrimination in admissions, employment and other areas, but because there are distinct biological differences, it would be unfair to let those who are born male and transitioned after puberty compete against biological women in competitive sports,” Knox said. “I’ve come to the conclusion it’s not ok.” 

Dunkle is still figuring it out. She supports including transgender students in almost all areas but doesn’t see how it could work in athletics without disadvantaging those identified as female from birth. Speaking from experience, she said, “Any policy that they come up with is going to be imperfect. You have to look at the results and effects, not just what looks fair in theory.”

“They wanted more evidence that she had gone,” said the trans student’s father, Jeff Walker. “I said, ‘I’ll send you media, pictures, an invitation from the White House.’ They still did not excuse the absence.”

The episode would certainly be in keeping with the spirit of laws signed by Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, that restrict trans students’ lives in and out of school. , similar to legislation in Texas and Arkansas, targets doctors who provide trans health services, like the prescription of puberty blockers, to minors. keeps trans students out of bathrooms and locker room facilities that match their gender identity. Like Florida’s so-called “don’t say gay” legislation, it also prohibits discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in the elementary grades.

Such legislation might soon be on a collision course with federal law, as the U.S. Department of Education puts the finishing touches on a long-awaited rewrite of Title IX. That update is widely expected to codify the rights of trans students for the first time. Department officials have already said that Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination and harassment in programs receiving federal funds, will echo the in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, which extended protections against sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace to LGBTQ employees.

A department spokesperson said Tuesday that it expects to release the new rule in May. 

Alabama is among 15 Republican-led states it. In the last year, a dozen states have passed bills prohibiting trans females from competing in girls’ and women’s sports. But the wave of legislation targeting LGBTQ students has since spread to encompass “just about every moment of their daily lives,” Sam Ames, director of advocacy and government affairs for the nonprofit Trevor Project, said earlier this month during a .

Experts expect the rule to put school districts in the center of what will likely be a long legal battle.

Max Eden, a research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called it “a very unenviable place.”

“It sets up a big showdown between states and the federal government,” he said during a , “and schools will be caught in between the two forces.” 

Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit leading the campaign against what it calls districts’ “indoctrination” of students on issues of race and gender, organized the event to inform parents about the upcoming rule. Eden also warned of an unpleasant tug-of-war between schools that teach gender as a “fluid construct” and parents who oppose references to gender identity in the classroom.

“It gets to a fundamental question of what is a human being,” he said. “If a school says one thing and Mommy and Daddy say another thing, a kid has to pick, and that’s not a fun place to put an 8-year-old.” 

The public is clearly divided over such policies. A from the University of Chicago and the AP-NORC Center showed that allowing trans students to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity receives the most support from Democrats (52%) Hispanic adults (35%) and those with a college degree (45%). Nine percent of Republicans supported such policies. Forty-seven percent of those who voted in a recent school board election and follow news about their local board were opposed, compared to 35% who don’t follow such issues.

The tension is already on display in Oklahoma, where Attorney General John O’Connor told the that it’s illegal to let a trans girl use the girls’ restroom, while state education officials say it’s a matter for the district to decide. 

For districts that could face similar directives in the future, “federal law always wins,” said W. Scott Lewis, co-founder of the Association of Title IX Administrators. “The writing is on the wall. This is a protected class.” 

That might change if federal courts weigh in against the department. Two current federal cases involving trans athletes — one in and another in — could work their way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite Republicans’ questioning, newly confirmed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson declined to comment on the issue during recent confirmation hearings.

While the education department’s interpretation of the Bostock ruling doesn’t mention sports, the Biden administration made its position known in filed last year in a West Virginia case. The plaintiff, a transgender girl who wants to compete with girls on her middle school cross country team, is challenging the state’s 2021 law banning students born as male from participating in girls’ sports. 

“Although the regulations allow recipients to operate or sponsor separate teams based on sex, the regulations do not define ‘sex’ or address how students who are transgender should be assigned to such teams,” the brief said. “When assigning students to single-sex sports teams, a recipient must still comply with the statutory prohibition against discrimination based on sex in Title IX itself.”

In a year marking Title IX’s 50th anniversary, some experts say the administration’s position could undermine years of work toward achieving equity in women’s sports. 

“Imagine you go to a meet to watch an event called ‘the Girls’ 100,’ which includes both males and females — some of whom identify as girls, some as boys, some as nonbinary. Specifically, what is it that makes the assembled individuals all ‘girls’ so that having them compete in a separate event from the ‘boys’ is defensible?” asked Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a Duke University law professor and co-director of the Center for Sports Law and Policy.

Some of the males could be on testosterone suppression, while some of the females are taking testosterone, she explained, adding that “such a field would only rarely allow a female who is not taking testosterone to win in a category that was originally designed for her, to secure her equal access to the social goods that flow from competitive sport.”

Lewis, with the Title IX administrators organization, predicted the issue will reach the court during its next term.

“They can’t let it sit any longer,” he said. 

The issue could also play out in Congress if Republicans regain control during upcoming midterm elections. But any legislation aimed at Title IX “will be entirely symbolic,” because it would need 60 votes in the Senate to pass initially and President Joe Biden would veto it, said R. Shep Melnick, a political science professor at Boston College.

“Congress has rarely amended Title IX, and never on a major substantive issue,” he said. “The conflict will play out in the administrative and judicial arenas.”  

‘Breaking a confidentiality’

Even before Biden took office, he pledged to revise the Trump administration’s Title IX rule, which increased protections for those unfairly accused of sexual misconduct. Once in office, he ordered the department to begin the lengthy process of rescinding the rule and restoring elements of Obama-era guidance that directed schools and colleges to address sexual assault.​

Those changes, already controversial, were quickly overshadowed by the administration’s efforts to incorporate the rights of LGBTQ students into Title IX. During a weeklong public hearing last year, the department invited comment from those experiencing discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, further signaling that the rule — which will be put out for public comment upon its release — would address those issues.

It’s unclear whether the regulation will include detailed guidance about issues like preferred names and pronouns or sex-specific school uniforms, but advocates for trans students hope the department will supplement the rule with examples of how districts can address those issues. 

Schools should “make it clear what nondiscrimination looks like” said Asaf Orr, senior staff attorney for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “Dictating that teachers can’t discuss anything related to gender identity is fostering a school environment that is not welcoming to LGBTQ students.”

Walker, who described his daughter Harleigh as “100% girl,” is a plaintiff in challenging Alabama’s new Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, which criminalizes transgender health services for children. He’s also concerned that requiring Harleigh to use the boys’ restroom will “open her up to assault.”

“My fear is some administrator at her school will try to make an example out of her,” he said. “They say this is going to protect my child. It’s not going to protect anyone.”

While the Alabama provision, which only applies to K-5, doesn’t affect Magic City Acceptance Academy, a Birmingham-area charter school that serves many LGBTQ students, Principal Michael Wilson said he’s concerned about a requirement for school officials to inform parents if students question their gender identity.��

“You’re breaking a confidentiality, a relationship that you have formed with kids,” he said, noting recent data showing increases in LGBTQ students seriously considering or attempting suicide.

The education department’s webinar highlighted what some schools are already doing to support trans students.

Sam Long, a trans biology teacher at Denver South High School in Colorado, talked about working with two other LGBTQ educators to “clean up” teaching materials on reproduction. 

“We can be more accurate and be more inclusive,” he said. “It’s ovaries that produce eggs. We’re acknowledging that not all women produce eggs, and also not all egg producers are women.”

Rebekah Bruesehoff, a trans student and activist from New Jersey, said she’s always “looking for clues” throughout her school — like preferred pronouns on a teacher’s ID badge — to see which educators are more accepting.

“I don’t just walk into class at the beginning of the year and announce that I’m transgender,” said the ninth grader, who described herself as a “total nerd” who loves school, plays field hockey and participates in musical theater. “It’s one tiny part of who I am, but there’s so much more to me.”

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court. With a vote of 53 to 47, Jackson picked up support from three Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah.

According to the White House, Jackson, who will be the first Black woman on the court, watched the vote with President Joe Biden. 

President Joe Biden made history Friday when he nominated federal appeals court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. If confirmed, however, she’ll likely face pressure to sit out one of the most important cases involving race and education in recent years.��

In 2016, she recused herself from a against the U.S. Department of Education because she has served on the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, where she previously graduated magna cum laude and served as editor of the Harvard Law Review. Prior to her confirmation hearings for a federal judgeship, she explained in a that she “was serving on the board of a university that was evaluating its own potential response” to sexual assault guidelines.

That rationale is likely to be revisited if she sits on the court next term when it hears an upcoming case in which the university is a defendant, one of two challenging race-based admissions policies. Plaintiffs argue that affirmative action policies at both Harvard and the University of North Carolina discriminate against Asian Americans by giving preference to Black and Hispanic students. 

Charles Geyh, an expert in judicial conduct at Indiana University, said Jackson’s first responsibility would be to ask herself whether she can be impartial. But the degree of the board’s involvement in creating and implementing the policy also factors into the decision.

“The more involved she was, the more a reasonable person would look at this and say, ‘I don’t know if she can weigh this thing in an even-handed way,’” he said. “It wouldn’t shock me to find that some senators will try to leverage that.”

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is one of several high-profile education cases the court will hear in coming years. Other potential issues expected to work their way up from the lower federal courts involve religious school choice, the rights of transgender students and the public status of charter schools.

Jackson, who attended a Miami-Dade high school, is the daughter of public school educators, whom she thanked Friday during remarks at the White House. 

“My father made the fateful decision to transition from his job as a public high school history teacher and go to law school,” she said. “Some of my earliest memories are of him sitting at the kitchen table reading his law books. I watched him study. He became my first professional role model.” Her father served as a school board attorney for the Miami-Dade County Public Schools and her mother was a principal at one of the district’s magnet schools for 14 years.

Despite her strong public school connections, Jackson has served on boards of private schools in the D.C. area — Georgetown Day School and a Christian school in Maryland that has since closed.

The Montrose Christian School opposed abortion, another issue Jackson could face on the court. The school’s mission statement also said marriage should be limited to those between a man and a woman. Questioned by Sen. Josh Hawley, a conservative Republican from Missouri during hearings last year on her nomination to the appellate court, she responded that she did not “necessarily agree with all of the statements … that those boards might have in their materials.” 

None of those potential conflicts came up Friday, however, when Biden formally announced her nomination.

“Her opinions are always carefully reasoned, tethered to precedent and demonstrate respect for how law impacts everyday people,” he said. “It doesn’t mean she puts her thumb on the scale of justice one way or the other, but she understands the broader impact of the decisions.” 

If confirmed, Jackson won’t change the ideological make-up of the court, where conservatives have enjoyed a supermajority since 2020. That means on a major educational issue like school choice — where liberals typically oppose public funds for religious schools — the addition of Jackson would be unlikely to affect the outcome.

But as the first Black woman on the court, Jackson would likely be more attuned to issues of race and gender as reflected in school dress codes or , and she might see “discrimination that maybe another justice might not,” said Preston Green, an education professor at the University of Connecticut. 

Jackson would join the court at a time when conservative justices have signaled they’re open to rolling back abortion rights and have already moved in the direction of more religious freedom. 

“This court is really undoing a lot of decisions that people have thought were off the table,” Green said.

‘So long overdue’

Prior to her service on the D.C. Court of Appeals, Jackson served as a trial judge on the Federal Court in Washington for 8 years. Biden called Jackson’s experience as a trial judge a “critical qualification,” and civil rights organizations celebrated the nomination.

In 2020, she blocked the from allowing child welfare agencies receiving federal grants to turn away LGBTQ youth and families. And in 2018, Jackson ruled that the Trump administration failed to follow proper procedure when it sought to end funding for teen pregnancy prevention.

“I’m elated. It’s groundbreaking, and so long overdue to have a Black woman on the Supreme court,” said Sasha Buchert, senior attorney at Lambda Legal, which focuses on the rights of LGBTQ students and adults. “She has a stellar civil rights record.”

Buchert is among the legal experts who expect a case involving the rights of transgender students to reach the court at some point. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard oral arguments in last week, could clash with the 4th Circuit,which ruled in that a transgender boy could use the bathroom that matched his gender identity. The Supreme Court turned down an appeal of that case, but conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said they would have heard it. 

Joshua Dunn, a political science professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, said the court also could ultimately confront the issue of whether transgender girls should be able to play women’s sports.

“I don’t see any way that they can dodge that one,” Dunn said. “There will be some split circuit decisions sooner rather than later.”

— a challenge to Idaho’s ban on transgender girls in women’s sports — is currently moving through the 9th Circuit. Long considered one of the most liberal appellate courts, the circuit court recently because of appointments by former President Donald Trump. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Arizona-based law firm, is also expected to appeal challenging a Connecticut policy that allows transgender girls to play in girls high school sports.

Dunn said it’s hard to predict how justices would rule in such a case, adding that if Jackson is confirmed, all three liberal members of the court would be women. 

The conservative members, he said, could be “suspicious” of ruling that bans like Idaho’s should stand, but added he could see “some of the liberal wing of the court having concerns” about transgender girls in sports.

The fact that Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative, wrote the 2020 opinion in could be a factor in any future cases involving LGBTQ rights. In that case, the court decided that federal law prohibits employment discrimination against LGBTQ workers. But Buchert said the ruling also left open the door for restrictions outside the workplace.

A ‘minimalist course’ 

Before the end of the current term, the court will issue an opinion in , which challenges a Maine law banning some religious schools from receiving public funds for tuition assistance. How the court rules in that case could determine whether Jackson might face a similar school choice issue if she’s confirmed.

Experts expect the court to rule in favor of the plaintiffs, who say the state is discriminating against religious families. “My sense is that [Chief Justice John] Roberts’s ability to keep the conservatives on the minimalist course that he established is over,” Dunn said, but added that the court could also leave open the possibility for similar cases in the future.

A decision in a , which focuses on whether a student can sue a charter school under the federal equal protection clause, is expected this spring. 

Jackson won’t be on the court to hear a church-state separation case this term in which a football coach argues he should be allowed to pray publicly after games. But when she clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer, the Supreme Court justice she’s in line to replace, the court ruled that student-led prayer at football .

In choosing Jackson, Biden passed on California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, and J. Michelle Childs, a federal district court judge in South Carolina, who not only went to public K-12 schools like Jackson, but also earned a law degree from the University of South Carolina.

For the 13-year-old from Minneapolis who lives close to where George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, the pandemic-induced isolation and social unrest amplifed his transgender dysphoria, emotional distress that occurs when someone’s gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth. His billowing depression landed him in the hospital after an attempt to die by suicide. During that dark stretch, he spent his days in an outpatient psychiatric facility, where therapists embraced music therapy. There, he listened to a punk song on loop that promised how  

Eventually they did. 

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Logsdon-Wallace, a transgender eighth-grader who chose the name Teeth, has since “graduated” from weekly therapy sessions and has found a better headspace, but that didn’t stop school officials from springing into action after he wrote about his mental health. In a school assignment last month, he reflected on his suicide attempt and how the punk rock anthem by the band Ramshackle Glory helped him cope — intimate details that wound up in the hands of district security. 

The classroom assignment was one of thousands of Minneapolis student communications that got flagged by Gaggle, a digital surveillance company that saw rapid growth after the pandemic forced schools into remote learning. In an earlier investigation, The 74 analyzed nearly 1,300 public records from Minneapolis Public Schools to expose how Gaggle subjects students to relentless digital surveillance 24 hours a day, seven days a week, raising significant privacy concerns for more than 5 million young people across the country who are monitored by the company’s digital algorithm and human content moderators. 

But technology experts and families with first-hand experience with Gaggle’s surveillance dragnet have raised a separate issue: The service is not only invasive, it may also be ineffective. 

While the system flagged Logsdon-Wallace for referencing the word “suicide,” context was never part of the equation, he said. Two days later, in mid-September, a school counselor called his mom to let her know what officials had learned. The meaning of the classroom assignment — that his mental health had improved — was seemingly lost in the transaction between Gaggle and the school district. He felt betrayed. 

 “I was trying to be vulnerable with this teacher and be like, ‘Hey, here’s a thing that’s important to me because you asked,” Logsdon-Wallace said. “Now, when I’ve made it clear that I’m a lot better, the school is contacting my counselor and is freaking out.”

Jeff Patterson, Gaggle’s founder and CEO, said in a statement his company does not “make a judgement on that level of the context,” and while some districts have requested to be notified about references to previous suicide attempts, it’s ultimately up to administrators to “decide the proper response, if any.”  

‘A crisis on our hands’

Minneapolis Public Schools first contracted with Gaggle in the spring of 2020 as the pandemic forced students nationwide into remote learning. Through AI and the content moderator team, Gaggle tracks students’ online behavior everyday by analyzing materials on their school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts. The tool scans students’ emails, chat messages and other documents, including class assignments and personal files, in search of keywords, images or videos that could indicate self-harm, violence or sexual behavior. The remote moderators evaluate flagged materials and notify school officials about content they find troubling. 

In Minneapolis, Gaggle flagged students for keywords related to pornography, suicide and violence, according to six months of incident reports obtained by The 74 through a public records request. The private company also captured their journal entries, fictional stories and classroom assignments. 

Gaggle executives maintain that the system saves lives, including those of during the 2020-21 school year. Those figures have not been independently verified. Minneapolis school officials make similar assertions. Though the pandemic’s effects on suicide rates remains fuzzy, suicide has been a leading cause of death among teenagers for years. Patterson, who has watched his business during COVID-19, said Gaggle could be part of the solution. Though not part of its contract with Minneapolis schools, the company recently launched a service that connects students flagged by the monitoring tool with teletherapists. 

“Before the pandemic, we had a crisis on our hands,” he said. “I believe there’s a tsunami of youth suicide headed our way that we are not prepared for.” 

Schools nationwide have increasingly relied on technological tools that purport to keep kids safe, yet there’s to back up their claims.

Like many parents, Logsdon-Wallace’s mother Alexis Logsdon didn’t know Gaggle existed until she got the call from his school counselor. Luckily, the counselor recognized that Logsdon-Wallace was discussing events from the past and offered a measured response. His mother was still left baffled. 

“That was an example of somebody describing really good coping mechanisms, you know, ‘I have music that is one of my soothing activities that helps me through a really hard mental health time,’” she said. “But that doesn’t matter because, obviously, this software is not that smart — it’s just like ‘Woop, we saw the word.’” 

‘Random and capricious’

Many students have accepted digital surveillance as an inevitable reality at school, according to a new survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology  in Washington, D.C. But some youth are fighting back, including Lucy Dockter, a 16-year-old junior from Westport, Connecticut. On multiple occasions over the last several years, Gaggle has flagged her communications — an experience she described as “really scary.”

“If it works, it could be extremely beneficial. But if it’s random, it’s completely useless.”
—Lucy Dockter, 16, Westport, Connecticut student mistakenly flagged by Gaggle

On one occasion, Gaggle sent her an email notification of “Inappropriate Use” while she was walking to her first high school biology midterm and her heart began to race as she worried what she had done wrong. Dockter is an editor of her high school’s literary journal and, according to her, Gaggle had ultimately flagged profanity in students’ fictional article submissions. 

“The link at the bottom of this email is for something that was identified as inappropriate,” Gaggle warned in its email while pointing to one of the fictional articles. “Please refrain from storing or sharing inappropriate content in your files.” 

But Gaggle doesn’t catch everything. Even as she got flagged when students shared documents with her, the articles’ authors weren’t receiving similar alerts, she said. And neither did Gaggle’s AI pick up when she wrote about the discrepancy in where she included a four-letter swear word to make a point. In the article, which Dockter wrote with Google Docs, she argued that Gaggle’s monitoring system is “random and capricious,” and could be dangerous if school officials rely on its findings to protect students. 

Her experiences left the Connecticut teen questioning whether such tracking is even helpful. 

“With such a seemingly random service, that doesn’t seem to — in the end — have an impact on improving student health or actually taking action to prevent suicide and threats” she said in an interview. “If it works, it could be extremely beneficial. But if it’s random, it’s completely useless.”

Some schools have asked Gaggle to email students about the use of profanity, but Patterson said the system has an error that he blamed on the tech giant Google, which at times “does not properly indicate the author of a document and assigns a random collaborator.”

“We are hoping Google will improve this functionality so we can better protect students,” Patterson said. 

Back in Minneapolis, attorney Cate Long said she became upset when she learned that Gaggle was monitoring her daughter on her personal laptop, which 10-year-old Emmeleia used for remote learning. She grew angrier when she learned the district didn’t notify her that Gaggle had identified a threat. 

This spring, a classmate used Google Hangouts, the chat feature, to send Emmeleia a death threat, warning she’d shoot her “puny little brain with my grandpa’s rifle.”

When Long learned about the chat, she notified her daughter’s teacher but was never informed about whether Gaggle had picked up on the disturbing message as well. Missing warning signs could be detrimental to both students and school leaders; districts if they fail to act on credible threats.

“I didn’t hear a word from Gaggle about it,” she said. “If I hadn’t brought it to the teacher’s attention, I don’t think that anything would have been done.” 

The incident, which occurred in April, fell outside the six-month period for which The 74 obtained records. A Gaggle spokesperson said the company picked up on the threat and notified district officials an hour and a half later but it “does not have any insight into the steps the district took to address this particular matter.” 

Julie Schultz Brown, the Minneapolis district spokeswoman, said that officials “would never discuss with a community member any communication flagged by Gaggle.” 

“That unrelated but concerned parent would not have been provided that information nor should she have been,” she wrote in an email. “That is private.” 

‘The big scary algorithm’

When identifying potential trouble, Gaggle’s algorithm relies on keyword matching that compares student communications against a dictionary of thousands of words the company believes could indicate potential issues. The company scans student emails before they’re delivered to their intended recipients, said Patterson, the CEO. Files within Google Drive, including Docs and Sheets, are scanned as students write in them, he said. In one instance, the technology led to the arrest of a 35-year-old Michigan man who tried to send pornography to an 11-year-old girl in New York, . Gaggle prevented the file from ever reaching its intended recipient.  

Though the company allows school districts to alter the keyword dictionary to reflect local contexts, less than 5 percent of districts customize the filter, Patterson said. 

That’s where potential problems could begin, said Sara Jordan, an expert on artificial intelligence and senior researcher at the in Washington. For example, language that students use to express suicidal ideation could vary between Manhattan and rural Appalachia, she said.

“We’re using the big scary algorithm term here when I don’t think it applies,” This is not Netflix’s recommendation engine. This is not Spotify.”
—Sara Jordan, AI expert and senior researcher, Future of Privacy Forum

On the other hand, she noted that false-positives are highly likely, especially when the system flags common swear words and fails to understand context. 

“You’re going to get 25,000 emails saying that a student dropped an F-bomb in a chat,” she said. “What’s the utility of that? That seems pretty low.” 

She said that Gaggle’s utility could be impaired because it doesn’t adjust to students’ behaviors over time, comparing it to Netflix, which recommends television shows based on users’ ever-evolving viewing patterns. “Something that doesn’t learn isn’t going to be accurate,” she said. For example, she said the program could be more useful if it learned to ignore the profane but harmless literary journal entries submitted to Dockter, the Connecticut student. Gaggle’s marketing materials appear to overhype the tool’s sophistication to schools, she said. 

“We’re using the big scary algorithm term here when I don’t think it applies,” she said. “This is not Netflix’s recommendation engine. This is not Spotify. This is not American Airlines serving you specific forms of flights based on your previous searches and your location.” 

“Artificial intelligence without human intelligence ain’t that smart.”
—Jeff Patterson, Gaggle founder and CEO

Patterson said Gaggle’s proprietary algorithm is updated regularly “to adjust to student behaviors over time and improve accuracy and speed.” The tool monitors “thousands of keywords, including misspellings, slang words, evolving trends and terminologies, all informed by insights gleaned over two decades of doing this work.” 

Ultimately, the algorithm to identify keywords is used to “narrow down the haystack as much as possible,” Patterson said, and Gaggle content moderators review materials to gauge their risk levels. 

“Artificial intelligence without human intelligence ain’t that smart,” he said. 

In Minneapolis, officials denied that Gaggle infringes on students’ privacy and noted that the tool only operates within school-issued accounts. The district’s internet use policy states that students should “expect only limited privacy,” and that the misuse of school equipment could result in discipline and “civil or criminal liability.” District leaders have also cited compliance with the Clinton-era which became law in 2000 and requires schools to monitor “the online activities of minors.” 

Patterson suggested that teachers aren’t paying close enough attention to keep students safe on their own and “sometimes they forget that they’re mandated reporters.” On the , Patterson says he launched the company in 1999 to provide teachers with “an easy way to watch over their gaggle of students.” Legally, teachers are mandated to report suspected abuse and neglect, but Patterson broadens their sphere of responsibility and his company’s role in meeting it. As technology becomes a key facet of American education, Patterson said that schools “have a moral obligation to protect the kids on their digital playground.” 

But Elizabeth Laird, the director of equity in civic technology at the Center for Democracy and Technology, argued the federal law was never intended to mandate student “tracking” through artificial intelligence. In fact, the statute includes a disclaimer stating it shouldn’t be “construed to require the tracking of internet use by any identifiable minor or adult user.” In , her group urged the government to clarify the Children’s Internet Protection Act’s requirements and distinguish monitoring from tracking individual student behaviors. 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, agrees. In recent letters to Gaggle and other education technology companies, Warren and other Democratic lawmakers said they’re concerned the tools “may extend beyond” the law’s intent “to surveil student activity or reinforce biases.” Around-the-clock surveillance, they wrote, demonstrates “a clear invasion of student privacy, particularly when students and families are unable to opt out.” 

“Escalations and mischaracterizations of crises may have long-lasting and harmful effects on students’ mental health due to stigmatization and differential treatment following even a false report,” the senators wrote. “Flagging students as ‘high-risk’ may put them at risk of biased treatment from physicians and educators in the future. In other extreme cases, these tools can become analogous to predictive policing, which are notoriously biased against communities of color.”

A new kind of policing

Shortly after the school district piloted Gaggle for distance learning, education leaders were met with an awkward dilemma. Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer prompted Minneapolis Public Schools to sever its ties with the police department for school-based officers and replace them with district security officers who lack the authority to make arrests. Gaggle flags district security when it identifies student communications the company believes could be harmful. 

Some critics have compared the surveillance tool to a new form of policing that, beyond broad efficacy concerns, could have a disparate impact on students of color, similar to traditional policing. to suffer biases. 

Matt Shaver, who taught at a Minneapolis elementary school during the pandemic but no longer works for the district, said he was concerned that could be baked into Gaggle’s algorithm. Absent adequate context or nuance,  he worried the tool could lead to misunderstandings. 

Data obtained by The 74 offer a limited window into Gaggle’s potential effects on different student populations. Though the district withheld many details in the nearly 1,300 incident reports, just over 100 identified the campuses where the involved students attended school. An analysis of those reports failed to identify racial discrepancies. Specifically, Gaggle was about as likely to issue incident reports in schools where children of color were the majority as it was at campuses where most children were white. It remains possible that students of color in predominantly white schools may have been disproportionately flagged by Gaggle or faced disproportionate punishment once identified. Broadly speaking, Black students are far more likely to be suspended or arrested at school than their white classmates, according to federal education data. 

Gaggle and Minneapolis district leaders acknowledged that students’ digital communications are forwarded to police in rare circumstances. The Minneapolis district’s internet use policy explains that educators could contact the police if students use technology to break the law and a document given to teachers about the district’s Gaggle contract further highlights the possibility of law enforcement involvement. 

Jason Matlock, the Minneapolis district’s director of emergency management, safety and security, said that law enforcement is not a “regular partner,” when responding to incidents flagged by Gaggle. It doesn’t deploy Gaggle to get kids into trouble, he said, but to get them help. He said the district has interacted with law enforcement about student materials flagged by Gaggle on several occasions, but only in cases related to child pornography. Such cases, he said, often involve students sharing explicit photographs of themselves. During a six-month period from March to September 2020, Gaggle flagged Minneapolis students more than 120 times for incidents related to child pornography, according to records obtained by The 74.

“Even if a kid has put out an image of themselves, no one is trying to track them down to charge them or to do anything negative to them,” Matlock said, though it’s unclear if any students have faced legal consequences. “It’s the question as to why they’re doing it,” and to raise the issue with their parents.

Gaggle’s keywords could also have a disproportionate impact on LGBTQ children. In three-dozen incident reports, Gaggle flagged keywords related to sexual orientation including “gay, and “lesbian.” On at least one occasion, school officials outed an LGBTQ student to their parents, according to . 

Logsdon-Wallace, the 13-year-old student, called the incident “disgusting and horribly messed up.” 

“They have gay flagged to stop people from looking at porn, but one, that is going to be mostly targeting people who are looking for gay porn and two, it’s going to be false-positive because they are acting as if the word gay is inherently sexual,” he said. “When people are just talking about being gay, anything they’re writing would be flagged.” 

The service could also have a heavier presence in the lives of low-income families, he added, who may end up being more surveilled than their affluent peers. Logsdon-Wallace said he knows students who rely on school devices for personal uses because they lack technology of their own. Among the 1,300 Minneapolis incidents contained in The 74’s data, only about a quarter were reported to district officials on school days between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.

“That’s definitely really messed up, especially when the school is like ‘Oh no, no, no, please keep these Chromebooks over the summer,’” an invitation that gave students “the go-ahead to use them” for personal reasons, he said.

“Especially when it’s during a pandemic when you can’t really go anywhere and the only way to talk to your friends is through the internet.”

Title IX’s protections against sexual discrimination and violence extend to gay and transgender students, the U.S. Department of Education announced Wednesday in an interpretation of the 2020 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County. (The full notice is embedded below)

Acting on statements Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has made since he was nominated, the department’s notice reinforces that “on the basis of sex” includes sexual orientation and gender identity. The few tense moments Cardona has had in hearings before Congress so far have involved questions from Republicans over whether transgender girls should be allowed to compete against biological girls in high school and college sports.

“Today is an important milestone in the struggle to recognize the rights of LGBTQ+ students, one that we mark with pride,” Suzanne Goldberg, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, wrote in a .

Last week, the department’s Office for Civil Rights held a five-day public comment period on a revamped Title IX rule, and stressed that officials were especially interested in hearing from those who have experienced harassment because of sexual orientation and gender identity.

In a statement, Congressman Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia and chair of the House education committee, said “LGBTQ students will have strong and clear legal protections from discrimination in schools, and a safe learning environment.”

According to , it’s unclear how the notice will impact states that have passed legislation banning trans students from competing against girls.

Today’s full release:

Transgender students would be banned from competing on school sports teams based on their gender identity under a bill that passed the Texas Senate on Thursday.

Despite immense , the upper chamber voted on an 18-12 vote to advance . The measure now heads to the Texas House.

The proposal would prohibit students from participating in a sport “that is designated for the biological sex opposite to the student’s biological sex as determined at the student’s birth.” Students would be required to prove their “biological sex” by showing their original, unamended birth certificates.

State Sen. , R-Lubbock, argued on Wednesday that the prohibition is necessary to keep girls safe from injury and to retain fairness in interscholastic athletics. But Perry acknowledged that he doesn’t know of any transgender students currently competing in Texas school sports.

And medical professionals have largely debunked the argument that transgender athletes have an advantage, with showing people taking hormones did not have a significant performance edge in distance running.

Opponents said the Republican leadership-backed bill was a “fear tactic” in search of a problem that doesn’t exist.

“Trans kids, they just know they are not what their birth certificate says,” said state Sen. , D-San Antonio. “And that’s where we’re creating a problem that we don’t need to.”

The measure would codify existing school athletic policy. The University Interscholastic League of Texas, which governs high school athletics and extracurricular activities, currently relies on students’ birth certificates to determine whether they participate in men’s or women’s athletics. Notably, the UIL recognizes changes made to birth certificates to alter a student’s gender marker, though that would no longer be allowed under the proposal.

Both the NCAA, the governing body for college athletics, and the International Olympic Committee allow athletes to compete based on their gender identity.

State Sen. , D-Dallas, suggested that if lawmakers were truly concerned with player safety, they’d focus on legislating injury-prone contact sports such as football. He also worried that the proposal could be harmful to cisgender or nonbinary students whose gender expressions don’t align with traditional social constructs. And he questioned whether his colleagues were trying to legislate a situation that isn’t widespread.

“I think we spend a lot of time anticipating things that aren’t going to happen,” Johnson said. “If this becomes a real problem, there might be a more subtle way we can handle it.”

Wednesday afternoon, Equality Texas held a news conference outside the Capitol building in Austin to bring awareness to over 30 bills filed in the legislature that would discriminate against LGBTQ youth. Ricardo Martinez, the organization’s CEO, noted that the first of these anti-trans bills was filed 156 days ago, on the first day of bill filing for this session.

“That day kicked off the Texas portion of a nationally-coordinated attack on our community,” Martinez said. “This attack, which intentionally targets transgender and intersex youth, who are some of the most vulnerable members of our community, is especially cruel given that we’re still in a deadly pandemic.”

Landon Richie, an 18-year-old transgender Texan, skipped his classes at the University of Houston to speak outside the Capitol Wednesday.

“Trans kids belong in Texas and deserve the same rights, access to health care, access to sports, access to public facilities, as any other Texan,” Richie said.

Mack Beggs, a transgender athlete from Texas, garnered national headlines after he in 2017 and 2018. Beggs competed in the women’s division because the UIL ruled he had to compete against the gender that appeared on his birth certificate. Attorney Jim Baudhuin sued the UIL in 2017, arguing that Beggs posed an injury risk to other athletes and possessed an unfair advantage. A Travis County judge the case.

“Mentally, it took a toll on me,” Beggs last month. “I think we need to have resources in place for other [trans] kids who are in those positions.”

He spoke out against proposals like SB 29, calling them “revolting and honestly appalling.”

The move by the Texas Senate is part of a national push by conservatives to restrict rights for transgender students. Similar bills have been filed in at least 20 states. Three states — Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee — earlier this year signed the prohibition into law.

Idaho was the first state to pass a law seeking to block transgender youth from sports last March. The law has been and has been blocked by a federal judge as the legal challenge proceeds through the courts.

On Monday, the that it will only hold college championships in states where transgender student-athletes can participate without discrimination.

“Inclusion and fairness can coexist for all student-athletes, including transgender athletes, at all levels of sport,” the NCAA statement said. “Our clear expectation as the Association’s top governing body is that all student-athletes will be treated with dignity and respect. We are committed to ensuring that NCAA championships are open for all who earn the right to compete in them.”

Multiple games in the 2022 NCAA men’s March Madness tournament are already scheduled to be played in Fort Worth and San Antonio and the 2024 college football national championship is slated for NRG Stadium in Houston.

Disclosure: Equality Texas and University of Houston have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

Shawn Mulcahy is a reporting fellow at , the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

The first push came from the president, who on his first day in office calling for federal agencies to root out discrimination based on gender identity and expression, including in public schools. In February, the administration also for litigation filed in Connecticut by a group of high school runners who argue that their rights under Title IX were violated by the state’s policy of allowing trans girls to race against them.

Republicans picked up the gauntlet happily, with introducing bills to require K-12 athletes to compete in the gender category that they were assigned to at birth. Governors in , , and have all signed such laws, which have also passed in at least one chamber of state legislatures in , , , and . After a split between Republicans in South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem along the same lines.

Beneath the political stakes lie swiftly changing legal and cultural mores, which are themselves being reshaped by new discoveries on the biology of athletic performance. In all, the status of trans athletes — and particularly the question of whether trans females should be allowed to compete in the girls’ category in high school competitions — has been taken up by combatants on all sides of America’s ongoing debate over the politics of sex and gender. Meanwhile, as the fight moves from playing fields to legislative chambers and courtrooms, advocates are attempting to strike a compromise between the necessities of competitive fairness and inclusion.

That balance has begun to develop at the pinnacle of elite sport, with regulatory bodies like the and the reaching accommodations that allow trans women to participate under specific conditions — typically including measures to suppress their bodies’ production of testosterone, which is linked to performance attributes like speed, power, and endurance. But adolescence, when many trans children are still early in their social and physical transitions, is a far more ambiguous stage.

Joanna Harper, a sports researcher at England’s Loughborough University and herself a trans runner, observed that various proposals to address the issue for teenagers all come with downsides. In an interview, she set a goal of “being as inclusive as we can possibly be without destroying the competitive balance.”

“It’s so hard,” said Harper. “How do you tell a 15- or 16-year old that they have to go on hormone therapy to play sports? It’s an extraordinarily difficult thing to say, but for these very high-performing athletes, it does create a conundrum.”

To others, one consideration supersedes all others: the need to welcome trans children into all aspects of school life, including sports. Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, the executive director of the advocacy group GLSEN (previously known as the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network), said that no claims around competitive fairness could justify treating trans students any different from their cisgender peers (i.e., those whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth).

“To use words from another civil rights fight, we know that anything separate is not equal. We know that when we start differentiating across lines of identity, young people will not be served by that.”

A ‘patchwork’ system

But according to Doriane Lambelet Coleman, sex differentiation is vital to the survival of women’s athletics. A professor at Duke Law School, Coleman is the co-director of the institution’s Center for Sports Law and Policy. She is also a former collegiate track champion who has worked in both American and international settings to develop anti-doping policies and rules determining eligibility for women’s competition.

Coleman that Title IX, which forbids sex-based discrimination across all federally funded educational programs, clearly mandates the segregation of athletes into categories according to sex-linked traits. Since its very purpose is to provide women and girls with the same access to athletic opportunity that boys have always enjoyed, forcing cisgender females to contend with rivals whose bodies lend them a competitive advantage effectively “[defeats] the purposes of the institution that is girls’ sport.”

“We need legislation that affirms the commitment to girl’s and women’s sport, and specifically to this set-aside of separate-sex teams on the basis of biological sex,” Coleman said. “It was never in doubt before that that’s what separate-sex sport meant, but now that it is questioned, we need to re-affirm that commitment.”

But Coleman also rejects the legal barriers being proposed and passed by Republicans, calling them overbroad. Some exceptions need to be drawn for trans girls and women who have undergone hormone treatment, or who transitioned before the onset of male puberty, she added.

The legislative push at the state level began almost exactly a year ago in Idaho, which flatly banned trans females from playing on girls’ teams at K-12 and post-secondary schools. In instances where doubt existed about an athlete’s biological sex, it would be resolved by an examination of “the student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels,” the text read. (The law was by a federal judge last summer, and litigation is still pending.)

As the legislation moves through statehouses around the country, students are facing an increasingly divided picture of athletic eligibility. , 16 mostly socially progressive states currently allow trans girls to compete in the category that matches their gender identity. Among the rest, some require they take medically prescribed hormone therapy, some require them to adhere to their natal sex, and some offer no recommendation.

Willingham-Jaggers referred to the sharp differences between different jurisdictions as a “patchwork” system that cries out for national clarification. In her view, that should come through the passage of the Equality Act, a federal bill that would amend existing civil rights law to prohibit discrimination in housing, education, and employment on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. The Act in February, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has already announced that it will be brought to the upper chamber for a vote.

Federal action is warranted because of the anxiety that trans students often feel about athletic participation, Willingham-Jaggers said. According to , over 10 percent of LGBT students feel discouraged from participating in sports because of their gender or sexual orientation. Forty-four percent of respondents said they avoided locker rooms because they felt unsafe or uncomfortable, 40 percent avoided gym or physical education classes, and 25 percent avoided athletic facilities.

“What happens when we discourage or intentionally exclude young people who are non-binary or transgender from sports [is that we] lock them out of all the positive effects that sports have on all young people — cis, trans, or non-binary,” Willingham-Jaggers said. “What is right for all students is also right for trans students.”

‘It’s no longer about sex’

Given the tiny margins Democrats now hold in Congress, neither the Equality Act nor any other federal legislation centered on trans youth looks likely to pass this session. While the possibility of regulatory reform still exists — the Justice Department recently stating that LGBT students would be protected under existing civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination based on sex, including Title IX — policymakers and educators still face the question of how the rights of trans and cisgender girls can be reconciled when they come into conflict.

For some experts, hormone therapy is a necessary part of any solution, at least at the most competitive levels of women’s sport. In recognition of changing norms, leading regulatory bodies like the NCAA and International Olympic Committee have created policies that require trans females to undergo estrogen or testosterone-suppression therapy before they can become eligible for women’s events.

Though she condemns the outright bans now under consideration in U.S. legislatures, calling them politically motivated, Loughborough University’s Harper said it was “perfectly reasonable” to place some restrictions on the participation of trans women in competitions.

As evidence, she cited the example of June Eastwood, a University of Montana runner who the first openly trans female to compete in a Division I cross-country meet. Eastwood completed the prescribed course of testosterone suppression during her transition, and generally proved a high-level if unspectacular performer in the women’s division. Had she not undergone the treatment, however, she might have easily dominated her sport; while running in the men’s category, Eastwood’s personal best in the 1500 meters was just a fraction of a second behind the women’s world record.

“Successful trans girls who have gone through male puberty, who have experienced all the gains that gives them and are good at their sport, will simply be too good, too successful in girls’ sports, unless you require them go through hormone therapy,” Harper said.

A less hypothetical case came during the 2016 Olympics, when all three medalists in the women’s 800 meters event were either known or suspected to have that produces both X and Y chromosomes in women. With testosterone levels that far exceed that of typical female athletes, those runners to undergo treatment to reduce their testosterone in order to enter women’s events between the quarter-mile and the mile.

But what is possible at elite levels of competition might not be workable in high school. Not all trans children have access to hormone therapies, and requiring them as a prerequisite for athletic participation could inadvertently distort students’ decisions around gender transition. To make things even more complicated, Republican legislators in several states bans on minors receiving “gender-affirming health care,” a treatment method that can recommend the use of puberty blockers and hormone replacement. In Arkansas, the first state to such a ban, Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson issued a veto on Monday only to the next day. If other states take the same approach, many transgender youth could be faced with a Catch-22 scenario: needing hormone therapy to compete in sports according to their gender identity, but being prohibited from receiving them.

All of it combines to make high school sports a particularly challenging space to adjudicate.

The best-known conflict within the realm of K-12 sports is now playing out in Connecticut, where have sued the state in federal court for permitting trans athletes to run track against cisgender girls. Between 2017 and 2019, those trans girls, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, combined to claim 15 state championship races. While former Attorney General William Barr formally backed the lawsuit, calling Connecticut’s policies “fundamentally unfair to female athletes,” the Justice Department under President Biden .

In part, the debate hinges on interpretations of Title IX, which was enacted nearly a half-century ago with the express purpose of in educational settings like sports. At the time of its establishment, school districts and universities directed their athletic budgets overwhelmingly toward male sports, and the concept of transgender identity was mostly outside the mainstream. By some estimates, participation in girls’ sport has increased by over 1,000 percent in the decades since. At the same time, the law permits “separate teams for members of each sex where selection for such teams is based upon competitive skill.”

Duke’s Coleman sees the increasing social acceptance of LGBT communities as a positive development, but warns that it likely will also generate more such cases if states like Connecticut don’t carefully insulate the category of cisgender girls. Otherwise, she argued, it could drift into something like an open division freely entered not only by trans girls, but also gender-fluid and nonbinary competitors, and even trans boys who are actively taking testosterone but still permitted to compete against females.

“It’s no longer about sex; it’s not about sex-linked hormones; and it’s not even about gender identity, since trans boys can stay in,” Coleman said. “So I can’t even describe that group anymore. And if you can’t describe that group, who’s going to fund it? And if people continue to fund it, how will it stand legally? It no longer has integrity or a purpose that we can identify because you’ve let everybody in, essentially.”

Culture war fodder

Only a handful of states have so far restricted access to girl’s and women’s sports exclusively to natal females, and all are among the most Republican-leaning in the country. At the national level, Republican Senators and have both called for similar measures.

David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College whose research focuses on U.S. political parties, said that the GOP seems to be coalescing around the proposal out of a recognition that LGBT acceptance remains “a controversial, uncomfortable issue for a lot of voters.”

“Republican politicians, who are increasingly oriented toward cultural as opposed to economic causes, have been looking for ways to translate the culture war into policy and legislation,” he continued. “So much of the culture war is actually not about what the government does, but here’s a case where it can be.”

While that much of President Biden’s agenda is reasonably popular, the polling also suggests an area of softness around the issue of trans athletes. According to a 2019 poll from Morning Consult, agreed that transgender women possessed an athletic edge over other women. , administered last month, found that 53 percent of registered voters supported a ban on trans athletes in women’s sports. Even among Democrats, just 42 percent of respondents said they would oppose such a ban, compared with 40 percent who would support it.

Aside from those figures, state-level Republicans are likely reading signs from former President Donald Trump, during his speech at February’s CPAC convention that “women’s sports as we know it [sic] will die” if restrictions aren’t adopted. In the same way that some lawmakers adopted Trump’s hatred of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, and are now its associated curriculum from use in public schools, they are now attaching themselves to another highly charged topic whose salience he has recently elevated.

But few if any elected Democrats have vocally opposed allowing trans women and girls to compete in sports according to their gender identity rather than their biological sex. Of the 16 states where official guidance recommends that course, all but one — Florida — has voted for the Democratic candidate in the last four presidential elections. This too reflects the partisan and geographic polarization at work, Hopkins argued.

“You don’t have a faction in the Democratic Party that’s pushing back against that,” he said. “They’re not worrying about carrying Senate races in South Dakota or Arkansas anymore because they’re out of the game in those states. That has really contributed to the culture war polarization between the two parties: Neither party is really trying to compete in the parts of the country that, culturally, are on the other side.”