Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, issued a statement blasting the Trump administration for backing away from protections, outlined by the Obama administration previous year, that allow transgender students to be treated according to their gender identity and access restrooms and other facilities that correspond to their gender identity.
Education secretary Betsy DeVos, despite being a billionaire anti-LGBT and ant-choice lobbyist, was hesitant to sign the bill, as reported by the New York Times, which would ask schools to no longer allow transgender students to use the bathrooms of their choice.
The Times reports that the Trump administration is rehashing Obama’s order due to ongoing litigation and some uncertainty over the directives Obama laid out.
Spicer then assured that the administration will “have further guidance coming out on this”.
Parents claim that the aforementioned guidance provide their families with the knowledge and security that the government is determined to protect trans students against bullying and discrimination.
Since January 2014, state law has mandated that students may fully participate in all school activities, sports teams, programs and facilities in accordance with their gender identity.
The guidelines, released by the Justice and Education departments last May, are nonbinding, but the departments did warn that schools not following them could face a loss of federal funding due to violations of Title IX, the law prohibiting sex discrimination in education.
That guidance will roll back a rule issued by the Obama administration that required schools to grant transgender students access to bathrooms and locker rooms that matched their gender identity, even if it did not align with their biological sex at birth.
“There’s just a general trepidation and distress around all the issues surrounding that the new administration”, she said. The Obama administration had appealed the decision, but this month, the Trump administration said it was dropping the appeal.
“Right now that’s an issue that the Department of Justice and Department of Education are addressing”, he said.
The suing states accused the agencies of issuing the guidelines by means of regulatory “dark matter”, a deluge of agency directives, notices, memoranda, guidance documents, and even blog posts which effectively create new policy without congressional legislation or Administrative Procedure Act (APA) protocols. Sessions, who has a long history of opposing equality rights for the LGBTQI community, fought her on the issue, pressuring her to back down and relent.
On Tuesday, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said the administration has chose to let states decide how to handle the demand for legal rights for people who wish to live as members of the opposite sex. He said in May that he’d rescind the Obama policy, but “still protect everybody”. “It’s understandable when a 16-year-old girl might not want an anatomical male in the shower or the locker room”, Anderson said. “The federal government should not be involved”.