Trump presents plan for using K-12 schools for racist and transphobic propaganda
President Donald Trump signed a toxic executive order Wednesday, barring federally funded schools from recognizing transgender students’ names and pronouns that align with their gender identity, Advocate reports.
The measure specifically targets social transitioning, which includes using chosen names, dressing in accordance with gender identity, and adopting preferred pronouns.
The order also mandates that schools notify parents if a student requests to use a different name or pronoun, a policy critics warn could forcibly out transgender youth, possibly leading to invalidation and violence at home.
The sweeping directive also prohibits transgender students from using bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender and prevents them from participating on sports teams consistent with their identity.
This is a fascist text
What is missing from much on the reporting on this case (including Advocate’s) is the fascist nature of the text. The Trump administration is no longer hiding that the goal is to create an education system that instills “a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand.”
“Patriotic education” means “an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles.”
We doubt that the extermination of Native Americans, the practice of slavery and the persecution of LGBTQ people can be seen as “ennobling”.
The goal is clearly meant to stop any teaching that make students question the racist past of the US and the current terror against transgender kids. The administration is turning the American education system into a propaganda machine for a cishet white supremacy. Real education is to be replaced with nationalistic propaganda.
The language used in the order is extremely toxic, using slurs and defamation to stigmatize those that support an open, just and democratic society. Any disagreement is seen as “indoctrination”, “anti-American, “subversive”, “harmful” and “false”.
All of these words could rightfully be used to describe the Trump-administration’s policy, but that is what fascists do: They project their own crimes upon those who go up against them.
Do not discuss real racism
The message given is that any substantial discussion of racism is bad.
The order will stop federal funding of any K-12 school that teaches what they call “discriminatory equity ideology”, which means “an ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.”
Concepts like “White Privilege” or “unconscious bias” (which are real, observable, social phenomena) are to be banned in schools receiving federal funding.
Any policy aimed at helping people of color in a white society is seen as some kind of reverse racism targeting white Americans.
A war against transgender people
There is broad agreement among researchers and medical experts (and their organizations) that gender incongruence and gender dysphoria are real phenomena, that they do not represent mental illnesses and that trans kids benefit greatly from the help the health system can provide them.
In spite of this the document is filled with insulting lies about trans people.
Gender affirming health care is presented as “surgical and chemical mutilation” . Trans women are presented as men.
This fits the rhetoric found in the previous Executive Order on “Protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation,” which states that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) lacks “scientific integrity”. (Who cares about real science, right?) Kids are apparently undergoing “female genital mutilation”. They are not. The use of puberty blockers does not include surgery.
So this is all about creating a false narrative that makes the social exclusion of all transgender people possible. They will definitely come for adult trans people next.
Protests
Advocacy groups swiftly denounced the order, arguing it effectively erases the existence of transgender people in schools and puts LGBTQ+ youth at greater risk of harm.
Nicholas Hite, an attorney with LGBTQ+ rights group Lambda Legal, condemned the move as “patently unconstitutional nonsense” designed to marginalize transgender students. He warned the order endangers youth by exposing them to increased bullying and discrimination.
The Human Rights Campaign also criticized the order, with its president, Kelley Robinson, saying that “All students deserve to feel safe and welcome in school. But this new administration is making it clear they want to dictate to children, their parents, and educators what they can read, what they can learn, what they can say, and who they can be.”
Trump may lack the authority to do what he’s promising, Jonathan Zimmerman, a University of Pennsylvania professor tells the Washington Post. He argues that the Every Student Succeeds Act, passed in 2015, forbids the federal government from mandating or incentivizing states to adopt or use any particular set of academic standards.
The order directs the education secretary to provide a plan to end “indoctrination” in schools within 90 days. Lambda Legal and others are considering legal action to challenge the directive.
But the legal approach must not be the only one. Pro-democracy activists and politicians have to stop beating around the bush and start telling the public that what we see here is fascism, plain and simple.
The photo is of an American school with kids saluting the American flag using the so-called Bellamy salute. For some bizarre reason many Americans did not find the similarity to the Nazi salute disturbing, not even during the Second World War.
Originally published at https://trans-express.lgbt on January 30, 2025.
