The Trump administration has given 40 states 60 days to remove references to gender ideology from their sexual education curriculum or risk losing federal funding.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families wrote letters to 40 states and six U.S. territories, demanding the removal of all references to gender ideology from their federally funded Personal Responsibility Education Program materials within 60 days.
“Accountability is coming,” said Acting Assistant Secretary Andrew Gradison in a statement Tuesday. “Federal funds will not be used to poison the minds of the next generation or advance dangerous ideological agendas. The Trump Administration will ensure that PREP reflects the intent of Congress, not the priorities of the left.”
The Trump administration terminated California’s PREP grant last week after the state failed to remove gender ideology from its educational materials.
The letters inform states that the purpose of the PREP grant is for states to “carry out personal responsibility education programs consistent with this subsection,” specifically educating students on “both abstinence and contraception for the prevention of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS.”
“[T]he statute includes no mention of gender ideology, which is both irrelevant to teaching abstinence and contraception and unrelated to any of the adult preparation subjects described in section 713(b)(2)(C),” the letters assert.
“The statute neither requires, supports nor authorizes teaching students that gender identity is distinct from biological sex or that boys can identify as girls and vice versa; thus, gender ideology is outside the scope of the authorizing statute and any expenditures associated with gender ideology are not allowable, reasonable, or allocable to the PREP grant.”
The use of curriculum encouraging children to use gender pronouns was singled out in letters to Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Guam, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New York, the Northern Mariana Islands, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
In Alaska, the Trump administration flagged the use of educational materials that encourage the use of gender-neutral language and promote the idea that there are multiple genders. The curriculum used in Nevada informed students of how they could access gender transition procedures. In Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Mississippi, New York, Palau, Pennsylvania, the Virgin Islands, West Virginia and Wyoming, students were instructed to roleplay “sexual pressure situations” with classmates of the same and opposite genders.
Additional problematic content embraced by states under the PREP grant includes material defining biological sex as “the label a doctor gives to a baby when it is born” in Delaware and material insisting that “children between the ages of 18 months and 2 to 3 [years] begin to articulate some understanding of their gender identity.” In Washington, children were allegedly taught to “have a clear sense of their gender identity by age 4 or 5.”
Additional states and territories that received letters for including gender ideology in PREP materials are Hawaii, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Dakota and Tennessee.
Statistics compiled by the Trump administration show that a combined total of more than $81 million in federal funding is at stake in the states and territories that received letters over their embrace of gender ideology in PREP materials.
The threat to revoke federal funding for states that continue to use PREP instructional materials promoting gender ideology comes less than a week after the Administration for Children and Families pulled $12 million in funding for California due to its embrace of curriculum teaching about “altering” the body “through hormone therapy” and “adding or removing breast tissue” while instructing teachers to “remind students that some men are born with female anatomy.”
The Trump administration’s efforts to withhold federal funds from schools that embrace gender ideology date back to a Jan. 29 executive order signed by President Donald Trump vowing to cut funding to any public school that supports “indoctrination” including “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
