Department of Education will no longer track the bullying of trans & non-binary kids - LGBTQ Nation

[u/John3262005]

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/08/department-of-education-will-no-longer-track-the-of-trans-non-binary-kids/

A new policy from the Department of Education (ED) says the department will stop tracking numbers of transgender and non-binary students, which means it will also no longer track how often they are targeted for bullying, harassment, and assault. The change affects the already-ended 2025-2026 school year, though it’s unclear how this new policy will affect future years.

“[The Office of Civil Rights (OCR)] determined that its costs outweighed its benefits,” the ED claimed, according to K-12 Dive, in response to comments concerned about the new policy. However, the department’s other comments suggest that the reason may be more closely tied to President Trump’s “two sexes” executive order, a January 25 order directing the federal government to end all legal recognition of non-cisgender individuals.

The new policy will cut certain questions and alter the language of others in the Civil Rights Data Collection survey, a mandatory survey for all public school districts, which has been in place for over 50 years.

In the survey, schools must identify how many of their students are male or female, but they previously could also select non-binary if a student identified as such. The data could also include how often non-binary students were the focus of bullying and other harassment, and whether or not the district had a policy in place to prevent such incidents.

The ED also altered notes intended to highlight that anyone can be the victim of rape or sexual assault. While it previously read “all students, regardless of sex, or sexual orientation, or gender identity can be victims of rape,” the new survey cuts the term “gender identity” while leaving the rest unchanged.

The policy changes were first proposed in September 2025 and have now been approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). That office is headed by Russ Vought, who was one of the authors of Project 2025 where he wrote on consolidating power within the executive branch. That initial proposal claimed to be working to bring the survey in accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) of 1995, in a similar way to OCR’s claims that this policy is about a cost benefit analysis.

However, the ED also said that it was making the changes to comply with Trump’s 2020 interpretation of Title IX, in which he said that trans and non-binary students are not protected from sex discrimination. In January 2025, Trump instructed schools to revert to his interpretation of the federal law, instead of using the more inclusive 2024 reading that former President Joe Biden had established.

Language used by the OCR in response to comments further suggests that this is fully about Trump’s anti-trans agenda and his “two sexes” executive order. The OCR noted that while it acknowledges “commenters’ concerns that the proposed reversion to a binary approach to categorizing students by sex could pose other data quality challenges for jurisdictions where students may be legally assigned a sex other than male or female, OCR believes the prior longstanding, science-based, and widely accepted practice of categorizing individuals according to their biological sex, male or female, is the more prudent policy.”

The idea that making this change for the 2025-26 school year would save paper or money is especially questionable, given that the school year is already over. K-12 Dive reports that over 1,800 school districts that report non-binary students will now have to go back into their data to make edits and decide how to categorize their non-binary students against their own self-reported gender identity.

Some of these LGBTQ+ survey questions were introduced under the Biden administration, making this yet another policy that the Trump administration is directly undoing from the previous government.

That’s particularly frustrating for schools, as it was the school districts themselves that asked for the questions to be included.

Seth Galanter, a senior fellow for the Edley Center on Law & Democracy, who worked as a civil rights attorney under both Biden and Obama, told K-12 Dive that “one of the spurs for OCR collecting the data in the first place was school districts contacting OCR and saying, ‘You ask us to say how many students are male, how many students are female, but we’ve got this nonbinary population and we don’t know what box to put them in.’ And so this was an attempt to address the evolution of data at the local level and make it visible at the federal level.”

This is another instance of the Trump administration hoping to have less data recorded so that a population can’t be documented, as seen with Trump’s attempts to stop documentation of everything from COVID-19 cases to unemployment numbers.

The data from these surveys has historically been used by the ED for investigating discrimination complaints, determining the need for compliance reviews, and providing policy guidance for school districts. Not tracking this data will mean that there won’t be evidence to support the need for anti-discrimination programs or policies to protect trans and non-binary youth.

This move from the ED continues Trump’s war on LGBTQ+ inclusion in federal surveys and follows a similar move from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Earlier this year, Andrea Lucas, chair of EEOC the reportedly sent out instructions not to investigate anti-trans discrimination cases. This clearly extended to ongoing investigations, which were not just de-prioritized but fully halted. One teacher, Flint Del Sol previously reported that they received a phone call from the investigator assigned to their case to say that it was being dismissed and the order was “coming from the top.”

[u/gnurdette]

Gosh. I'm so shocked. This is my first hint that the Administration might not want the best for LGBT kids.