The new policy also alters the definition of rape, excluding “gender identity” from a list of protected statuses.
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The United States Department of Education will no longer collect data measuring harassment, bullying, or assaults of transgender or nonbinary students.
The Office of Management and Budget approved the rule change in July. The move comes as the executive branch agency has taken over many aspects of the Education Department, with the Trump administration seeking to consolidate and eventually cut the department entirely. In addition to eliminating data collection on bullying and harassment of trans and nonbinary kids, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) Data Collection unit will no longer track whether schools have policies protecting those students.
The rule change also eliminates trans or nonbinary persons from a list of protected people in its definition of rape. Whereas the previous policy stated that all students, “regardless of sex, or sexual orientation, or gender identity,” could be victims, the new policy reads, “All students, regardless of sex, or sexual orientation, can be victims of rape” — omitting gender identity as a protected status.
The changes are being made, in part, to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order from 2020, which removed federal consideration of trans and nonbinary protections and designated that only two sexes would be recognized (male and female) by the administration.
Seth Galanter, a senior fellow for the Edley Center on Law & Democracy and a former deputy assistant secretary at the Department under the Obama and Biden administrations, criticized the changes.
The collection of such data was a “toehold into getting a sense of what this population looked like for the first time, and the hope obviously would have been that we would be able to spot trends as more school districts started reporting this data,” he said.
The problem of bullying and harassment of transgender and nonbinary students was well known by the department, Galanter noted. As Galanter explained in comments reacting to the new policy:
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.
In response to comments panning the decision, the administration said it was not worth pursuing data on bullying and harassment of these students due to cost issues.
“OCR determined that its costs outweighed its benefits,” the Education Department said in a statement.
According to a Trevor Project survey from last year, nearly 6 in 10 LGBTQ students (59 percent) experienced bullying over the last school year. Those who were bullied “reported significantly higher rates of attempting suicide in the past year than their peers,” the report noted.
Thirty-six percent of LGBTQ young people “seriously considered attempting suicide,” the report demonstrated. Of trans and nonbinary young people, 4 in 10 (40 percent) attempted suicide.
While the Trevor Project survey provides insight into bullying and harassment of LGBTQ kids, the OCR report would have provided more concrete numbers on the issues trans and nonbinary students face.
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