Somewhere between banning books and editing museum plaques, the Trump administration found time for another passion project: deciding, once and for all, what gender really means. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — the woman who once famously suggested that guns in schools might be necessary to protect students from grizzly bears — has announced plans to roll back Title IX protections for transgender students. The new definition of gender in school policies? As fixed as Betsy’s smile during a Senate confirmation hearing.
If you’re wondering what qualifies the Department of Education to be the nation’s leading authority on biology, identity, and lived experience, the answer is simple: the same thing that qualifies a reality TV star to be president. Confidence. Lots of it. And the unwavering belief that facts are negotiable if you hold them down long enough.
Step One: Pretend This Is About Clarity
Bureaucratic overhauls always arrive gift-wrapped in “clarity.” DeVos isn’t out here saying, “We’ve decided to strip protections from trans kids because it polls well with certain voters.” No, she’s saying, “We just want to make the rules clear.”
It’s the kind of clarity you get when someone throws out the instruction manual and decides to guess how the IKEA bookshelf goes together. Sure, you end up with something that stands upright, but only if you lean it against a wall and never touch it again.
The problem with this kind of clarity is that it only runs in one direction: toward erasure. A definition that says gender is “determined by biological characteristics at birth” isn’t clarity — it’s a convenient way to write certain students out of existence on paper, so you can ignore them in practice.
Step Two: Call It Fairness
The beauty of the “fairness” argument is that it sounds noble while doing the opposite of what it claims. “We just want everyone to have equal opportunities,” they say, while quietly pulling the floorboards out from under anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into their categories.
In this version of fairness, protecting trans students is unfair to… everyone else. Title IX, they argue, was never meant to include gender identity — as though the law is some kind of sacred time capsule that must remain untouched, except, of course, when they feel like touching it.
It’s fairness the way Monopoly is fair if you start the game by giving one player all the railroads and then telling everyone else to “work harder.”
Step Three: Ignore the Experts
Ask any reputable psychologist, educator, or medical professional about gender identity in youth, and you’ll get a nuanced, evidence-based answer that takes into account lived experience, mental health, and the reality that puberty blockers do not, in fact, summon the Antichrist.
Ask this administration, and you’ll get a press release written as though it were cribbed from the comments section of a Facebook post your uncle shared. The experts are only “experts” if they confirm the policy; otherwise, they’re part of the “radical left.” This isn’t about protecting students — it’s about protecting ideology from contamination by inconvenient facts.
The Real Classroom Lesson
For trans students, the lesson isn’t subtle. The government is telling them: your identity is up for debate, and you don’t get a vote. The people who decide whether your pronouns get respected in gym class are the same ones who think gender-neutral bathrooms are the first sign of societal collapse.
Title IX was supposed to ensure that no student faces discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded education. Rolling back protections for trans youth says, “We’re fine with discrimination — as long as we define the terms.”
Why It Matters Beyond the Schoolyard
This isn’t just about which locker room a student uses or whether their name is read correctly at graduation. It’s about setting a precedent: if the government can redefine gender in education policy, it can redefine it anywhere.
The ripple effect is enormous. School districts will take cues from federal policy, often erring on the side of over-compliance to avoid losing funding. State legislatures will seize the moment to pass their own “clarity” laws. And trans students — already at higher risk for bullying, depression, and suicide — will be told, at every level of authority, that their identity is a bureaucratic inconvenience.
The Betsy DeVos Approach to Inclusion
Betsy DeVos has a knack for turning inclusion into exclusion with the same smile you’d use to hand someone a cupcake filled with sawdust. She frames it as “protecting the integrity of women’s sports,” “ensuring privacy,” or “respecting parental rights.” But strip away the talking points, and it’s just another way of saying: we will decide who counts as worthy of protection.
And this isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s part of a wider pattern of policies aimed at narrowing public life to fit the worldview of those already in power. Museums, classrooms, libraries — all are being re-engineered to ensure that the official story is the only story.
Progressive Pushback
Progressive activists are mobilizing, and they’ve seen this movie before. They know that once a rollback like this gains momentum, it’s not enough to simply oppose it; you have to make it politically costly. That means lawsuits, public campaigns, and getting the stories of trans students into the news cycle before the administration can flatten them into statistics.
And they have an advantage: reality. Every day, trans students live their lives, succeed in sports, thrive in classrooms, and graduate into the same messy, complicated adulthood as everyone else. No amount of redefinition can erase that truth — but it can make living it a lot harder.
The Slippery Definition
Ironically, for an administration obsessed with “clear definitions,” their own definition of gender will have to be endlessly maintained, like a poorly patched pothole. They’ll have to keep deciding who “counts” and who doesn’t — and since gender identity doesn’t conform to neat categories, every new case will force them to double down or admit they were wrong.
They’ll double down. Every time. Because that’s the real rule here: never admit the frame was wrong, just keep resizing reality until it fits.
The Endgame
The danger isn’t just this one policy. It’s the normalization of using administrative power to erase marginalized identities from legal recognition. Once that’s accepted, it can be applied anywhere — and to anyone.
Today it’s trans students. Tomorrow it could be any group that makes those in power uncomfortable. The only qualification for being targeted is being inconvenient to the official narrative.
In a few decades, there might be a museum exhibit about this moment. And if the same crowd that’s rewriting museum plaques gets to curate it, the description will probably read: “Early 21st-century education policy adjustments: Ensuring fairness for all students.”
The display will be neat, tidy, and perfectly inoffensive — unless you were one of the students who lived through it.