What will Trump policies mean for transgender students?

Experts say they don’t expect drastic changes

Since the Trump administration distanced itself from an Obama-era directive protecting transgender students in public schools this month, advocates have been left wondering what stance the country’s new leadership will ultimately take on the controversial issue — and how that might play out in local school districts.

New Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos hasn’t publicly voiced an opinion on transgender students’ rights, and during the campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump said he believed that students should be allowed to use whatever bathroom they choose.

But conservatives have strongly opposed President Barack Obama’s order compelling schools to let transgender students select the school restroom and locker room that corresponds to their gender identities, arguing that it violates the privacy and civil rights of other students. And this month, the administration abandoned an Obama-era appeal of an injunction issued in response to a lawsuit over the directive. The injunction remains in place, and the issue will be taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court sometime later this year.

As such, there isn't much of an immediate impact on policy, and legal experts and local advocates say they don’t expect drastic changes.

“I think the key thing to understand is how federal law impacts local policy,” said Cheryl Kleiman, a Pittsburgh-based staff attorney with the Education Law Center. “School districts can always provide more protection than those found in federal law, but they can’t provide less.”

Still, Ms. Kleiman called the move a “deeply troubling signal” of the administration’s stance.

“But at this point, they’re just signals,” she said. “The laws that protect students are currently in place, and the Education Law Center is ready and prepared to continue to defend and protect those rights.”

Lambda Legal, the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group representing three transgender students who are suing the PineRichland School District over its policy requiring students to use facilities that correspond with their biological sex, said the same.

“I think it’s important for LGBT persons out there to know that no matter the rhetoric, the uncertainty that may be occurring with the current federal executive branch, they have both statutory and constitutional rights that need to be respected and they have allies that are looking out for them,” said staff attorney Omar Gonzalez-Pagan.

Ms. Kleiman said school districts are still free to enact policies of their own to protect transgender students. Pittsburgh Public Schools was one of the first districts in Pennsylvania to do so last

year, and the board started working on the policy even before the Obama directive to the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice.

At the local level, “I don’t expect any change absent some directive in the opposite way from the Department of Education,” said district solicitor Ira Weiss.

But he says discussions about the issue will change.

“I think it’s going to be a decidedly less receptive approach to these sorts of issues,” Mr. Weiss said. “I think both the administration generally and the secretary [of education] historically give me no reason to believe that they’re going to have the same kind of views of this as the prior administration had.”

Ms. Kleiman praised Pittsburgh Public Schools for its policy, and said more school districts will likely now be responsible for putting their own protections in place for the most “vulnerable” students.

“We echo the call to keep those protections, to keep ensuring that policies and practices are in place to protect the rights of students and make sure schools are inclusive and fair and welcoming to all students,” she said.