Trump administration scrubs data on gender-based bullying from school civil rights survey

The Trump administration has recently removed all data related to gender identity and nonbinary students from the Civil Rights Data Collection survey on school civil rights. This was done per an executive order signed by President Trump, which defines sex as only male or female. The removal of this data prevents the government from having a detailed picture of the experiences of transgender and nonbinary students in schools.

Only districts that already collected data on these students were required to report it, and approximately 1,800 out of the 13,000 U.S. school districts complied. Seth Galanter, a senior fellow at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy, explained that this suppression of data "loses the granular experience of those kids" and hinders the ability to understand the school experiences of these students at local, state, and national levels.

The Education Department stated that more data will be released in the coming weeks, but the removal of this information is seen as part of the administration's efforts to undermine protections for transgender and nonbinary students in schools.