Trump administration suppresses data on gender-based bullying in schools

The Trump administration has removed data on transgender and nonbinary students from the latest federal Civil Rights Data Collection, including figures on bullying and harassment based on gender identity.

The U.S. Education Department’s survey covers nearly every public school in the country and was conducted for the 2023-2024 school year. Although the survey included “nonbinary” as a gender category, data in all fields related to gender identity were replaced with a code stating “Suppressed in Compliance with Executive Order," The Associated Press reports. 

The code refers to an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office directing the federal government to recognise sex as only male or female.

The administration also suppressed data on allegations of bullying or harassment based on gender identity, school policies addressing such conduct and links to those policies.

Seth Galanter, a former Education Department civil rights attorney, said the changes would make it harder to assess the experiences of transgender and nonbinary students.

“We’re losing the granular experience of those kids,” Galanter said. “They exist in the world, their schools acknowledge their existence, but we now no longer have any way to have any kind of local, state or national picture about these kids and what their school experience is like.”

Only districts that already collected information on transgender and nonbinary students were required to submit such data. About 1,800 of more than 13,000 U.S. school districts did so in the latest collection.

The Education Department said its Office for Civil Rights would release additional data in the coming weeks and is “realigning the functions of OCR to align with its statutory mandate.”

The data suppression is part of the Trump administration’s broader efforts to remove gender-identity information from federal data collections and limit protections for transgender and nonbinary students in schools.

By Sabina Mammadli