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U.S. Dept. of Education investigating California over gender identity privacy law

U.S. Dept. of Education investigating California over gender identity privacy law

Yahoo28-03-2025

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - The U.S. Department of Education is going after California over gender identity policies in schools.
The agency announced an investigation into California's Department of Education (CDE) Thursday, alleging the state violated the Family Educational Rights Privacy Act, or FERPA, the federal law that protects students' education records and gives parents the right to access and control them.
California's Assembly Bill 1955, which went into effect at the beginning of the year, prevents schools, districts, and similar educational offices from implementing or enforcing policies or rules that require employees to share information about a student's sexual orientation or gender identity and expression with any person, including parents, without the student's consent, with few exceptions.
The federal government said numerous educational districts and agencies across California are possibly violating FERPA "to socially transition children at school while hiding minors' 'gender identity' from parents."
U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon says these actions violate FERPA because parents are reportedly not being informed about students' gender identities, which may be discussed during the school day.
Federal officials said they're concerned California's Department of Education is playing a role, either directly or indirectly, in these alleged violations because of the number of local education agencies allegedly violating FERPA.
What they're saying
"Teachers and school counselors should not be in the business of advising minors entrusted to their care on consequential decisions about their sexual identity and mental health. That responsibility and privilege lies with a parent or trusted loved one," McMahon said in a statement. "It is not only immoral but also potentially in contradiction with federal law for California schools to hide crucial information about a student's well-being from parents and guardians."
The other side
KTVU reached out to CDE officials about the investigation. While a response has yet to be received, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond has previously affirmed continued protections for students based on gender, gender expression, gender identity, and sexual orientation.
"In California, 'all' still means all. While the Trump Education Department announced that they will no longer protect all students from discrimination, California law is unaffected by recent changes to federal policy and continues to provide safeguards against discrimination and harassment based on gender, gender expression, gender identity, and sexual orientation," Thurmond said in response to a "Dear Colleague" letter, an open letter sent from a federal official to make statements on bills.
The letter was sent on Jan. 31 by the U.S. Department of Education. Thurmond said the federal government was taking a backward step on protections guaranteed by Title IX, a federal civil rights law that protects against discrimination based on sex.
"While federal guidance devolves, our commitment to safeguarding the rights of all students persists," Thurmond said.
The Source
U.S. Department of Education statement, Assembly Bill 1955, CA Superintendent Tony Thurmond's response to "Dear Colleague" letter

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We're supposed to ignore the fact that these women admittedly never told Daedone or Cherwitz, let alone their sexual partners, that they were uncomfortable or didn't want to do these things. We're supposed to ignore the fact that contemporaneous accounts of these acts—emails, texts, journal entries, social media posts—often showed sunny feelings about what was going on. And we're supposed to ignore the fact that these women didn't report any crimes or labor violations at the time and are only testifying after being approached by FBI agents a decade or two later. The defendants are being held accountable for how these women feel—or at least told FBI agents who were making promises and extolling their victimhood that they feel—about 10- and 15-year-old sexual activity that everyone seems to have been perfectly fine with at the time. We're looking at campus kangaroo courts come to a federal courthouse, with U.S. attorneys fully embracing ideas about consent that were weird and radical just a decade or two ago. I'm sure this will be cheered by some people. I find the prospect offensive and dangerous. It's a total affront to due process, giving people little notice about how to avoid liability (since consent in the moment clearly doesn't matter). And unlike on college campuses, the arbiters of these disputes now have the power to help put people in prison for long stretches. It creates a dangerous situation not only for people who engaged in sex acts with someone claiming, decades later, that their consent was invalid but also for anyone who might be said to have "conspired" to have encouraged these sexual encounters or to have "participated in a venture" that received any benefit from them. It opens the gate to forced labor or sex trafficking prosecutions based on sexual regret. It's also one more step in the total infantilization of women, negating the gains in sexual and social autonomy that we've won. This situation where we expect all the rights of adulthood but none of the responsibility can't last. We're going to start seeing—we are seeing—rights chipped away at, too. At a time when many are keen to use sexual "harms" to justify everything from online censorship to limiting LGBTQ expression, curtailing reproductive rights, and encouraging women to give up on college and just have babies, no feminist, friend of women, or woman who cares about her own bodily autonomy and ability to consent should be cheering this safe space–ification of the DOJ. • The slippery slope of age-verification laws for adult content is on full display in France, where the "government is considering designating X as a porn platform — a move that will likely have the platform implementing strict age verification requirements," per Politico. It's not hard to imagine the same thing happening in the U.S., rendering laws aimed at carding people who visit porn websites as a backdoor to either require age verification for social media, too, or make social media websites ban sexually oriented content and accounts of any kind. • President Donald Trump is expected to once again extend the deadline for TikTok parent company ByteDance to sell the company or be banned. "Remember when TikTok was supposedly an urgent national security threat that required emergency legislation? Funny how that 'emergency' keeps getting 75-day extensions," Techdirt Editor Mike Masnick writes. That "should tell you everything about how 'urgent' this national security threat actually was." • "It would help immensely if the critiques of porn, did not confuse 'sex' with 'porn.' The push to be 'sexy' and sexism are not rooted in one form of media," comments Mike Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, in response to a New Yorker review of the new book Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. "But linking both evangelicals and anti-SW feminists is the idea that sexist evil can be traced to one tantalizing source. To do that, in these sexual monotheories, porn has to be a monolith. That it presents women one way (submissive) and with one look (skinny, with big tits). Antiporn texts depend on a charicature [sic] of porn, a flattening of sexual speech, in order to establish a clear directional effect on culture." As to the idea that focusing on consent in porn is somehow insufficient, Stabile posts: says: "We focus on 'consent'…because it's how we restrain the urge to police other people's fantasies and sexualities. Because saying 'your articulation of sexuality' is damaging to ME, is the same impulse that underlies anti-LGBTQ censorship." The post Federal Prosecutors Are Starting To Sound Like Campus Activists About Sex and Consent appeared first on

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