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HHS agency threatens funding for California sex ed program over ‘gender ideology'
The Trump administration's bigoted, anti-scientific worldview is driving new threats to federal funding in California. On Friday, the Administration for Children and Families, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, sent a letter to the state threatening to pull its funding for a sex ed program unless the state removes references to what the administration calls 'egregious' content related to 'gender ideology.'
The letter, signed by the organization's head, Andrew Gradison, accuses California's Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) of 'teaching young students that gender identity is distinct from biological sex and that boys can identify as girls,' and gives the state a 60-day deadline to remove 'all gender ideology references' from its curricula.
The agency said it's making this threat in the name of providing youth with 'medically accurate, fact-based education,' which is particularly Orwellian given that virtually every reputable medical association in the United States acknowledges that transgender people exist and that gender identity isn't fixed to biological sex.
A spokesperson for California Gov. Gavin Newsom told The Hill the PREP program isn't the state's official K-12 sex ed curriculum and defended the program's merits.
'To be clear: this is NOT California's K-12 sex education curriculum,' the spokesperson said in a statement. 'The California Personal Responsibility Education Program (CA PREP), which receives barely $6 million in federal funding, provides comprehensive sexual health education to adolescents via an effective, evidence-based program model.'
The letter comes amid a barrage of other right-wing attacks on trans children. The Supreme Court ruled last week that Tennessee can lawfully ban parents from seeking gender-affirming care for their kids, and the Trump administration announced it was removing specialized support service for trans and other LGBTQ people in crisis from a national suicide hotline. The attempt to censor California's PREP program seems like yet another anti-scientific effort by Trump and company to harass and ostracize trans people from public life.
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