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Maine DOE says it won’t follow Trump’s gender order. Will Mass.?
The DESE has not made an official statement, but pointed out it has its own definition of gender identity.
Maine’s Department of Education said in a statement Friday that it would not enforce President Donald Trump’s recent executive order that said the U.S. government would only recognize two genders: male and female.
Executive Orders:
The department said the order does not affect state law or locally adopted school board policies, and that all Maine schools are “expected to abide” by the Maine Human Rights Act, which, among other protections, says all students must be allowed to participate in “all educational, counseling and vocational guidance programs, all apprenticeship and on-the-job training programs and all extracurricular activities without discrimination because of sex, sexual orientation or gender identity, a physical or mental disability, ancestry, national origin, race, color or religion.”
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“The MHRA also prohibits retaliation for asserting MHRA-protected rights,” the announcement said.
The anti-trans executive order will have a particular impact on young people, said Tesla Cariani, a lecturer in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Boston University.
“Youth have limited legal rights to begin with, which is one reason why the executive order banning gender-affirming care is targeted towards people under 19,” Cariani said, who added that the executive order and the ones that have come since — including one that bans transgender troops from serving openly in the military, and another that aims to end gender-affirming medical treatments for those under 19 years old — are “already negatively impacting the mental and physical health of students.”
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“The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system,” the gender order reads. “Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.”
“These are attempts to legislate and define trans people out of existence,” Cariani said. “But trans and gender variant people, including trans youth, have existed long before these orders and will continue to persist.”
The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has not released an announcement of this kind, and its communications director Jacqueline Reis declined to say whether the agency is expected to.
But, she noted, Massachusetts has a similar state law that “specifically protects students on the basis of their gender identity on the basis of their gender identity,” Reis said.
The law asserts that “No person shall be excluded from or discriminated against in admission to a public school of any town, or in obtaining the advantages, privileges and courses of study of such public school on account of race, color, sex, gender identity, religion, national origin or sexual orientation.”
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And DESE has its own definition of gender identity, Reis noted. It describes it as “a person’s gender-related identity, appearance or behavior, whether or not that gender-related identity, appearance or behavior is different from that traditionally associated with the person’s physiology or assigned sex at birth.”
Massachusetts, then, seems falls in line with the Maine Department of Education’s announcement, though it has not said so publicly.
“The Massachusetts Department of Education has an opportunity to come out with strong public support of trans and nonbinary students,” Cariani said. “They have a chance to send a message that Massachusetts will fight for the safety, respect, and dignity of trans and nonbinary youth even in the face of a hostile federal government.”
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