Acknowledging the existence of transgender students isn’t “goofy stuff”

The Trump Administration demands states discriminate against LGBTQ+ students; South Carolina and other states seem eager to comply.

This piece is available for free by clicking here, thanks to the support of the Center for Educator Wellness and Learning.

In response to a recent federal order requiring South Carolina and 39 other states to remove materials from their sex education curricula, Governor Henry McMaster told reporters, “We all knew there’s a lot of goofy stuff in a lot of these educational materials, that have got no business being in there and we ought to get it out”.

South Carolina could lose around $1.58 million in grant funding if it doesn’t comply; statements from McMaster and other officials make it very unlikely they won’t willingly go along with the order.

According to the South Carolina Daily Gazette, McMaster indicated that prior Democratic administrations had allowed the targeted materials, which included advice to respect students’ preferred pronouns.

Photo of South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster by Kinard Lisbon, via McMaster’s official website.

In fact, a 2020 consent decree from a federal district court explicitly required South Carolina’s Department of Education to ignore a part of the state’s sex education law which violates the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. Specifically, the law required that sex education ignore the existence of same-sex or other non-heterosexual relationships.