Education Department's Delayed Civil Rights Survey Scrubs All Gender Identity Data, DOJ Sues Kansas School District Over Parental Notice

Since the Education Department released its long-overdue Civil Rights Data Collection for the 2023-2024 school year this week, an Associated Press analysis has turned up something the initial coverage of the release didn't fully capture: every single data column tied to gender identity has been wiped clean.

Where the survey once tracked nonbinary students as a category alongside male and female, and tallied allegations of bullying based on gender identity, the new release shows a repeated code instead: "Suppressed in Compliance with Executive Order." That's a direct reference to the executive order President Trump signed on his first day in office defining sex as strictly male or female under federal policy.

The suppression didn't stop at headcounts. AP found the government also erased data on whether school districts had written anti-harassment policies covering gender identity, and stripped out any links to those policies. Roughly 1,800 of the more than 13,000 school districts nationwide had reported this data in the last collection cycle, according to Seth Galanter, a senior fellow at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy who ran the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights under both the Obama and Biden administrations.

"We're losing the granular experience of those kids," Galanter told AP. "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." A school district that quietly ignores bullying complaints tied to gender identity now has one less federal data trail exposing it. The Education Department did not respond to AP's request for comment.

A parental-rights lawsuit built on 1970s privacy law

The data purge landed the same week the DOJ's Civil Rights Division filed a lawsuit against Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools. The two stories run in parallel but are separate.

The lawsuit doesn't target the data collection at all. It targets a 2024 district policy instructing staff who learn a student is transgender or gender-nonconforming to loop in the principal, but allowing the district to withhold that information from the student's own parents if the student asks, subject to review by a panel that includes the district's equity and inclusion office and its attorney.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Civil Rights Division, called it a matter of basic authority. "Parental rights are paramount in the operation of America's public schools, and Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools does not know children better than their own parents," Dhillon said in a statement, according to the Daily Signal. "The Department will not tolerate school districts playing fast and loose with federal law in the service of radical gender ideology," she added.

The legal theory is novel: the DOJ is applying the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment of 1978, decades-old statutes never written with gender-identity disclosure in mind, to argue the district is illegally withholding student records from parents and asking students sensitive personal questions without parental consent. Education Secretary Linda McMahon had already found the district in violation of FERPA on July 1 and of the PPRA on August 25, according to the Daily Signal, laying the groundwork for the DOJ suit.

Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools disputes the claim entirely. The district said in a statement this week that it has "fully complied" with federal law despite the policy in question, though it did not publicly detail how it squares that compliance with the FERPA and PPRA findings McMahon issued.

The bigger pattern

The Williams Institute, an LGBTQ-focused law and policy research center at the UCLA School of Law, has counted roughly 360 instances since Trump's inauguration where the administration removed sexual-orientation or gender-identity data from federal collections. These include everything from Medicare surveys to the flagship school civil rights dataset. As an advocacy-aligned research center, the Williams Institute has an obvious stake in framing the removals as harmful, but the underlying count of removed data fields is a factual tally, not an opinion.

Supporters of the administration's approach argue the federal government has no business tracking a category, "nonbinary," that conflicts with the administration's legal definition of sex, and that parents, not school administrators, should be the ones deciding how to handle a child's gender questions. Critics counter that stripping the data doesn't make bullying or discrimination disappear, it just makes it invisible to regulators and researchers.

Both things can be true at once, and neither the data suppression nor the Kansas lawsuit resolves the other. The Kansas City district has not said whether it will change its policy or fight the suit in court, and no trial date has been set.