The Trump administration gave California a deadline to eliminfate gender-ideology references from material used in a federally funded program aimed at preventing teen pregnancy, accusing the state of seeking to “indoctrinate our children.”
The Administration for Children and Families, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, wrote in a Friday letter that the state has 60 days to remove the gender-identity passages from material used in the Personal Responsibility Education Program or lose its federal grant.
“The Trump administration will not tolerate the use of federal funds for programs that indoctrinate our children,” said HHS acting Assistant Secretary Andrew Gradison. “The disturbing gender ideology content in California’s PREP materials is both unacceptable and well outside the program’s core purpose. ACF remains committed to radical transparency and providing accountability so that parents know what their children are being taught in schools.”
PREP, with a budget of $75 million, seeks to reduce teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases by teaching youth ages 10-19 about abstinence and contraception. California received $5,864,762 in PREP funding in fiscal 2023, according to a 2023 report from Sex Ed for Social Change.
The letter to Sydney Armendariz, director of the Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health Division at the California Department of Public Health, listed eight passages that Mr. Gradison said went beyond the scope of the program.
They include the following:
From the “Rights, Respect and Responsibility” curriculum for middle schoolers: “We’ve been talking during class about messages people get on how they should act as boys and girls — but as many of you know, there are also people who don’t identify as boys or girls, but rather as transgender or gender queer. This means that even if they were called a boy or a girl at birth and may have body parts that are typically associated with being a boy or a girl, on the inside they feel differently.”
From “Making Proud Choices,” a curriculum for ages 12-18: “Transgender refers to a person’s gender identity. Gender identity is your inner sense of your gender — Do you feel like a guy? Do you feel like a girl? Do you feel like something different than a guy or a girl? Often gender identity matches a person’s body — someone with a girl’s body feels like a girl on the inside or someone with a boy’s body feels like a boy on the inside — but not always. Transgender is when a person’s inner feelings about gender identity don’t match the body.”
From “Teen Talk High School”: “Remind students that some men are born with female anatomy, some women are born with male anatomy.”
Congress created the program to educate students on “both abstinence and contraception for the prevention of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections,” but the statute “contains no mention of gender ideology,” said the letter.
The state’s program material was approved by the Administration for Children and Families under the Biden administration, but Mr. Gradison said that was a mistake.
“The prior administration erred in allowing PREP grants to be used to teach students gender ideology because that approval exceeded the agency’s authority to administer the program consistent with the authorizing legislation as enacted by Congress,” he said in the letter. “California’s current PREP curricula and program materials are out of compliance with the PREP statute and HHS regulations and must be modified.”
He gave the state until Aug. 19 to submit its modified curricula and program material to the agency.
In April, the agency asked states to submit their PREP material as part of a “medical accuracy review,” but concluded that the gender-ideology references in the California curricula are outside the scope of the statute.
“In light of this, we are changing our planned course of action and are no longer conducting a review for medical accuracy because the content that we were going to review for medical accuracy is outside of the subjects that are statutorily authorized in this program,” said the letter in a footnote.
