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

BY STEVE NUZUM

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”. 

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.  

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. 

As the consent decree points out, South Carolina’s law also includes language requiring that sex education be “planned and carried out with the purpose of maintaining, reinforcing, or enhancing the health, health-related skills, and health attitudes and practices of children and youth that are conductive [sic] to their good health and that promote wellness, health maintenance, and disease prevention”. 

By excluding non-heterosexual students from sex education, the state was attempting to deny them equal treatment under this law.  

The same is obviously true of transgender and gender-nonconforming students in South Carolina, who morally, ethically, and legally deserve the same treatment and access to sexual health information as their cisgender peers. To ignore that they exist likely violates the spirit, and perhaps the letter, of the federal consent decree, and opens the state up to further legal action.

The federal letter makes the broad claim that a federal program intended to help students learn how to prevent sexually-transmitted infections does not include discussion of “gender ideology” (which here implicitly refers to the fact that many people do not self-identify with their gender assigned at birth). But, just as in the state law that resulted in the 2020 consent decree, this argument blatantly ignores the fact that all students, whether or not they are straight and/ or cisgender, are entitled to receive instruction that is relevant to their situation.

The use of the term “gender ideology,” an invention of a political movement to deny the existence of transgender and gender-nonconforming people, demonstrates that the federal law, and Governor McMaster’s response to it, are political moves that are not based in science, psychology, or good-faith concern for students.

Every major American medical association has affirmed the reality of transgender people, and has supported research-based gender-affirming care. 

Although the CDC did not specifically collect data on transgender and gender- nonconforming youth at the time, its most recent data on “sex risk behavior” involving “sexual minority” students indicated that LGBTQ+ students are at a higher risk than their peers for contracting sexually- transmitted infections (STIs). If preventing such diseases is the explicit purpose of the federal program (and the strongly-implied purpose of SC’s state law), it is counterintuitive and discriminatory to exclude LGBTQ+ youth from those programs.

And while steps like respecting student pronouns may not seem to be directly related to the prevention of STIs, it’s also impossible to imagine a program that gives these students adequate information while also erasing their gender identities. How could such a program address the fact that they are likely at a higher risk for contracting STIs, or the fact that they may need different advice than their cisgender or gender-conforming peers in order to reduce their risk? Research has supported the use of student’s preferred pronouns, even if many state and district policies discourage or even forbid their use. 

According to HIV.gov, the South accounted for 49% of new HIV infections in America in 2022, vastly more new infections than any other region of the country. Heterosexual people were a small minority of those new infections, and perhaps this is because of our long history of not acknowledging the need for specific advice in what the CDC calls “sexual minority” communities. In the most recent year for which state health data was available, 11,514 people died from HIV in South Carolina, and South Carolina has some of the highest per capita HIV diagnosis rates in the country.

It’s not comfortable to think about children and young adults being exposed to STIs or engaging in sex before adults may believe they’re ready. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t at risk, or that they don’t need factually-based non-political health education.  

And while most teachers will not have to deliver sexual health information to students, we should all be supporting our colleagues who do have that responsibility.  

The court was very clear in 2020 that to exclude students from sex ed because of their identity is a serious Constitutional violation. But even more importantly, excluding transgender and gender-nonconforming students from the conversation is part of a larger campaign to erase them from public life, which causes real and lasting harm to both individual students and to our communities. Students need and deserve better protection, and unfortunately our state leaders have indicated they are very unlikely to provide them with this protection unless we act to hold them to account.