Federal civil-rights data covering nonbinary students and gender-identity bullying reached the Education Department through school reporting. The department then removed those fields from the public release under a Trump executive order.
The Trump administration has found another way to make transgender and nonbinary students disappear from federal records.
This time, it did not simply stop asking about them.
Public schools across the country submitted civil-rights data for the 2023–24 school year to the U.S. Department of Education. That reporting included information about nonbinary students, gender-identity-based harassment and bullying, and district policies designed to protect students from that harassment.
When the federal government released the dataset, those numbers had vanished.
In their place, the department inserted a message:
“Suppressed in Compliance with Executive Order.”
An analysis of the newly released Civil Rights Data Collection found that the department systematically removed gender-identity-related information from the public dataset.
The students still existed.
Schools still documented what happened to them.
Federal officials simply chose not to let the public see the information.
What the Education Department Removed
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights administers the Civil Rights Data Collection, or CRDC, which has existed in various forms since 1968.
The collection gives the federal government one of its broadest tools for examining whether students receive equal access to educational opportunities.
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Nearly every public school and school district in the United States participates. Schools report information about discipline, advanced courses, disability services, harassment, school policing and other measures that can expose patterns of discrimination.
For the 2023–24 collection, districts that already tracked students that way could report them as male, female or nonbinary.
Schools also reported allegations of harassment or bullying based on gender identity.
Districts supplied information about written policies that prohibit gender-identity-based harassment or bullying and provided links to those policies.
The department removed those gender-identity-related fields from the public release.
In the previous collection, roughly 1,800 of more than 13,000 U.S. school districts reported information involving transgender and nonbinary students, according to a former Education Department Office for Civil Rights attorney interviewed by the Associated Press.
That number may not represent every transgender or nonbinary child in America.
But the information represented something critically important: evidence.
It could reveal where students faced bullying.
Researchers could use it to examine possible disciplinary disparities.
Parents and advocates could compare which districts adopted protections and which did not.
By removing the information, the federal government made those patterns harder to see.
This Wasn’t a Data-Quality Decision
The distinction matters.
The Education Department did not remove the numbers because officials found them statistically unreliable.
Officials did not cite student privacy as the reason.
Schools did not simply fail to submit the information.
Instead, the department labeled the fields “Suppressed in Compliance with Executive Order.”
That order came from President Donald Trump’s January 20, 2025 directive titled Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.
Trump ordered federal agencies to recognize only male and female sexes and rejected gender identity as a replacement for sex.
The order also instructed agencies to remove forms, policies, communications and other materials that the administration considers supportive of what it calls “gender ideology.” It further directed agencies to list only male or female on forms that require sex and not to request gender identity.
The policy now reaches beyond disagreement over transgender identity.
It increasingly prevents the federal government from measuring transgender people’s experiences at all.
The Government Can’t Fix What It Refuses to Measure
That creates a serious civil-rights problem.
Data collection does more than give researchers material for charts.
The Office for Civil Rights relies on CRDC information to guide investigations, policy decisions and technical assistance. Policymakers, educators, parents, journalists and advocates also use the data to understand whether schools provide equal educational opportunities.
A district with unusually high levels of gender-identity-based bullying should draw attention.
Researchers should be able to examine whether transgender and nonbinary students receive suspensions or expulsions at disproportionate rates.
The public should also be able to compare states and districts to see where LGBTQ+ student protections exist and where they do not.
Removing the data makes all of that more difficult.
That is the danger of making a marginalized population statistically invisible.
Discrimination does not stop because the spreadsheet stops counting it.
And the Erasure Is Continuing
The 2023–24 suppression did not happen in isolation.
The Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law documented approximately 360 federal data collections that removed at least one sexual-orientation or gender-identity measure during the first year of Trump’s second administration.
Researchers found that 338 removed gender-identity measures. Sixty also removed sexual-orientation information, even though Trump’s January 2025 executive order did not specifically require agencies to eliminate sexual-orientation data.
The Education Department has also changed what it plans to collect in the future.
Documentation for the 2025–26 Civil Rights Data Collection lists several gender-identity-related items for removal, including:
- The number of reported allegations of harassment or bullying based on gender identity.
- Whether a school district has a written policy prohibiting gender-identity-based harassment or bullying.
- The web address for that policy.
The pattern is difficult to miss.
First, the government collected the data.
Then it hid the data.
Now it plans to stop collecting parts of it altogether.
Why It Matters
The Trump administration often describes its anti-transgender policies as an effort to restore governmental neutrality or biological accuracy.
Refusing to measure whether a group of children faces harassment is not neutral.
Removing a database field does not make a transgender student cisgender.
Erasing a category does not make a nonbinary student safer.
And hiding information about gender-identity-based harassment does not make discrimination disappear.
It only makes discrimination harder to document.
This is what institutional erasure can look like when it moves through bureaucracy.
No dramatic announcement is necessary.
No official has to stand behind a podium and say transgender students no longer matter.
The government can simply delete a field from public view.
Suppressed in Compliance with Executive Order.
With that one bureaucratic label, journalists, researchers, parents, advocates and civil-rights officials lose access to information that could help expose what transgender students experience in schools.
Transgender students have spent years hearing that their identities are merely ideological.
Now the federal government appears increasingly determined to make evidence about their lives harder to find.
Refusing to count transgender people does not make transgender people disappear.
It only makes it easier to ignore what happens to them.
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