The new Trump administration moved Wednesday to revoke U.S. guidelines that let transgender students use bathrooms and locker rooms matching their chosen gender identity rather than the gender listed for them at birth.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer said a statement of guidance on the controversial issue would reverse a directive issued last year by former President Barack Obama.
Spicer said it was “not a priority” for President Donald Trump to rescind the Obama order, but that the new administration was forced to decide if it would defend it in a pending court case, and opted not to.
The spokesman said Trump believes in “states’ rights,” saying that the issue of transgender rights in restrooms in public schools and other public buildings is best left for the 50 U.S. state governments to decide.
Anti-bullying safeguards to stay
Under Obama, thousands of public schools throughout the country were required to grant transgender students access to bathrooms of their choosing, even if was not the same gender as on the students’ school records.
Under the new guidance, Trump officials said anti-bullying safeguards are being kept in place, to protect transgender students from taunts of classmates at their schools.
The Obama-era guideline was based on a reading of a U.S. law that bans sex discrimination in education and school activities, in the belief that it also applied to gender identity. The guideline was not legally binding, but it amounted to a warning to school districts that they faced loss of federal funds if they did not follow it.
The issue sparked protests in some school districts and opposition by conservative local officials, particularly in cases where it allowed transgender girls — those identified as male at birth but later chose to live as females — to use girls’ restrooms.
A laissez-faire approach
During his long run for the White House, presidential candidate Trump took a laissez-faire attitude toward the issue — a policy of letting matters take their own course, without interfering. At one point, he invited prominent transgender activist Caitlyn Jenner to use whichever restroom she preferred at his Trump Tower office building in New York.
Jenner, the former Olympic gold-medal winner known at the time as Bruce Jenner, used the women’s bathroom a few days later when she visited the skyscraper where Trump lived and ran his worldwide businesses.
“A trans woman in New York, I gotta take a pee,” Jenner said at the time. “Anyways, oh my God, Trump International Tower, I love this.”
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