The U.S. Department of Education is abandoning the collection of key civil rights data on the nation's LGBTQ+ students, cutting out data and definitions related to the harassment, bullying and assaults of a student group that has been found to be more at-risk of such incidents.
The changes will be made to the Civil Rights Data Collection, a mandated survey of all public school districts that has been administered for almost six decades, for at least the 2025-26 school year. Changes to future years' data collections are still forthcoming.
Changes to the 2025-26 survey questions — approved by the Office of Management and Budget in July — include eliminating schools' reporting of how many students identify as nonbinary, how often they are victims of harassment and bullying, and whether school districts have policies prohibiting those incidents.
The changes also eliminated the mention of "gender identity" from the definition of rape and sexual assault. Whereas previous collections defined rape as something that could be done to “all students, regardless of sex, or sexual orientation, or gender identity,” the proposed collection says, “All students, regardless of sex, or sexual orientation can be victims of rape” — explicitly striking “gender identity” in the new definition.
OCR typically uses civil rights data — which began including certain LGBTQ+ topics under the Biden administration — to investigate discrimination complaints, initiate compliance reviews, and provide policy guidance to districts, according to Education Department documents.
The data collections under the chopping block now also provided districts with impetus to collect information on and be accountable for the treatment of certain student populations, including LGBTQ+ students, experts say.
"It was a a toehold into getting a sense of what this population looked like for the first time, and the hope obviously would have been that we would be able to spot trends as more school districts started reporting this data," said Seth Galanter, senior fellow for Edley Center on Law & Democracy and former deputy assistant secretary at the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights under the Obama and Biden administrations, where he worked on the civil rights survey.
Galanter said that while the survey additions didn't require all districts nationwide to collect data and report on their nonbinary students, those that already collected the information were asked to report it.
"In fact, one of the spurs for OCR collecting the data in the first place was school districts contacting OCR and saying, ‘You ask us to say how many students are male, how many students are female, but we've got this nonbinary population and we don't know what box to put them in,'" said Galanter. "And so this was an attempt to address the evolution of data at the local level and make it visible at the federal level."
According to Galanter's analysis of most recent publicly available CRDC data from 2021-22, over 1,800 school districts reported enrolling one or more nonbinary students. That represents 11% of all school districts located across 39 states and the District of Columbia.
Together, they enroll 13,660 nonbinary students across 5,200 schools. While those are only the number of students schools have chosen to report, the actual number of transgender youth, including nonbinary, ages 13 to 17 is around 724,000, according to the UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute.
"OCR determined that its costs outweighed its benefits," the department responded to commenters who wanted to continue to include those students.
The department, which first proposed walking back the LGBTQ+-inclusive survey questions last year, said in its response to public feedback this month that "the decision to retire the nonbinary category reflects OCR’s effort to design the CRDC to be compatible with LEAs’ reporting and recordkeeping practices, the vast majority of which use two values for recording student sex."
"OCR acknowledges commenters’ concerns that the proposed reversion to a binary approach to categorizing students by sex could pose other data quality challenges for jurisdictions where students may be legally assigned a sex other than male or female," the Education Department said. "OCR believes the prior longstanding, science-based, and widely accepted practice of categorizing individuals according to their biological sex, male or female, is the more prudent policy."
Because the 2025-26 school year has already concluded, the more than 1,800 districts that do count and report nonbinary students will have to revisit their numbers and retroactively determine how to report them as "male" or "female," Galanter said.
"For them, it adds burden, because now they have to recode them and contact the parents, or somehow decide how they're going to characterize them as male or female," Galanter added.
LGBTQ+ youth at risk
The department is pushing forward with the changes despite public concern that doing so would affect districts' awareness of challenges facing the population and schools' inclusion efforts for that group.
The Trevor Project reported in May, for the seventh year, that LGBTQ+ youth are at higher risk for suicide as a result of mistreatment and stigmatization.
Some 36% of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered suicide in the last year, including 40% of transgender and nonbinary young people, according to the organization.
Nearly 60% of LGBTQ+ young people ages 13-17 said they were bullied in the past year, and those who did reported significantly higher rates of attempting suicide in the past year than their peers.
Commenters worried that the changes would mislead school officials to believe they do not need to address incidents of sex discrimination that relate to a student’s gender identity or sex characteristics, minimize the impact of sexual assault on vulnerable populations, and increase the incidence of mental health challenges for LGBTQ+ students.
The Education Department acknowledged pushback to each of its changes — and in some cases disagreed — but ultimately did not reverse course on its controversial changes.
The agency defended some of its changes as compliance under an executive order titled "Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government." That order states that it is the nation's policy to "recognize two sexes, male and female" and that "these sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality."
The department has used that and other executive orders to crack down on LGBTQ+-inclusive efforts in schools, including policies regarding pronoun usage, parental notification, facility usage and athletics participation.
