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Trump FCC Chair Hints at TV Warnings for Kids' Content That Acknowledges Existence of Transgender People
"This is a solution in search of a problem, and another example of this commission prioritizing culture war politics over the real issues that affect consumers every day," said the only Democratic FCC commissioner.
Apr 22, 2026
In the Trump administration's latest attempt to push transgender people out of public life, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr said Wednesday that his agency is weighing whether ratings on television shows should be modified to warn viewers when trans people are acknowledged.
Carr posted a public notice on social media that the FCC's Media Bureau would be seeking public comment on whether the TV Parental Guidelines age rating system—established under the Telecommunications Act of 1996—should include notices for "transgender and gender nonbinary programming" in a similar fashion to existing labels for sex, violence, and other content that parents could consider "harmful" to children.
Carr wrote: "Recently, parents have raised concerns with the industry’s approach... They argue that New York and Hollywood programmers are promoting controversial issues in kids' programming without providing any transparency or disclosures to parents."
Neither Carr nor the FCC's notice elaborated on what supposedly harmful content children were being exposed to or which programs it would seek to warn families about.
The FCC notice also asked for public comment on whether other changes should be made to ensure that the TV Oversight Management Board, which oversees the rating system, represents a "range of family values." It also inquired about whether it should add board members from religious organizations.
While the FCC does not directly implement the programming ratings, it does have a role in overseeing them. As FCC chairman, Carr has brought an unusually heavy hand down on the rights of broadcasters to air content critical of President Donald Trump.
He has threatened to strip the broadcast licenses of networks that cover Trump's war in Iran unfavorably. Before that, he was briefly successful in his efforts to bully ABC into pulling the Trump-critical late-night host Jimmy Kimmel's show from the air.
By labeling transgender and nonbinary representation as dangerous to children, Carr would be taking yet another action to bring the media landscape into conformity with the Trump administration's agenda, which has consisted of systematic attempts to push transgender Americans to the margins of society and portray them as deviant and dangerous, particularly to children.
Among a slew of other anti-LGBTQ+ policies, the administration has reinstated a full ban on transgender people in the military, attempted to punish medical establishments that provide gender-affirming care, withheld passports and other legal documents from transgender people containing their preferred gender identifiers, and aggressively sought to pressure school districts into adopting policies that refuse to recognize trans students.
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the agency’s only Democratic commissioner, criticized Carr's push to revise TV ratings.
“American families are worried about affordability, access, and rising costs, not whether the TV ratings system has enough warnings about gender identity,” Gomez said in a statement. “The FCC’s own record shows the existing system is working fine."
While Carr claimed there had been many complaints about "ratings creep" from parents, Gomez noted that the most recent report from the TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board said it received just 11 complaints about ratings guidelines in 2025 and that only two resulted in a ratings change.
Gomez said, "This is a solution in search of a problem, and another example of this commission prioritizing culture war politics over the real issues that affect consumers every day."
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'A Chilling Alarm': Trump Admin Kills Civil Rights Settlements Supporting Trans Students
"There is absolutely no basis for what the Department of Education is doing, and it is unimaginably cruel," said a leader at the National Women's Law Center.
Apr 06, 2026
Continuing the assault on transgender people that President Donald Trump launched as soon as he returned to power last year, the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights rescinded portions of settlements intended to protect trans students at five school districts and one college.
The department framed the move as "freeing schools" from the Biden and Obama administrations' "illegal and burdensome enforcement of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972," a landmark civil rights law that bars sex-based discrimination in schools that receive federal funding.
According to The Associated Press, "One of the school systems, Delaware Valley School District in rural eastern Pennsylvania, received notice of the change from the Trump administration in February and has since voted to roll back its antidiscrimination protections for transgender students."
The administration also rescinded provisions of resolution agreements with Cape Henlopen School District in Delaware and Fife School District in Washington, as well as California's La Mesa-Spring Valley School District, Sacramento City Unified, and Taft College.
This is a cruel step by the Trump administration that will make our schools less safe and welcoming for all.Trans kids deserve what every student deserves — a school that supports their freedom to thrive.
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— ACLU (@aclu.org) April 6, 2026 at 6:05 PM
"The Trump administration has opened at least 40 civil rights investigations into educational institutions that provide protections for transgender students," and filed lawsuits in California and Minnesota, The New York Times reported. However, "Education Department officials said there was no precedent for the federal government terminating previously negotiated civil rights settlements with schools. Civil rights lawyers who worked under Democratic and Republican administrations said they were unaware of previous examples of such a move."
Advocates for trans people sharply condemned the rollback, which came on the heels of last week's International Transgender Day of Visibility.
"This sends a chilling alarm that trans students really are a target of this administration," Shelby Chestnut, executive director of the California-based Transgender Law Center, told the Times. "It's extremely concerning. Students should be safe to go to school and get an education."
Shiwali Patel, senior director of education justice at the National Women's Law Center, said in a statement that "there is absolutely no basis for what the Department of Education is doing, and it is unimaginably cruel. Title IX exists to ensure that students are protected from discrimination and treated with dignity so that they can learn and thrive in our schools. It's always been about that. It's what students, families, lawmakers, and advocates fought for when Title IX was passed decades ago. But the Trump administration's Department of Education has spent its limited resources to strip Title IX of that very purpose."
"Real complaints of discrimination and sexual assault are going unanswered by the Department of Education while conservative lawmakers continue to escalate their attacks on a small minority of students," Patel noted. "Parents, teachers, and students need the department to focus on addressing real harms on campuses instead of rolling back policies that keep all students safe."
"We should all be alarmed at the Trump administration's cruel escalation of their anti-trans agenda," she added. "When they push laws that explicitly target trans people or attempt to use scientifically inaccurate language to define sex, they are also inevitably targeting all women and girls. They want to control what we do, how we look, and how we act until we are pushed out of public life. But we are not going anywhere."
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Trump Attack on Trans Athletes Continues as DOJ Sues Minnesota Education Department
"It is astonishing that any president would try to target, shame, and harass children just trying to be themselves, let alone a president with so many actual problems to address," said the state attorney general.
Mar 30, 2026
The US Department of Justice on Monday continued President Donald Trump's crusade against transgender youth competing in sports in line with their identity by suing the Minnesota Department of Education and the state's high school league.
"The United States files this action to stop Minnesota's unapologetic sex discrimination against female student athletes," says the complaint, filed in a federal court in the state by the DOJ's Civil Rights Division.
"The state of Minnesota, through its Department of Education, and the Minnesota State High School League require girls to compete against boys in athletic competitions that are designated exclusively for girls and share intimate spaces, such as multiperson locker rooms and bathrooms, with boys," the complaint continues. "This unfair, intentionally discriminatory practice violates the very core of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972."
The Associated Press noted that "the administration has filed similar lawsuits against Maine and California, and has threatened the federal funding of some universities over transgender athletes, including San José State in California and the University of Pennsylvania."
Tim Leighton, a spokesperson for the league, told the AP that it does not comment on threatened or pending lawsuits. According to The New York Times, Emily Buss, a spokesperson for the state department, said Minnesota's leadership was reviewing the complaint while remaining "committed to ensuring every child—regardless of background, ZIP code, or ability—has access to a world-class education."
While Trump and his allies have aimed to stop all trans women and girls from competing as they identify—including at the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles—the fight with Minnesota specifically traces back to the president's February 2025 executive order, after which the administration began investigating the state.
The Minnesota Department of Education gets over $3 billion in federal funding. Democratic state Attorney General Keith Ellison sued to stop the administration from pulling that money last April. In September, the US departments of Education and Health and Human Services concluded that the state agency and league violated Title IX, and the case was referred to the DOJ in January.
In a Monday statement, Ellison said that the DOJ's lawsuit "is just a sad attempt to get attention over something that's already been in litigation for months."
"Donald Trump is currently facing an unpopular war that he launched, rising gas prices, massive health insurance price hikes, and a partial government shutdown caused in part by his ICE agents killing two Minnesotans in broad daylight," Ellison said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "It is astonishing that any president would try to target, shame, and harass children just trying to be themselves, let alone a president with so many actual problems to address."
The DOJ filing about trans student-athletes came less than a week after Ellison and other Minnesota officials sued the Trump administration over its refusal to cooperate with state investigators probing the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents earlier this year, as well as the shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, who was wounded but survived.
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