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'We Will Fight': Denver Schools Defy Trump's Attacks on Trans Students Despite Threats to Federal Funds
"The district has made clear it will not fold quietly, signaling that some institutions still have the resolve to stand against a federal campaign of erasure," wrote one LGBTQ+ rights journalist.
Sep 03, 2025
As educational institutions around the country capitulate, Denver's public school system said Tuesday that it would defy demands from the Trump administration to discriminate against transgender students even if it means losing federal funds.
Alex Marrero, the superintendent of Denver Public Schools (DPS), said the school "will protect all of their students from this hostile administration," by refusing to implement a ban on gender-neutral bathrooms mandated by Trump's Department of Education.
On Thursday, the department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) sent Denver Public Schools an email demanding that the school remove a multi-stall, gender-neutral restroom at one of its high schools, which it claimed violated Title IX of the Civil Rights Act.
As Erin Reed, an independent journalist who covers LGBTQ+ rights, notes, the facility built by DPS and other schools is "similar to facilities in major airports, European cities, and increasingly across the United States." The school, meanwhile, has said that the facility was requested by students themselves and has 12-foot high partitions to protect their privacy.
The OCR went further. To be compliant with Title IX, it said, the school also had to "adopt biology-based definitions for the words 'male' and 'female'," meaning they needed to classify transgender students by their biological sex at birth rather than their preferred identities, including banning them from restrooms that do not correspond to their biological sex.
The Trump administration also called on the school to eliminate components of its "LGBTQ+ Toolkit," which includes guidance on how students and faculty can create a welcoming environment for their trans peers. Among other things, the document encourages members of the school community to step in to stop bullying of LGBTQ+ students, respect the preferred pronouns of all students, and for faculty to enforce dress codes in a gender-neutral way.
As Reed put it, the department was effectively "claiming that Title IX actually mandates discrimination against transgender students."
If DPS refused to comply within 10 days, the department threatened to strip the district of federal funding, which makes up 7% of the school's annual budget, according to Chalkbeat. A large portion of that federal money goes toward low-cost school lunches for poor children.
In a statement issued Tuesday, DPS's school board and administration put out a statement "disagreeing unequivocally" with the government's interpretation of the law.
"Title IX permits schools to provide sex-separate restrooms. It does not require that to be the only option," DPS argued. "The interpretation put forward by OCR would undercut our equity commitments, contradict our mission, harm the very students we are entrusted to support, and would have a devastating impact on East High School and the broader LGBTQ+ community. What matters most is that students are safe, have privacy, and can learn without fear."
"The decision to implement gender-neutral restrooms at East followed direct feedback from LGBTQ+ students who reported they did not feel safe," the statement continued. "For these students, access to a restroom where they feel secure is not symbolic. It is about dignity, health, and the ability to learn. When students speak, we listen and we act."
Superintendent Marrero, meanwhile, put out a short video on Instagram expressing his support for the district's LGBTQ+ students.
"As you might have seen in the news, the federal government has decided to take a firm stance and have us roll back our support to the LGBTQ+ community, and of course, we're not having it," Marrero said. "We will continue to stand in solidarity, and as you engage this weekend and beyond, I just wanted to let you know that we got you, and everything is going to be ok."
In a statement published alongside the video, Marrero wrote: "We will fight. In the courts, if we must. In the public square, when necessary. Always in partnership with those who believe that every student deserves to show up to school ready to learn, free from fear."
With this pledge to stand by its LGBTQ+ students, DPS joined five school districts in Virginia that last month responded with similar defiance when the Trump administration ordered them to stop allowing trans students to use bathrooms matching their gender. Those districts—which include Loudoun, Arlington, and Fairfax Counties—have launched a lawsuit against the Trump administration to keep their federal funding.
"Elite institutions like Brown, Columbia, and Penn—as well as multiple hospitals serving transgender youth—have already capitulated, signing away protections through bathroom and sports bans or cutting off medical care entirely," Reed wrote. "Denver Public Schools, by contrast, has drawn a line. With the Department of Education's deadline looming next Monday, the district has made clear it will not fold quietly, signaling that some institutions still have the resolve to stand against a federal campaign of erasure."
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Fear and Loathing in the Preseason: Democracy on Thursday Night
Three days. Three moves. Ballots declared scams. Registration ruled improper. Maps tilted. The point isn’t just to block opponents. It is to shred the idea that there are fair rules at all.
Aug 23, 2025
It’s preseason football. The games don’t count, but the plays do. August is when coaches test the roster, run experiments, and flash just enough of the playbook to hint at what’s coming. Starters run a series or two. Rookies play like their careers depend on it. Veterans jog through familiar routes. Preseason is rehearsal and preview, a low-stakes glimpse of how the coach plans to run the real game.
That’s also what American politics looked like this week. US President Donald Trump was the coach. His team was on the field. And nothing he called was random. These weren’t scattered plays. They were practice runs for one central move: Erase the idea of neutral rules, brand every referee a cheat, and make only one result possible.
On Monday, he declared mail ballots and voting machines a scam and promised to federalize state elections with the stroke of a pen. His Truth Social post read like a coach screaming the scoreboard itself was rigged. Mail ballots? Fraud. Voting machines? A “total disaster.” His cure-all: government-issued paper ballots with watermarks, counted by hand, supposedly faster, cheaper, flawless. But the real twist was his insistence that states are “merely agents” of the federal government, bound to obey his executive order. That isn’t just trash talk. It is a constitutional mugging. Elections have always been state-run under federal guardrails. Trump wants them president-run, with states reduced to clerks.
The deeper move is psychological. Mail voting has been around since Union soldiers cast ballots during the Civil War. Voting machines have been in use for more than a century. Neither exotic. Neither inherently insecure. Yet Trump brands them counterfeit by definition. He isn’t accusing Democrats of bending rules. He is saying the rules themselves are a scam. Once the scoreboard is declared broken, only he can decide the final score.
In American democracy, the season has already begun, the field is tilted, the scoreboard is broken, and the refs have been run off.
The next day brought a subtler drill, but the same logic. In a “Dear Colleague” letter, the Department of Education barred colleges from using federal work-study jobs for voter registration, even if the work was nonpartisan. Registration, they argued, was “political activity.” Political activity cannot be paid with federal funds. Which wipes out the kids at folding tables in student centers, the ones passing forms in dorms, the reminders before deadlines. Without them, colleges are still technically required to hand out forms, but the mandate is toothless. The memo even lets schools withhold them from students they “reasonably believe” are ineligible, like international students. In practice, discretion becomes exclusion.
This isn’t mobs storming the field. It is the authoritarianism of memos: quiet, technical, bureaucratic. A faceless letterhead does what the riot could not. Clipboards become contraband. Neutral acts—handing out a form, reminding someone of a deadline—are suddenly reclassified as dirty tricks. The players who kept the drive alive are ruled out of bounds, whistled for fouls that do not exist.
By midweek the action shifted to Austin. Texas Republicans, at Trump’s demand, rammed through a new congressional map. Democrats tried to deny a quorum by fleeing the state. They were threatened with arrest and ended up sleeping on the House floor. “I want to cry, but I am too angry,” said state Rep. Nicole Collier (D-95), exhausted and furious. The maps weren’t surprising, but they were ruthless: Communities of color carved into ribbons, cities lashed to rural strongholds, Republican dominance welded in place for years. Gerrymandering is an old sport. What’s new is how openly it is played as loyalty to Trump. Gov. Greg Abbott congratulated his party for “staying true to Texas.” Democrats called it dictatorship by district. Both were right. The field itself had been tilted until one team always played uphill.
Three days. Three moves. Ballots declared scams. Registration ruled improper. Maps tilted. The point isn’t just to block opponents. It is to shred the idea that there are fair rules at all. Once the referees are branded cheaters, every loss looks stolen and every victory feels like divine justice. That is how a system loses the ground it plays on.
We’ve seen this game before. After Reconstruction, Black political participation itself was cast as fraud. The sight of Black officeholders was derided as “Negro domination.” Literacy tests and poll taxes were marketed as neutral “integrity measures,” though their purpose was exclusion. Everyone knew the score was rigged. The trick worked anyway because neutrality had already been redefined as corruption.
The pattern repeats. In the 1960s, psychiatrists described civil rights activism as “protest psychosis.” In the Soviet Union, dissidents were diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia.” In Hungary, Viktor Orbán branded NGOs as “foreign agents.” Different fields, same tactic: Erase the baseline of neutrality so only raw power remains.
What makes this moment distinct is the speed and coordination. In 72 hours, Trump called the game crooked, the Department enforced it on paper, and Texas locked it into law. History shows that once neutrality is redefined as fraud, procedure alone cannot fix it. Reconstruction faltered not only because of violence but because federal enforcement was itself declared illegitimate. Jim Crow endured not only because of poll taxes but because Black citizenship itself was rebranded as a scam. Once the field is said to be broken, every call looks rigged.
And the breakdown isn’t just on the field. It is in the stands. Pew finds nearly half of Republicans now say mail ballots are fraudulent by definition. Trust in voting machines has cratered. Gallup reports confidence in federal institutions at record lows. Even basic registration drives—students handing out forms, neighbors reminding each other of deadlines—are increasingly seen as partisan cons. Some call this polarization. It is worse. Polarization assumes the same field, however bitterly contested. What is dissolving now is belief in the field itself.
Trump’s conditioning drill is simple: Teach the fans to boo the refs before kickoff, and every call looks crooked. A loss feels stolen. A win feels ordained. That isn’t healthy mistrust. It is training people to believe the scoreboard only works when their side is ahead.
And that is the whole horror of preseason. You think it is rehearsal. You think the game has not started yet. You think this is just your team practicing, that things will get better once the season starts, that you will pull it together. But in American democracy, the season has already begun, the field is tilted, the scoreboard is broken, and the refs have been run off. The loudest man on the sideline is calling the score, daring anyone to say otherwise.
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Trump’s Purge of Civil Servants Is a Direct Attack on Civil Rights—And Democracy Itself
The dismantling of our rights relies on complacency—we must begin to organize protests, strikes, and direct aid to affected communities starting immediately.
Jul 18, 2025
The U.S. Supreme Court just handed President Donald Trump a blank check to dismantle the federal government—and with it, the last safeguards for civil rights in America.
In an unsigned order last Tuesday, the justices allowed the Trump administration to proceed with mass federal layoffs and agency closures, overriding lower courts that had ruled these moves unconstitutional.
The consequences will be immediate and devastating. For example, the Department of Education’s (DOE) workforce will be cut by half and Trump’s executive order to commence the closure of the federal agency is now enforceable. Among the first departments to face reductions? Nearly half the staff at the Office for Civil Rights. Seven of its regional offices—including busy ones in major hubs like New York, Chicago, and Dallas—have been shuttered. Thousands of pending civil rights cases will now hang in limbo.
This attack on the DOE—and the nearly 60,000 other workers purged from federal agencies this year under the Trump administration—aren’t just another round of bureaucratic belt-tightening; they’re a deliberate attack on our civil rights and on the only watchdogs in the federal government left that can stop Donald Trump’s authoritarian overreach.
Rolling back the gains of the civil rights era is precisely the point.
As a former civil rights attorney at the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights, I’ve seen firsthand how the oversight from civil servants at federal agencies has safeguarded marginalized communities. In my eight years as a civil rights attorney, I worked with other civil servants to ensure that every child in America—regardless of their background or circumstance—saw equal treatment and opportunity in their education. We were the last line of defense to ensure that students of color, women, LGBTQ+ youth, and disabled students’ rights were protected and anti-discrimination laws were enforced.
But now, with these attacks from the Trump administration, that enforcement will be severely weakened, if not done away with completely. What’s more, civil rights oversight isn’t just a casualty of cuts at the DOE; it’s every federal agency.
The Department of Homeland Security recently implemented a “reduction in force” for three key offices that oversee civil rights protections, including the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The Social Security Administration recently announced it was closing its Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity, where about 150 people worked investigating civil rights complaints. And, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has been frozen.
These attacks are not only morally reprehensible—they are outright unconstitutional. By dismantling agencies established by acts of Congress and diverting funds from congressionally mandated programs, Trump is violating the separation of powers and usurping authority that the Constitution explicitly grants to the legislative branch.
And make no mistake: Rolling back the gains of the civil rights era is precisely the point—Trump’s white nationalist supporters want to return America to a mythical white, Christian past. These interests just so happen to align with the Trump-backing billionaires for whom cutting public services frees up funds for lucrative tax cuts.
The issue is compounded by the fact that these cuts simultaneously do away with the last watchdogs left in the federal government who would be able to push back against this type of unconstitutional overreach attacking our civil rights.
When I worked in the DOE, I witnessed firsthand in President Trump’s first term how civil servants worked as a last line of defense against Trump’s authoritarian assault on our democracy. Although often maligned by the right as “deep-state” actors, these nonpartisan civil servants who acted on their oath to the Constitution—rather than any president—leaked damaging information and resisted unlawful orders, significantly stymieing the first Trump administration’s agenda. Their effectiveness was illustrated clearly by how this time around Project 2025 made their removal a high priority via Schedule F, which reclassifies nonpartisan roles as political appointees.
As these workforce reductions go into effect, the administration has simultaneously instituted loyalty screenings—ensuring anyone hired is loyal MAGA to the core and that only ideologues will remain. The result? There is no one left to investigate when our civil rights are being violated—and there is no one left to push back to prevent them from doing so in the first place.
The courts will not save us—that much is clear. And we all know what returning these functions to the state looks like: the Jim Crow era, where states, particularly red states, turned their back on civil rights and instead entered into a new reign of terror. But the dismantling of our rights relies on complacency—we must begin to organize protests, strikes, and direct aid to affected communities starting immediately.
If we wish to defend the civil rights of Black people and other communities of color, the LGBTQ+ community, women and children, and the millions of us who aren’t part of the top 1% and defend our democracy from Trump’s authoritarian attacks, we must become ungovernable now and resist every chance we get.
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