#Trump administration targets #Maine again, this time on #transgender policy in schools

The U.S. #DepartmentOfEducation. which Trump wants to abolish, is investigating whether dozens of Maine school districts are violating or misusing federal privacy laws and infringing on parents’ rights.

by Eric Russell, March 28, 2025

"The Trump administration is once again targeting Maine over its policies on transgender youth.

"The U.S. Department of Education – an agency the president is trying to abolish – announced Friday it has initiated an investigation into Maine’s Department of Education over allegations that school districts in the state are violating the Family Educational Rights Privacy Act (#FERPA).

"Specifically, the federal agency says school districts are allowing officials to create 'gender plans' that support a transgender student’s identity but then not making those plans available to parents.

"A similar investigation was launched in #California this week.

[...]

"Schools in Maine have been caught in a legal gray area between respecting student privacy and parents’ rights to be informed when it comes to children’s expression of gender identity while at school. Many youth live in families whose members might not be supportive of their gender identity.

"The Trump administration already has been investigating Maine for allowing #TransgenderAthletes to compete, something that is allowed under the #MaineHumanRightsAct but defies an executive order the president signed in February. This month, the administration found that Maine violated the federal law known as #TitleIX and warned that if the state didn’t make changes, it would risk referral to the U.S. Department of Justice and the potential loss of tens of millions of dollars in federal funding.

"The announcement from the U.S. Department of Education this week also warns that if any Maine district is found in violation of the federal privacy act, it could lose federal funding. It’s unclear how that will play out, though, because Trump is trying to eliminate the education department at the federal level.

"A spokesperson for the Maine Department of Education did not immediately respond Friday to questions about the investigation. A spokesperson for the Maine Attorney General’s Office declined to comment.

"Trump and his supporters have elevated transgender rights as the biggest battle in the country’s culture war and believe their messaging is a political winner, even beyond traditional party lines.

"In addition to his executive order barring transgender girls or women from competing in athletics, Trump signed another that says the federal government would only recognize two genders, male and female, a move some advocates said was designed to erase transgender individuals from existence.

"Many states, Maine included, have strong protections for transgender individuals."

Read more:
https://www.pressherald.com/2025/03/28/trump-administration-targets-maine-again-this-time-on-transgender-policy-in-schools/

Archived version:
https://archive.md/b6gpf
#MainePol #USPol #MaineResists #ProtectTransYouth #TrumpIsABully #Education #Authoritarianism #Fascism #CharacteristicsOfFascism #TransRightsAreHumanRights

I'm seeing an awful lot of Threads sourced nuggets espousing the virtues of, along with optimism surrounding, the #Fediverse lately.

This seems a bit sus to me, like a concerted outreach effort on the part of Meta/Faceplant and a few other largish, commercial actors to popularize their ulterior motives of domination by... Ahem, normalizing the concepts of #DeSoc and more specifically, the ActivityPub powered spaces in the Fediverse.

I actually dunno who MDBHD or John Oliver are, but I'm certain that they're no Oprah, although it would be nice if she would weigh in on the critical mass achieved to date in the adoption of Fediverse technologies that are #FOSS based, and #Privacy respecting.

To date, *Privacy has been of primary consideration and motivation in the development community surrounding the #ActivityPub powered platforms in the Fediverse, but the questionable players entering from the horizontally scaling decentralized social networking industry have, as of late, been overwhelmingly of the deprecated, privacy disrespecting, monolithic silo persuasion. These monolithic-ally inclined companies hailing from vertically thinking companies are an expected, yet suspect group of *privacy mining experts, sophomorically (sic) wading into the deep end of a demographic consisting mostly of privacy minded* individuals and notable developers of the FOSS based portions of the software world.

<tangent> These industrial surveillance engines are already back on their heels as they venture into what many warn as an #EEE incursion - but truth be told, already too late to the game to subjugate, assimilate us: #Diaspora #ZOT #nostr #Nomad #Matrix #TOR #Yggdrasil #I2P #IPFS / #IPNS and others, including blockchain based so-called #Web3 solutions with baked in privacy considerations at the protocol layer are being *Bridged to interoperate with each other and ActivityPub in the Fediverse at rates which the purveyors of industrial surveillance machinery must invariably only describe as "alarming rates" - that's good news for the average schmoes of the world like you and I. </tangent>

So why are we, just in the past few weeks, seeing so much attention given to the Fediverse by these #juggernauts, perhaps #dreadnoughts, that for so long have exhibited such great restraint and avoidance of the mere utterance of Fediverse, ActivityPub, or even alluding to the notions of Decentralization? There's certainly a particular spin in their delivery, leveraging third parties that obfuscate their participation in the dissemination of their, Great News.

Speaking of Dreadnoughts, just how was it that the great Bismarck was taken out? Remember? The outgunned and outmatched Royal Navy took out her port rudder!

It was the end of an era. A rudder post. The Bismarck was doomed to circle her watery grave.

But I digress...

Make no mistake, obscuring the lines between the privacy respecting FOSS based camps that have historically steered the direction of DeSoc has taken, and the deprecated, proprietary silo companies which have based their entire existence upon advertising and industrial surveillance models that I refer to as The Sunnyvale Syndrome family of data mining engines, is now seeping through the cracks of a clear delineation between these two prinicples - that of uncompromising privacy and open source development and that of proprietary, closed source subjugation methodologies leveraging **YOU as the product in inventory*.

Feel free to boost and share your comments at length here. A million people other than myself are here in the Fediverse and are really interested in just what kind of impact the introduction of these traditionally privacy raiding Industrialists will have upon their... scratch that, our future online safety.

tl;dr: Your very private, personal medical history and data (and that of your minor children, in violation of FERPA regulations) is being wholesaled and auctioned off by the so-called "Big-Tech" entrants and hopefuls that are at this very time knocking on the front door of the ActivityPub portions of Fediverse... Tread lightly, and consider how your every move going forward affects the unwitting consent to farm and sell your most confidential personal information.

it is up to you - it is your choice to affirm or deny - whether industrial surveillance is your birthright to embrace or your nemesis to destroy... You, We, have that power to decide.

#tallship #Privacy #Sunnyvale_Syndrome #meta #HIPAA #PHI #FERPA h/t to: @liaizon

.

RT: https://social.wake.st/users/liaizon/statuses/111714899199909225