Illinois Rep. Mary Miller called for stripping federal money from schools whose staff she accused of steering students toward new gender identities without telling their parents, citing incidents she attributed to schools in five states.
Miller, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, laid out the cases in a post on X. Her list pointed to schools in Massachusetts, California, Maine, Florida and Kansas where, according to the post, staff helped minors with gender transitions, handed out chest binders, or began using new pronouns for students while keeping parents in the dark.
“Across the country, activist educators are secretly pushing children to reject their own bodies while lying to moms and dads.
Enough is enough. Cut the funding!” Miller wrote.
The post extends a campaign Miller has waged for years over how public schools handle gender identity, and federal funding has been her lever of choice. She introduced the Keep Our Girls Safe Act to write President Donald Trump’s executive order on women’s sports into law. The bill directs the federal government to rescind funding from any public school that denies girls female-only spaces.
“My bill ensures public schools follow the law—or lose federal funding,” Miller said when she filed it.
Before that bill, she urged Trump to pull all federal funding from Deerfield Public School District 109 in her home state after a mother told the district’s board that her daughter had been made to change in front of a transgender student in a girls’ locker room. The district said no student is required to change in front of others and that middle school students can use private changing areas.
Miller, who chairs the House Family Caucus, also authored the Stop Sexualization of Children Act. That measure would amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to bar federal dollars from funding school books and curriculum containing sexually explicit material or themes of transgenderism and gender dysphoria.
Her demand lands while the Education Department presses its own case on parental notification. The department and the Justice Department announced enforcement action against Anne Arundel County Public Schools in Maryland and Ann Arbor Public Schools in Michigan, alleging both districts withheld information about students’ gender identity from parents in violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Federal officials said the Maryland district classified a student’s gender identity as confidential medical information, placing it beyond parents’ reach.
Civil rights groups said such federal actions violate academic freedom, free speech and due process. Jeffco Public Schools in Colorado sued the administration to block the Education Department from withholding more than $50 million in federal K-12 funding over its transgender policies.
Under the federal privacy law, the Maryland and Michigan districts now face possible judicial proceedings and the loss of federal funds as the enforcement cases move forward.
