State Board of Ed's gender language update makes Dems nervous

By MATT FRIEDMAN

08/07/2023 06:55 AM EDT

Good Monday morning!

It’s clear that Democrats in the Legislature and executive branch agencies don’t have the same priorities this time of year.

After the Board of Education last week adopted its latest amendments to “Managing for Equality and Equity in Education,” the biggest change of which “equality” in its policy in favor of “equity, Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin and Senate President Nicholas Scutari both issued statements criticizing the move.

“We believe that families should have a voice in what is taught to their children, and as long as we have a say over the matter, they will continue,” the statement, which followed Republican criticism, said.

Read this article in The Record for a good summary of the controversy.

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By a narrow vote, the Board of Education made what appear largely to be technical changes to the language, much of it changing language to gender-neutral. That includes sports, in which the board removed references to “both sexes” and “two sexes” in favor of “based on sex” and “all sexes.” This led to a lot of talk about how the Board just approved allowing transgender boys into girls’ sports teams.

It’s a complicated issue, but political campaigns generally don’t take well to nuance. And it looks like Democrats don’t want to get bogged down in this culture war a few months before an election in which their state legislative majorities are on the line.

If you read the Department of Education’s responses to comments, their position is that these amendments do no such thing — because it’s already allowed. Assigning students to teams “based upon sex assigned at birth or biological sex without regard to their expressed gender identity would not be consistent with State law,” the response reads.

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