#National Federation of State High School Associations

[justinssportscorner]

Donald Padgett at Advocate:

The Department of Education is urging the NCAA to strip awards and records from transgender athletes. The NCAA last month banned transgender student-athletes from participating in sports aligned with their gender identity. “Because of President Trump’s bold leadership, men will no longer be allowed to compete in women’s sports regardless of how they identify, and the NCAA has correctly changed its tune on its discriminatory practices against female athletes,” Candice Jackson, deputy general counsel for the DOE, said in a statement. “The next necessary step is to restore athletic records to women who have for years been devalued, ignored, and forced to watch men steal their accolades.” President Donald Trump has targeted transgender rights in a series of executive orders in the first days of his second administration. One of the orders signed on January 20, his first day in office, entitled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” defined sex as male or female based on the “immutable biological reality of sex.” On January 29, he signed an order entitled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” which barred schools that receive federal funding allowing trans students from participating in sports, using bathrooms and changing facilities, and choosing pronouns that align with their gender identity. [...] The new request would affect the awards and records of University of Pennsylvania trans woman swimmer Lia Thomas, who made history in 2022 as the first transgender NCAA Division I champion when she won the 500-yard freestyle event. The NCAA did not indicate whether it will honor the new request. Meanwhile, Jackson made clear her department will continue to target the transgender community. “The Trump Education Department will do everything in our power to right this wrong and champion the hard-earned accomplishments of past, current, and future female collegiate athletes,” Jackson said.

This is an egregious act of anti-trans history revisionism, all done to appease anti-trans extremists such as Riley Gaines.

See Also:

NBC News: Education Dept. urges NCAA to reverse transgender athletes' records, titles and awards

Outsports: Stripping sports titles and awards from trans women is a sick attempt to erase history

AP: Dept of Education asks NCAA, high schools to erase records set by transgender athletes

LGBTQ Nation: Trump’s Department of Education demands all transgender athletes be stripped of records & titles

[democracyunderground]

"Native Americans across Indian Country shared mixed emotions this week after President Biden apologized for the U.S. government’s role in running Native American boarding schools across the country.

During the 150-year practice, at more than 400 schools where the U.S. partnered with various religious institutions, Indigenous children were separated from their families and stripped of their language and customs in an effort to assimilate into white culture. There were also documented cases of abuse and death.

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who is a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe and has been instrumental in bringing these issues to a wider audience through her Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, applauded Biden’s move.

“I'm so grateful to [Biden] for acknowledging this terrible era of our nation's past,” Haaland, whose grandparents were taken to boarding schools, posted on X.

ederal Indian boarding schools have impacted every Indigenous person I know. These were places where children - including my grandparents - were traumatized. I'm so grateful to @POTUS for acknowledging this terrible era of our nation's past.

“I would never have guessed in a million years that something like this would happen,” she told the Associated Press.

At the Gila Crossing Community School near Phoenix, Biden celebrated Haaland’s historic role and apologized today for America’s “sin.”

“It’s an honor, a genuine honor … to right a wrong, to chart a new path,” he said. “I formally apologize as president of the United States of America for what we did. I formally apologize. It’s long overdue.”

However, Indigenous leaders and citizens across the country stressed that this is only the first step.

“This is one of the most historic days in the history of Indian Country, and an apology of this size must be followed by real action,” Nick Tilsen, who belongs to the Oglala Lakota Nation and is president and CEO of the Indigenous rights organization NDN Collective, told Yahoo News.

Tilsen believes that there are specific, actionable steps that need to accompany any apology. For him, that means passing the U.S. Truth and Healing Commission bill in Congress, rescinding medals of honor for those who participated in the Battle of Wounded Knee, releasing “longest living Indigenous political prisoner in American history Leonard Peltier, who is also a boarding school survivor” and “unprecedented investment in Indigenous languages and education.”

Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation Chuck Hoskin celebrated the move, calling out Haaland’s role in particular, and echoed the sentiment of following any apology with action.

“The [Department of the Interior’s] recommendations, especially in the preservation of Native languages and the repatriation of ancestors and cultural items, can be a path toward true healing,” Hoskin said in a statement.

While many Indigenous leaders are calling for action, Tilsen stressed that this is also a time to hold boarding school survivors and their families close.

“At this moment in history, we have to remember many of the survivors of the boarding schools are still alive,” he said. “It's in every household and it's in every community. And it's directly tied to the struggles that our people have today.”

Dylan Rose Goodwill, who is Diné (Navajo), Hunkpapa Lakota and Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota, was visiting Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, Calif., on Thursday when she heard the news about Biden’s forthcoming apology. It’s a place that is part of her family history, as her grandmother (or másáni) was sent there when it served as a federally run Native boarding school.

She told Yahoo News that hearing the news there was “complicated.”

As the senior assistant director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Southern California, Goodwill was visiting the school as a college recruiter.

“I've always had these kinds of mixed feelings because it's been weird to be the admission counselor for the schools that my own grandparents attended,” she said.

“It was already a tough morning to go and then to receive the news on site was really a mixture of feelings because I felt anger mostly, where it was like disbelief that this was happening, excitement that at least it was happening, but also feeling like this isn't enough,” Goodwill added.

Sitting where her grandmother sat in the 1930s and '40s, Goodwill asked herself, “What is that gonna really hold for her now? She passed in '04.”

Biden’s statement comes 16 years after former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for Canada’s role in the Indigenous residential school system — a topic filmmakers Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie document in their film Sugarcane, about St. Joseph’s Mission School near the Sugarcane reserve in British Columbia.

NoiseCat is a member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen and a descendant of the Lil’wat Nation of Mount Currie and whose grandmother attended the Catholic Church-run residential school and gave birth to his father there. He told Yahoo News that this moment was important for a “continentwide conversation about what happened to Native families and Native children at Native American boarding schools and Indian residential schools.”

Joining Biden and Haaland for the event on the Gila River Indian Reservation along with Kassie, NoiseCat continued, “The fact that the president has chosen to formally apologize to survivors and their families is a real testament to the significance of this story, which needs to be understood as a foundational story to North America.”

However, Kassie echoed that actionable steps must follow sentiment.

“As momentous and important as this day is, it's important that it's followed up with action,” she told Yahoo. “It's important that the records of what happened at these institutions that are held by the U.S. government and the Catholic Church are opened to Indigenous communities who are looking for answers. And it's important that those communities also have the opportunity to hold to account those institutions and individuals who abused them.”

For Tilsen, it’s also a time to “center the survivors.”

“As we sort of politically dissect this moment,” he said, “I also want to recognize the pain that is being resurfaced, and that our people deserve the right to have pain and they deserve the right to have rage in this moment while we lean towards moving forward in action.”

NoiseCat, who has a deeply personal connection to the residential school history, said, “I'm probably going to call my dad today after the apology and just check in with him.”

[batboyblog]

The budget reconciliation provision would raise eligibility requirements for low-income schools and districts to serve free meals to all students.

The House Ways and Means Committee is suggesting cutting $12 billion in school meal programs over 10 years by adjusting school qualification for the Community Eligibility Provision and requiring income verification for national K-12 breakfast and lunch programs, according to a document on the committee’s budget reconciliation options.

Specifically, the committee proposed raising the minimum threshold for low-income schools and districts to qualify for CEP, which allows low-income schools to serve free meals to all students. To participate in the program, 25% of students enrolled in a school have to be certified as eligible for free school meals. The House proposal calls for a 60% threshold. 

The proposal would strip away 24,000 schools’ ability to participate in CEP, impacting over 12 million children, according to the Food Research & Action Center, a nonprofit anti-hunger advocacy group.  

The suggested cuts offer an early glimpse into House Republicans’ priorities for school nutrition policy.

A rollback in school eligibility for the provision is being proposed just as Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation, has called for the elimination of CEP altogether. The policy agenda developed in conjunction with some former Trump administration officials also recommended the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees CEP,  work with lawmakers to curb any efforts in support of universal school meal programs.

The federal school lunch and breakfast programs “should be directed to serve children in need, not become an entitlement for students from middle- and upper-income homes,” Project 2025 said.

The committee’s proposals have been released ahead of an expected budget reconciliation, which is part of a special legislative process to fast-track high-priority fiscal legislation that adjusts laws regarding spending, revenues, deficits or the debt limit. 

Reconciliation bills cannot be filibustered in the Senate, “giving this process real advantages for enacting controversial budget and tax measures,” according to the nonpartisan research nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. To pass, these bills only need a simple majority in the Senate rather than 60 votes and don’t require the president’s signature. 

The committee’s move also comes at a time when CEP participation has climbed in recent years, most recently rising 19% during the 2023-24 school year. 

As of last school year, half of all schools in the National School Lunch Program were using the provision to serve free meals to all students, according to a January FRAC report. 

“Taking away this important and effective way for local schools to offer breakfast and lunch at no charge to all of their students would increase hunger in the classroom, reintroduce unnecessary paperwork for families and schools, increase school meal debt, and bring stigma back into the cafeteria,” FRAC said in a Jan. 17 statement. 

Unpaid school meal debt has continued to increase for nearly a decade, according to a January report from the School Nutrition Association. In fact, the median unpaid school meal debt was $6,900 per district nationwide in 2024 — a 26% rise from the previous year.

When pandemic-era waivers ended in 2022 for a temporary universal school meal policy nationwide, some schools took on more meal debt. 

Meanwhile, eight states have established their own universal meal programs in lieu of federal action, according to FRAC. Other states leaders are eyeing similar measures this year, including in Alaska, Missouri, Oregon, and New York.

[mariacallous]

Most of the time, as the senior rabbi of Temple Beth-El in San Antonio, Rabbi Mara Nathan’s focus is on Jewish families. But this week, she’s finding herself thinking about Christian ones, too.

That’s because Texas is poised to adopt a public school curriculum that refers to Jesus as “the Messiah,” asks kindergartners to study the Sermon on the Mount and presents the Crusades in a positive light.

The curriculum, Nathan said, “gives Christian children the sense that their family’s religion is the only true religion, which is not appropriate for public school education, at the very least.”

Nathan is among the many Texans raising concerns about the proposed reading curriculum as it nears final approval. Earlier this week, the Texas State Board of Education narrowly voted to proceed with the curriculum, called Bluebonnet Learning. A final vote is set for Friday.

The critics, who include Jewish parents and organizations as well as interfaith and education advocacy groups, say Bluebonnet — which will be optional but which schools would be paid to adopt — inappropriately centers on Christian theology and ideas. They have been lobbying for revisions since it was first proposed in May, offering detailed feedback.

“The first round of the curriculum that we saw honestly had a lot of offensive content in it, and was proselytizing, and did not represent Jewish people well,” said Lisa Epstein, the director of San Antonio’s Jewish Community Relations Council.

Now those critics say most of their specific suggestions have been accepted but they remain concerned.

“Looking at the revision, we still feel that the curriculum is not balanced and it introduces a lot of Christian concepts at a very young age, like resurrection and the blood of Christ and the Messiah, when kids are just really too young to understand and they don’t really have a grasp yet completely of their own religion,” she added. Epstein, who testified at a hearing on the proposal in Austin on Monday, has a child in high school and two others who graduated from Texas public schools.

The Texas vote comes as advocates of inserting Christianity into public education are ascendant across the country. Political conservatives are in power at the national level and the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority has demonstrated openness to blurring church-state separation.

President-elect Donald Trump has signaled support for numerous initiatives to reintroduce Christian doctrine into public schools, from supporting school prayer to endorsing legislation that would require public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. (One such measure in Louisiana was recently blocked by a federal judge.)

In Texas, Bluebonnet’s advocates say the curriculum would elevate students’ learning while also exposing them to essential elements of cultural literacy. They note that the curriculum includes references to a wide range of cultures, including ancient religions, and that the religious references make up only a small fraction of the material.

“They’ll elevate the quality of education being offered to all Texas students by giving them a well-rounded understanding of important texts and their impact on the world,” Megan Benton, a strategic policy associate at Texas Values, which says its mission is “to stand for biblical, Judeo-Christian values,” said during the hearing on Monday, Education Week reported. Texas Values called criticism of the proposed curriculum an “attack on the Bible.”

The Texas Education Authority solicited the proposed curriculum, which would join a menu of approved options, as part of a pandemic-era effort that waived some transparency laws, meaning that its authors are not fully known. But The 74, an education news organization, reported this week that a publishing company co-founded by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee contributed content to the curriculum.

Trump tapped Huckabee, a pastor and evangelical favorite, last week to become his ambassador to Israel.

For some in Texas and beyond, Bluebonnet represents a concrete example of how the national climate could ripple out into local changes.

“A lot of things, we think they’re outside of our community, or outside of our scope, like we hear these things, but are they really going to impact us?” said a Jewish assistant principal in the Richardson Independent School District north of Dallas who asked to remain anonymous. “But I think now that it’s becoming a potential reality, a friend was asking me, would Richardson adopt this? Is this something that is really going to happen in our community?”

While the Supreme Court has ruled that public schools can teach about religion, they cannot prioritize one religion over another in that instruction. So Bluebonnet’s inclusion of Christian and Bible stories in lesson plans drew scrutiny from the start — which grew after the Texas Tribune reported that a panel required to vet all curriculum proposals included Christian proponents of incorporating religion in public education.

In September, The Texas Education Authority’s curriculum review board published hundreds of pages of emails from members of the public along with whether the critiques had resulted in changes. Some did, the board noted, but many others were rejected.

A coalition of Jewish groups submitted 37 requested changes to the initial curriculum proposal. Epstein said the San Antonio JCRC had specifically objected to language in some lessons that evoked “antisemitic tropes” and textual inaccuracies in referencing the story of Queen Esther, as well as offensive references to the Crusades and language that explained the birth of Jesus as the messiah.

One passage had invited students to imagine “if you were a Crusader,” Epstein said, referring to the Christian knights of the Middle Ages who sought to conquer the Holy Land, massacred communities of Jews and are venerated by some on the Christian right.

In the case of the Esther lesson, the original curriculum had recreated an aspect of the Purim story in which Haman drew lots to determine when to kill Jews in the Persian Empire — as a way to teach probability. Nathan called that particular lesson “subversively antisemitic.”

“In ancient Persia [drawing lots] was a way of helping someone make a decision, and the game was called Purim,” the initial text read. “Ask students to choose a number from 1 to 6. Roll a die and ask the students to raise their hand if their number was rolled.”

“This is shocking, offensive and just plain wrong,” Sharyn Vane, a Jewish parent of two Texas public school graduates, said at a September hearing, according to the New York Times. “Do we ask elementary students to pretend to be Hitler?” (Historical simulations have widely been rejected by educators for all grades.)

Both of the lessons were revised after feedback from Jewish groups and others, but Epstein and Nathan said the changes were not adequate. A new prompt asks students to describe “the journey of a Crusader” in the third-person, but it still sanitizes the murder of many Jews and Christians during the Christian quest to conquer Jerusalem, Epstein charged.

And while the Purim lots activity was dropped, Epstein noted that a specific lesson plan about Esther — a beloved figure among evangelical Christians — also includes a reference to God, which the Megillah, the Jewish text telling the Purim story, famously does not do. She said that inaccuracy was not addressed in the revisions.

In a statement, San Antonio’s Jewish federation, under which the JCRC operates, also acknowledged the changes that were made after its feedback but expressed concern over what it called “an almost solely Christian-based” perspective with “inaccuracies” and content that is inappropriate for elementary school students.

“We are not against teaching a broad range of religious beliefs to children in an age-appropriate way that clearly distinguishes between ‘beliefs’ and ‘facts,’ and gives appropriate time and respect to acknowledging many different religions,” the federation said. “Public schools should be places where children of all religious backgrounds feel welcomed and accepted.”

The newer version of the curriculum also did not address the federation’s concerns about language referring to Jesus as “the Messiah,” written with a capital “M,” and references to “the Bible,” rather than “the Christian Bible” specifically, as the federation had urged the curriculum’s creators to adopt.

The Austin branch of the Anti-Defamation League, which was also involved in the efforts, also applauded the revisions that had been made thus far but said it still “reject[s] the current version of the proposed curriculum.”

“We agree that students should learn the historical contributions of various religious traditions, but ADL’s analysis of the originally proposed curriculum found that a narrow view of Christianity was overwhelmingly emphasized, there were few mentions of other faiths and the curriculum baselessly credited Christianity with improved societal morality,” the group said in a statement. “Although improvements have been made, the materials still appear to cross the line into teaching religion instead of teaching about religion.”

Criticism to the curriculum goes far beyond the Jewish community. Texas AFT, the state’s outpost of the American Federation of Teachers, a leading teachers’ union, also opposes the proposal. “Texas AFT believes that not only do these materials violate the separation of church and state and the academic freedom of our classroom, but also the sanctity of the teaching profession,” the union said in a statement.

Some Republicans on the Texas Board of Education expressed reservations about the curriculum’s quality and age-appropriateness, separate from its religious content.

And nonpartisan and interfaith groups like Texas Impact and Texas Freedom Network have also been involved in efforts to oppose the curriculum, as has the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. Epstein said a Sikh parent also testified at one of the hearings, asking for her faith’s traditions to be incorporated into lesson plans to provide more religious perspectives.

Nathan said that when she testified against the proposal at a September hearing, her allies were diverse.

“Some of the people who were against it were not Jewish, and just were [against] the way that the curriculum was being put together pedagogically,” she said. “But there were both Jewish and non-Jewish people there, and also some Christian folks who were there who were opposed to such an overtly Christian curriculum.”

Marian Neleson, who has a 14-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son in the Frisco Independent School District, said it has never been easy to be a Jewish family in her area.

“There’s always concerns as a parent when there’s just a handful of other Jewish children in a majority Christian school,” said Neleson, who is active in her local interfaith alliance. “From how the school celebrates, how they do their calendars. Do they remember that there is a Jewish holiday, and then they schedule major school functions on High Holy Days?”

Now, she’s worried that her own district could face pressure to adopt the new curriculum, if it is approved.

“These kind of curriculums are promoting one interpretation, one religion’s view, and I feel like that’s not very respectful of people who come from different backgrounds and different faiths and different religions,” Neleson said. She added, “I do think that the Frisco school district particularly does try to be inclusive and try to recognize the diversity of the community, but I know that there’s always pressure from groups who are trying to promote one agenda in the schools.”

The Richardson assistant principal said she saw in the financial incentive to adopt the curriculum — districts that do so will get up to $60 per student — an inappropriate assertion of support by the state. Many Texas districts are cash-strapped after legislators declined to substantially increase school funding last year.

“There is such a push in education for high-quality instructional materials,” said the assistant principal, who has three elementary school-aged children. “They’re pushing this so hard, and even potentially putting up funding for it if you adopt it, but it’s not a truly high-quality curriculum.”

In a Facebook post after Tuesday’s preliminary vote, Vane encouraged parents to reach out to members of the state’s education board to urge them to oppose the curriculum. “It’s not over yet,” she wrote.

Nathan said she’s not sure how much opponents of the curriculum can do if it’s approved, but she stressed the importance of local advocacy — especially since the curriculum is not required.

“I think reaching out to your local school board and communicating with local teachers in your community is going to be key,” she said. “If this occurs, what do I need to do in my local school district to make sure that there’s programming that balances the perspective?”

But she signaled that the intensity of the proposed curriculum would undercut any counter-programming by representatives of other faiths.

“It’s not presented as, ‘Here’s what Christians believe,’” Nathan said about Bluebonnet. “It’s presented as, ‘Here is the truth.’ There’s a difference.”

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

At first glance, Dave Langston’s predicament seems similar to headaches facing homeowners in coastal states vulnerable to catastrophic hurricanes: As disasters have become more frequent and severe, his insurance company has been losing money. Then, it canceled his coverage and left the state.

But Mr. Langston lives in Iowa.

Relatively consistent weather once made Iowa a good bet for insurance companies. But now, as a warming planet makes events like hail and wind storms worse, insurers are fleeing.

Mr. Langston spent months trying to find another company to insure the townhouses, on a quiet cul-de-sac at the edge of Cedar Rapids, that belong to members of his homeowners association. Without coverage, “if we were to have damage that hit all 17 units, we’re looking at bankruptcy for all of us,” he said.

The insurance turmoil caused by climate change — which had been concentrated in Florida, California and Louisiana — is fast becoming a contagion, spreading to states like Iowa, Arkansas, Ohio, Utah and Washington. Even in the Northeast, where homeowners insurance was still generally profitable last year, the trends are worsening.

In 2023, insurers lost money on homeowners coverage in 18 states, more than a third of the country, according to a New York Times analysis of newly available financial data. That’s up from 12 states five years ago, and eight states in 2013. The result is that insurance companies are raising premiums by as much as 50 percent or more, cutting back on coverage or leaving entire states altogether. Nationally, over the last decade, insurers paid out more in claims than they received in premiums, according to the ratings firm Moody’s, and those losses are increasing.

The growing tumult is affecting people whose homes have never been damaged and who have dutifully paid their premiums, year after year. Cancellation notices have left them scrambling to find coverage to protect what is often their single biggest investment. As a last resort, many are ending up in high-risk insurance pools created by states that are backed by the public and offer less coverage than standard policies. By and large, state regulators lack strategies to restore stability to the market.

Insurers are still turning a profit from other lines of business, like commercial and life insurance policies. But many are dropping homeowners coverage because of losses.

Tracking the shifting insurance market is complicated by the fact it is not regulated by the federal government; attempts by the Treasury Department to simply gather data have been rebuffed by some state regulators. 

The turmoil in insurance markets is a flashing red light for an American economy that is built on real property. Without insurance, banks won’t issue a mortgage; without a mortgage, most people can’t buy a home. With fewer buyers, real estate values are likely to decline, along with property tax revenues, leaving communities with less money for schools, police and other basic services.

And without sufficient insurance, people struggle to rebuild after disasters. Last year, storms, wildfires and other disasters pushed 2.5 million American adults out of their homes, according to census data, including at least 830,000 people who were displaced for six months or longer.

[darkmaga-returns]

The U.S. Department of Education requested that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) “correct the records” of all the female athletes whose titles and awards were stolen by males who competed against them while claiming to be women.

The Tuesday letter, addressed to NCAA president Charlie Baker, former Republican governor of Massachusetts, and Bob Lombardi, president of the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), comes after the NCAA already decided it would no longer allow males to compete against females.

“Because of President Trump’s bold leadership, men will no longer be allowed to compete in women’s sports regardless of how they identify, and the NCAA has correctly changed its tune on its discriminatory practices against female athletes,” Education Department Deputy General Counsel Candice Jackson wrote in the letter. “The next necessary step is to restore athletic records to women who have for years been devalued, ignored, and forced to watch men steal their accolades. The Trump Education Department will do everything in our power to right this wrong and champion the hard-earned accomplishments of past, current, and future female collegiate athletes.”  

[moontyger]

The Education Department on Tuesday urged organizations overseeing high school and college athletics to strip records, titles and awards from transgender women who competed in women’s sports.

The department sent a letter to the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS)   calling on them to “restore to female athletes the records, titles, awards, and recognitions misappropriated by biological males competing in female categories,” according to a news release from the department.

Candice Jackson, deputy general counsel for the Education Department, said women athletes

“have for years been devalued, ignored, and forced to watch men steal their accolades.”

“The Trump Education Department will do everything in our power to right this wrong and champion the hard-earned accomplishments of past, current, and future female collegiate athletes,” Jackson said in a statement.

The department added that “correcting the record” is consistent with the NCAA’s new policy prohibiting trans women from competing in women’s sports. 

The NCAA’s policy change came the day after President Donald Trump signed an executive order last week barring trans girls and women from competing in female sports. The order threatens to revoke federal funding from schools that don’t comply. The order does not bar trans boys and men from playing on male sports teams, and the department’s letter to the NCAA and NFHS does not mention reversing awards won by trans men.

...

More than 500,000 student-athletes compete in NCAA championship sports, according to the association. While it’s unclear how many are transgender, NCAA President Charlie Baker told a Senate committee in December that he is aware of fewer than 10.

NFHS reported that more than 8 million students competed in high school sports last year, though the organization does not report how many are trans. 

In 2021, when dozens of states considered legislation to restrict trans athletes’ participation in school sports, The Associated Press reached out to more than two dozen state lawmakers sponsoring the measures along with conservative groups supporting them and found that sponsors could not cite a single instance in their own state or region where such participation had caused problems. 

[coochiequeens]

The dude was competing on the women's fencing team one month after competing on the men's team.

By Amy Hamm December 10, 2024

A trans-identified male college athlete has been quietly moved onto the women’s fencing team at Wagner College, and may now be collecting a women’s scholarship. Redmond Sullivan, who had previously competed on both the male and female teams simultaneously, seized gold in the women’s category at the Connecticut Division Junior Olympic Qualifier last week.

Sullivan first began competing in female sports while attending Daniel Hand High School in Connecticut, where he won a state championship in girls track and field for shot put during a Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) competition

According to the results of the CIAC meet, Daniel Hand High School would have placed fourth had it not been for Sullivan’s dominating performance in the girls category, during which he threw the shot put nearly four feet farther than his second-place female competitor. Sullivan was the only student athlete to make it in the CIAC championship Top 10 during their first year of competition.

That same year, while competing in girls shot put and discus, he earned first, second, or third place in 14 separate competitions. Bizarrely, Sullivan was allowed to compete in girls track and field while he was also competing in boys fencing at the same school.

After graduation, Sullivan began attending Wagner College in Staten Island, New York. He joined the men’s fencing team, and participated in the New England Division USFA Pomme De Terre on June 17, 2023, during which he placed 29th out of 58 male competitors. As late as October of 2023, Sullivan was still classified as a fencer on the men’s team. But just one month later, he began competing in women’s fencing.

His transfer to the women’s team was unannounced by Wagner, and Sullivan enjoyed a significant improvement in his performance after beginning to compete against females.

At the Northeast Fencing Conference Varsity Meet in November, Sullivan won 3-0 in all of his matchups. Then, at the December 1 Seahawks Invitational, a fencing competition for Wagner College, Sullivan won two out of three fencing sets in the female category.

On Sunday, Sullivan won gold at the Connecticut Division Junior Olympic Qualifier in the Junior Women’s Foil.

Wagner College has not responded to a request for comment. On their website, the school claims to be “committed to stopping sex discrimination” in compliance with U.S. Title IX, a 1972 law that is supposed to guarantee equal opportunities for female students, including athletes.

In 2021, the Biden administration extended Title IX protections to transgender individuals, preventing the ability for colleges to keep males out of female sports. Several Republican states have sued over the federal changes to Title IX, arguing that it is unsafe and unfair for female athletes. President Elect Donald Trump has claimed he will, once in office, make changes to “keep men out of women’s sports.”

Wagner College also touts its “inclusive and supportive environments for LGBTQIA+ students.” They have published a list of “gender inclusive bathrooms” across the campus, and also instruct students to “honor the personal pronouns [of others] even when the person is not present” and to “not disclose a person’s gender identity unless you have obtained their consent.”

Marshi Smith, co-founder of the Independent Council on Women’s Sport (ICONS), condemned Wagner College for allowing Sullivan to compete against females, and added that National Collegiate Athletics Association policies have emboldened colleges to protect trans-identified male athletes.

“The NCAA is repeatedly rewarding the replacement of women in order to champion men in women’s sports. This ongoing pattern of discrimination is why we are supporting a female athlete’s lawsuit against the organization. Legal action is necessary to hold the NCAA accountable for its repeated failures to uphold fairness and equality in women’s sports, with fencing being a particularly troubling example,” she says.

In March, ICONS filed a lawsuit against the NCAA on behalf of over one dozen female athletes for letting transgender athletes compete in women’s sports and use female locker rooms.

At the center of the class-action suit is Lia Thomas, a trans-identified male who dominated the 2022 NCAA Swimming Championships while a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Thomas fared poorly while participating in male sport, but began racking up medals after transferring to the women’s team.

[feministfocus]

The Inspiring Upbringing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

by Sofia Bocchino

Most Americans know the name Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and feminist icon, but not many know how she became the influential judicial figure she will always be remembered as. Ginsburg served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 to 2020, and was the second woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice in U.S. history. Growing up in Brooklyn during the 1930s and 40s, she experienced severe adversity from a young age. Her older sister died from meningitis at the age of six, and her mother died from cancer just days before her high school graduation, which she was unable to attend. Ginsburg also endured WWII in her childhood, which was an especially stressful time for her family because they were Jewish. Despite this adversity, Ginsburg excelled in school, and went on to study at Cornell University on a full scholarship. During her time there, she would meet many figures who influenced her future career, including her future husband, Martin Ginsburg, a nationally prominent tax attorney, Vladimir Nabokov, professor of literature and renowned Russian author who influenced her writing, and Robert Cushman, a constitutional lawyer who inspired her to practice law. 

After graduating from Cornell, marrying Martin, having a daughter and spending two years in Oklahoma where her husband was stationed in the army, Ginsburg moved back to Massachusetts and began her legal studies at Harvard Law School. Ginsburg also became the first woman to ever serve on the editorial staff of the Harvard Law Review. However, in the midst of her studies, she had to move with her family to New York City after her husband took a job with a law firm, finishing her studies at Columbia Law School and graduating in 1959. After graduating, she struggled to find employment as a lawyer due to her gender and the fact that she was a mother. It was very rare for a woman to succeed in a law career during this time due to sexism and wage gaps. With the help of her professor from Columbia; however, Ginsburg was able to receive a clerkship under the Southern District of New York. There, she researched Swedish Civil Procedure, and her work was published in a book entitled Civil Procedure in Sweden (1965). Her experience as a clerk landed her the opportunity to work as an assistant professor at Rutgers School of Law; however, she was asked to accept a lower salary because of her husband’s well-paying job. In 1965, she gave birth to her second child. She was still working as an assistant professor and concealed her pregnancy for fear that her contract would not be renewed. 

In 1970, after receiving tenure the year prior, Ginsburg became professionally involved in gender equality after being asked to moderate a student panel in “women’s liberation.” After only a year, Ginsburg published two law review articles, led a seminar in gender discrimination, and partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to draft briefs in two federal cases. Throughout the 1970s, Ginsburg was a pioneer in the field of gender equality, drafting dozens of law review articles, contributing to Supreme Court briefs on gender discrimination, and co-authoring a law-school casebook on the matter. Due to her revolutionary research and career at Rutgers, Ginsburg became founding counsel of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project in 1972 and was hired by Columbia Law School, where she became the first tenured female faculty member. Throughout the 70s, Ginsburg argued before the Supreme Court six separate times and won five of the cases. 

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington, D.C. Ginsburg was a very liberal judge, and became heavily involved in protecting women’s reproductive rights, specifically the right to have an abortion. In 1993 she delivered the Madison Lecture at New York University Law School, providing a critique of the reasoning behind Roe v. Wade. Ginsburg argued that the court should have issued a more limited decision, providing room for the court to provide better details, claiming it would “reduce controversy rather than fuel it.” 

In August of 1993, Ginsburg replaced Byron White on the Supreme Court after being nominated by president Bill Clinton and confirmed by the senate on a vote of 96-3. Ginsburg would continue to lead a fulfilling legacy for 27 years, some notable acts include requiring state funded schools to admit women (United States v. Virginia), creating strides towards equal pay in her dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision on the pay discrimination case (Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.), protection of pregnant women in the workplace, a key vote in queer people’s right to same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), and a pioneer in the protection of Roe v. Wade. Even after her death, Ruth Bader Ginsburg continues to pave the way for gender equality from her past work both inside and outside of the Supreme Court. 

While women’s rights have been challenged in America, with the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the new President-elect’s decision to leave all aspects of reproductive rights up to each state, Ginsburg’s influence has been challenged. In spite of this injustice, feminists and pro-choice activists and politicians everywhere continue to advocate for reproductive rights. Now more than ever, it is crucial that politicians and activists across the country continue to advocate for reproductive rights and gender equality, as we are now entering a presidential term where those rights may be further threatened. This issue can be fought for through voting, educating yourself and others, and supporting political candidates and federal justices who will advocate for and work to re-establish reproductive rights and gender equality in law and government. Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent her whole life fighting for all encompassing women’s rights and gender equality, and as citizens who have been impacted by her work, it is expected that we carry on her legacy, especially in times of national adversity. Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be remembered in history as the first woman to make major breakthroughs in laws pertaining to women’s rights and gender equality as a tenured professor at Ivy League universities, all while raising two children. It was for those reasons and so much more that NYU law students and young people across the nation granted her the title of the “Notorious RBG.”

[justinssportscorner]

Greg Owen at LGBTQ Nation (02.13.2025):

The enforcement arm of President Donald Trump’s Department of Education announced it is rooting out transgender student-athletes reported in Minnesota and California. The department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) said “directed investigations” into the Minnesota State High School League (MSHSL) and the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) would commence after the two sports associations announced they would adhere to state antidiscrimination rules allowing transgender student-athletes to play school sports. Craig Trainor, the department’s acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, said that would be in violation of Trump’s executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” “The Minnesota State High School League and the California Interscholastic Federation are free to engage in all the meaningless virtue-signaling that they want, but at the end of the day they must abide by federal law,” Trainor said in a press release, using the same partisan and threatening language now regularly employed by agency officials in the Trump era. “OCR’s Chicago and San Francisco regional offices will conduct directed investigations into both organizations to ensure that female athletes in these states are treated with the dignity, respect, and equality that the Trump Administration demands,” Trainor said. “I would remind these organizations that history does not look kindly on entities and states that actively opposed the enforcement of federal civil rights laws that protect women and girls from discrimination and harassment.”  

[...] Trump’s Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports order states, “It is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities” and to take “all appropriate action to affirmatively protect all-female athletic opportunities and all-female locker rooms and thereby provide the equal opportunity guaranteed by Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972.” 

The Trump Administration bullying states that permit trans sports athletes to play in competitions aligned with their gender identity is cruelty in action.

[gladiolusarchive]

LGBTQIA+ Initiatives in the US

Los Angeles Department of Mental Health

LACDMH is committed to promoting the wellbeing and resilience of LA County’s LGBTQIA2-S+ individuals and communities, which represent a diverse range of gender and sexual expressions, identities and orientations.

Boys & Girls Club of America - LGBTQ Initiative

After more than 160 years serving youth, we know that a sense of belonging is everything, and that’s especially true for LGBTQ+ kids and teens. With a foundation of safety and acceptance, kids are more likely to get involved, make new friends, and build skills to support their success. Boys & Girls Clubs provide millions of kids and teens a place to belong, know their value and reach their full potential.

The Trevor Project

39% of LGBTQ+ young people seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year. We’re responding to the public health crisis of suicide among LGBTQ+ young people by building a safer, more inclusive world.

Rainbow Labs

Are you 13-18 years old and exploring if you are queer and/or gender non-conforming? If so, we have numerous mentoring programs for you to choose from designed by other queer and gender-nonconforming youth. Our comprehensive program includes storytelling, creative arts, career exploration, entrepreneurship, leadership, LGBTQ+ history and culture, and sports.

National LGBTQ Task Force

The National LGBTQ Task Force builds power, takes action, and creates change to achieve freedom, justice, and equity for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. As the progressive voice of the LGBTQ movement and the LGBTQ voice of the progressive movement, the National LGBTQ Task Force organizes people and money in pursuit of liberation for all.

American Osteopathic Foundation - LGBTQ+ Health Equity & Inclusion Initiative

The American Osteopathic Foundation (AOF) envisions a world without discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, where health disparities do not exist. Those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, intersex, or asexual (LGBTQ+) are provided with excellent healthcare in an environment free from prejudice.

ACLU - LGBTQ Rights

The ACLU works to ensure that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people can live openly without discrimination and enjoy equal rights, personal autonomy, and freedom of expression and association.

It Gets Better

Since 2021, It Gets Better has distributed more than $1.3 million to fund student-led school based grants to middle and high schools throughout the United States and Canada. to date, we’ve funded more than 140 projects in 47 states and 9 Canadian provinces and territories, supporting projects that uplift and empower LGBTQ+ students.

Equality Federation

Equality Federation is an advocacy accelerator rooted in social justice, building power in our network of state-based lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) advocacy organizations. We work collaboratively on critical non-partisan issues—from advancing workplace fairness and family recognition to defeating anti-transgender bills and HIV criminalization laws—that affect how LGBTQ+ people experience the world from cradle to grave.

Sylvia Rivera Law Project

The Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) works to guarantee that all people are free to self-determine their gender identity and expression, regardless of income or race, and without facing harassment, discrimination, or violence. SRLP is a collective organization founded on the understanding that gender self-determination is inextricably intertwined with racial, social and economic justice. Therefore, we seek to increase the political voice and visibility of low-income people and people of color who are transgender, intersex, or gender non-conforming. SRLP works to improve access to respectful and affirming social, health, and legal services for our communities. We believe that in order to create meaningful political participation and leadership, we must have access to basic means of survival and safety from violence. Much of the information on their website is also available in Spanish!

GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ+ Equality

LGBTQ+ specific health research is underfunded and underutilized, especially when it comes to research on and by BIPOC LGBTQ+ people, intersex people, and other historically-excluded intersectional identities. As the oldest and largest association of LGBTQ+ and allied health professionals, GLMA is a vital resource for policy-makers and coalition partners working to promote LGBTQ+ health equity. GLMA provides practice-changing continuing education for health professionals and resources to educate and empower LGBTQ+ patients. They also have a LGBTQIA+ Provider Directory.

Trans Lifeline

Trans Lifeline connects trans people to the community support and resources we need to survive and thrive. We envision a world where trans people have the connection, economic security, and care everyone needs and deserves—free of prisons and police.

True Colors United

True Colors United implements innovative solutions to youth homelessness by focusing on the experiences of those most impacted —LGBTQ+ and BIPOC youth. True Colors United is guided by two core beliefs: those who’ve experienced an issue first-hand hold the keys to the solution, and improving outcomes for the most impacted communities benefits everyone.

If you know of additional resources, please add them in a reblog!

[lboogie1906]

Vivian Osborne Marsh (September 5, 1897 - March 8, 1986) was a community activist and government official, who became one of the most influential African Americans in the San Francisco area. She was born in Houston. When she applied to UC Berkeley, because of her southern schooling she was required to take several entrance exams despite high grades. Her excellent results on the entrance exams helped to discontinue this policy of discriminating against southern applicants. She received both a BA and MA in Anthropology, becoming among the first African Americans to receive a master’s degree from UC Berkeley.

While attending college, she founded the Berkeley campus’ Kappa chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. She went on to found several other chapters, and at times she served as president, Far West regional director, and national president. Two major projects she organized were the Traveling Library, which provided books to rural portions of Georgia, and Teen Lift, which provided opportunities for underprivileged teenagers to visit events such as symphonies and operas. She and her husband, Leon F. Marsh, Sr., were deeply involved in many fraternal organizations in California. She was elected president of the California State Association of Colored Women which under her supervision established the Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery in Oakland. She was involved in the National Council of Negro Women where as a state supervisor of the National Youth Administration she helped to find employment for unemployed youths during the Depression.

She was a Republican in a heavily Democratic area, and yet she still had considerable influence over both state and federal officials in her area. She ran in 1959 for a city council position in Berkeley but was defeated. She remained involved in many community organizations, and on February 21, 1981, the mayor of Berkeley declared it to be Vivian Osborne Marsh Day. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #deltasigmatheta

[mariacallous]

Centibillionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of the former US Digital Service—now the United States DOGE Service—has been widely publicized and sanctioned by one of President Donald Trump’s many executive orders. But WIRED reporting shows that Musk’s influence extends even further, and into an even more consequential government agency.

Sources within the federal government tell WIRED that the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk and to the tech industry. Among them is a person who, according to an online résumé, was set to start college last fall.

Scott Kupor, a managing partner at the powerful investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, stands as Trump’s nominee to run the OPM. But already in place, according to sources, are a variety of people who seem ready to carry out Musk’s mission of cutting staff and disrupting the government.

Amanda Scales is, as has been reported, the new chief of staff at the OPM. She formerly worked in talent for xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, according to her LinkedIn. Before that, she was part of the talent and operations team at Human Capital, a venture firm with investments in the defense tech startup Anduril and the political betting platform Kalshi; before that, she worked for years at Uber. Her placement in this key role, experts believe, seems part of a broader pattern of the traditionally apolitical OPM being converted to use as a political tool.

“I don't think it's alarmist to say there's a much more sophisticated plan to monitor and enforce loyalty than there was in the first term,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.

Got a Tip?

Are you a current or former employee with the Office of Personnel Management or another government agency impacted by Elon Musk? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact Vittoria Elliott at vittoria_elliott@wired.com or securely at velliott88.18 on Signal.

Sources say that Riccardo Biasini, formerly an engineer at Tesla and most recently director of operations for the Las Vegas Loop at the Boring Company, Musk’s tunnel-building operation, is also at the OPM as a senior adviser to the director. (Steve Davis, the CEO of the Boring Company, is rumored to be advising Musk on cuts to be made via DOGE and was integral in Musk’s gutting of Twitter, now X, after his takeover of the company in 2022.)

According to the same sources, other people at the top of the new OPM food chain include two people with apparent software engineering backgrounds, whom WIRED is not naming because of their ages. One, a senior adviser to the director, is a 21-year-old whose online résumé touts his work for Palantir, the government contractor and analytics firm cofounded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who is its chair. (The former CEO of PayPal and a longtime Musk associate, Thiel is a Trump supporter who helped bankroll the 2022 Senate campaign of his protégé, Vice President JD Vance.) The other, who reports directly to Scales, graduated from high school in 2024, according to a mirrored copy of an online résumé and his high school’s student magazine; he lists jobs as a camp counselor and a bicycle mechanic among his professional experiences, as well as a summer role at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company.

Among the new highers-up at the OPM is Noah Peters, an attorney whose LinkedIn boasts of his work in litigation representing the National Rifle Association and who has written for right-wing outlets like the Daily Caller and the Federalist; he is also now a senior adviser to the director. According to metadata associated with a file on the OPM website, Peters authored a January 27 memo that went out under acting OPM director Charles Ezell’s name describing how the department would be implementing one of Trump’s executive orders, “Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce.” This has to do with what’s sometimes known as Schedule F—a plan to recategorize many civil service jobs as political appointees, meaning they would be tied to the specific agenda of an administration rather than viewed as career government workers. The order would essentially allow for certain career civil servants to be removed in favor of Trump loyalists by classifying them as political appointees, a key part of the Project 2025 plan for remaking the government.

“I think on the tech side, the concern is potentially the use of AI to try and engage in large-scale searches of people's job descriptions to try and identify who would be identified for Schedule F reclassification,” says Moynihan.

Other top political appointees include McLaurine Pinover, a former communications director for Republican congressman Joe Wilson and deputy communications director for Republican congressman Michael McCaul, and Joanna Wischer, a Trump campaign speechwriter.

“OPM is not a very politicized organization,” says Steven Kelman, a professor emeritus at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “My guess is that typically, in the past, there have been only one or maybe two political appointees in all of OPM. All the rest are career. So this seems like a very political heavy presence in an organization that is not very political.”

Another OPM memo, concerning the government’s new return-to-office mandate, appears, according to metadata, also to have been authored by someone other than Ezell: James Sherk, previously at the America First Policy Institute and author of an op-ed advocating for the president to be able to fire bureaucrats. Formerly a special assistant to the president during Trump’s first term, he is now a part of the White House Domestic Policy Council.

The return-to-office policy, according to the November Wall Street Journal op-ed authored by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is explicitly geared toward forcing the attrition of federal employees.

Last week, many federal workers received test emails from the email address HR@opm.gov. In a lawsuit filed last night, plaintiffs allege that a new email list started by the Trump administration may be compromising the data of federal employees.

“At a broadest level, the concern is that technologists are playing a role to monitor employees and to target those who will be downsized,” says Moynihan. “It is difficult in the federal government to actually evaluate who is performing well or performing poorly. So doing it on some sort of mass automated scale where you think using some sort of data analysis or AI would automate that process, I think, is an invitation to make errors.”

Last week, federal employees across the government received emails encouraging them to turn in colleagues who they believed to be working on diversity, equity, inclusion, and access initiatives (DEIA) to the OPM via the email address DEIAtruth@opm.gov.

“This reminded me,” says Kelman, “of the Soviet Stalinism of turning in your friends to the government.”

The OPM did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did the people whom sources say now sit atop the bureaucracy.

“I am not an alarmist person,” says Kelman. “I do think that some of the things being described here are very troubling.”

[head-post]

US House votes to ban transgender participation in women’s sports

The US House of Representatives has approved a bill banning transgender people from participating in women’s high school sports teams, US media reported.

218 congressmen voted in favour of passing the document, while 206 voted against it. Only two Democrats joined Republicans in voting. The bill also prohibits federal funding for schools whose women’s sports teams include transgender students.

Republicans presented the bill as a way to level the playing field for female athletes. Democrats, meanwhile, said it would lead to an invasion of privacy for young girls. They also pointed to the bill as the latest example of Republicans’ unhealthy fixation on trying to restrict transgender rights, when that time could have been spent passing laws aimed at creating jobs or lowering food prices.

The document still needs to be approved by the Senate. Meanwhile, in the upper house of Congress, Republicans will need seven more Democratic votes for the bill to pass.

In 2022, American transgender swimmer Leah Thomas won the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I championship. This sparked resentment from her opponents. In response, Thomas stated that transgender people were not a threat to women’s sports.

Read more HERE

[shewhoworshipscarlin]

Kamala/ James Arthur Harris

James Arthur “Kamala” Harris was a professional wrestler best known for his professional wrestling persona, Kamala, a fictional Ugandan giant. Harris was born on May 28, 1950, to Jessie Harris and Betsy Mosely in Senatobia, Mississippi. He had four sisters as well. Harris grew up in Coldwater, Mississippi where his family owned a furniture store. When he was four years old, his father was murdered after a dice game. Growing up, he worked as a sharecropper to help provide for the family. Harris dropout out of high school in the ninth grade and became a burglar.

In 1967, on the advice of police, Harris left Mississippi and moved to Florida where he worked a truck driver and fruit picker. He next moved to Benton Harbor, Michigan where he met a professional wrestler Bobo Brazil who became his trainer. In 1978, Harris made his professional wrestling debut as “Sugar Bear” Harris. One year later, in 1979 he won his first professional wrestling championship in the National Wrestling Association (NWA) Tri-State Tag Team competition with wrestler Oki Shikina. In 1980 he joined Southeastern Championship Wrestling as “Bad News” Harris and later that year won its championship. In 1982, Harris joined the Continental Wrestling Association (CWA) after being offer by a job by promoter Jerry O’Neal “The King” Lawler.

While wrestling for CWA, Lawler and another wrestling promoter, Jerry Winston Jarret, created a new wrestling character for Harris. This character, named Kamala, was a stereotypical Ugandan headhunter with face and body painting who was supposed to be the bodyguard of former President of Uganda Idi Amin. Harris then joined Mid-South Wrestling owned by promoter William Harris and remained with the organization until 1986.

Harris wrestled with other wrestling organizations during his career including World Class Championship Wrestling and the World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment, WWE), and World Championship Wrestling before retiring in 2010 at the age of 60.

Despite his long successful wrestling career, Harris had numerous personal and health related issues. In 2011, had his left leg amputated below the knee due to complications from high blood pressure and diabetes. A year later, his right leg was also amputated below the knee. As a result of the amputations, a charity fund was set up to help with his financial needs.

In 2016, Harris was part of a class action lawsuit filed against World Wrestling Entertainment claiming that wrestlers received traumatic brain injuries during their time with WWE. Unfortunately for Harris and other wrestlers, the lawsuit was dismissed by Judge Vanessa Lynne Bryant in 2018.

Harris was married twice during his lifetime, first to Clara Freeman. That marriage ended in divorce. He later married Emmer Jean Bradley and that marriage lasted until his death. He was also father six children, five daughters and one son.

In 2017, Harris underwent lifesaving emergency surgery to clear fluid from around his heart and lungs. His health problems continued. He was hospitalized on August 5, 2020, after testing positive from COVID-19 during the pandemic in Mississippi. Four days later, on August 9, Harris died from complications from diabetes and COVID-19 in Oxford, Mississippi. He was 70.

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/people-african-american-history/kamala-james-arthur-harris-1950-2020/

[democracyunderground]

President-elect Trump has repeatedly pledged to dismantle the Department of Education, a decision that could radically reshape learning across America.

Why it matters: The Department of Education plays a crucial role in making education access and quality more equitable for students nationwide.

Abolishing the department and the accompanying changes are "an effort to strip the federal government of any ability to do good ... as a way to justify further defunding our public schools and colleges," Kelly Rosinger, an associate professor of education and public policy at Penn State, told Axios.

State of play: The Department of Education has been a punching bag for Republicans for decades. Ronald Reagan threatened to abolish it, and many inside the GOP have echoed Trump's calls for its end.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) last year said, "Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., should not be in charge of our children's intellectual and moral development," while introducing a bill to kill the department.

Driving the news: Elon Musk, one of President-elect Trump's most influential backers, posted a video to X Monday showing Trump boasting about closing the department and sending all education matters "back to the states."

The official 2024 GOP platform also calls for closing the Department of Education. Can Trump actually get rid of the department?

While not impossible, Trump's political pathway to abolishing the Department of Education is narrow.

Eliminating the department would require congressional action, likely including a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate, the Washington Post reported.

Despite their 53-47 Senate majority, Republicans are unlikely to muster up the votes to circumvent the filibuster.

A House vote last year on an amendment eliminating the department failed after 60 Republicans joined Democrats opposing it, per the Post.

Flashback: Trump's animus toward the Department of Education isn't new. During his first term, he proposed merging the Education and Labor departments.

Betsy DeVos, Trump's previous secretary of education, was seen by many critics as anti-public education. What does the Department of Education do?

The Department of Education's budget funds a variety of programs to help students obtain a quality education.

The department funds Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provides supplemental funding to high-poverty K-12 school districts.

Head Start programs provide vital child care services for many low-income and rural communities across the country, Rosinger pointed out.

The department also administers Pell Grants, which help low-income students attend college.

The Office of Special Education Programs provides resources to support students with disabilities through age 21.

The department also collects national data on schools and enforces federal civil rights laws to prohibit discrimination.

Zoom in: The Department of Education is also the loan holder for most federal student loans.

What happens if the department is eliminated?

Project 2025, which Trump's allies have touted as the incoming administration's agenda, outlines plans to abolish the department, which it calls a "one-stop shop for the woke education cartel."

Instead, Project 2025 calls for redistributing various federal education programs across the government, while eliminating others or transferring them to the states.

For instance, it calls for management of Title I to be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. The department's civil rights office would join the Justice Department, and the Treasury Department would manage student loan collections and defaults.

What they're saying: These changes — from shifting programs across agencies, shuffling staff or losing experts in the field — could mean "chaos ahead," Rosinger said.

"When federal government programs are chaotic, it's going to disproportionately harm working-class families," she added.

What could happen to student loans?

While Trump has repeatedly railed against the Biden administration's student debt forgiveness efforts, Project 2025 takes aim at the federal government's role as a student loan lender.

Project 2025 says that income-driven repayment (IDR) plans have "proliferated beyond reason," and that a new IDR plan should be instituted that requires payments equal to 10% of a borrower's income for those earning above the poverty line.

It also calls for returning to a system where private lenders offer student loans. Private loans typically come with higher interest rates than federal loans.

There are also concerns the administration could narrow the scope of loans available to help students attain higher education, like eliminating Parent PLUS loans for undergraduates and graduate student PLUS loans — both of which Project 2025 calls for, Rosinger said.

How will this reshape American education?

These changes would profoundly alter American education.

For one, it will "decimate" the professional education bureaucracy, as Trump replaces career experts in their fields with political appointees, Rosinger said.

Between the lines: Even if the Department of Education is left intact, changes are likely, as the Trump administration is unlikely to continue the Biden administration's efforts to expand LGBTQ+ and gender equality protections or forgive student debt, Rosinger said.

The Trump administration could also transfer responsibility for accrediting universities and colleges to the states, she added.

That could see accreditation being "used as a lever" to discourage schools from pursuing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs and affirmative action programs, Rosinger noted.

The bottom line: "Looking at Project 2025, the programs that are supporting trans students, that support low-income students, that support racially minoritized students, these are going to be the ones that are the most threatened," Rosinger said.