A conservative, rural state led by a Democratic governor continues to ask schools to sign a nondiscrimination policy promoting transgenderism and LGBTQ ideology as part of their school lunch funding contracts, a local investigation has found.

Kansas, led by Governor Laura Kelly (D), asks school districts to sign a nondiscrimination policy as a condition of participating in its “Child Nutrition and Wellness” program, the school’s state lunch program. But the contract continues to include “gender identity” and “sexual orientation.” Policies banning “discrimination” based on transgenderism, implemented by the Biden-Harris administration but repealed under President Donald Trump, require schools to open women’s restrooms, sports activities, and showers to men.

As of this writing, the Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) website states: “In accordance with federal civil rights law and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) civil rights regulations and policies, this institution is prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex (including gender identity and sexual orientation), disability, age, or reprisal or retaliation for prior civil rights activity.”

Yet the current nondiscrimination policy adopted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the nation’s school lunch programs, includes neither category.

A June 6 email KSDE sent school superintendents says the state has received no “written guidance” about this specific provision of the nondiscrimination clause in its contracts. The state education bureaucracy’s narrow wording “appears to be a deceptive effort to get school boards to use the gender language,” wrote Patrick Richardson, an investigative journalist at The Sentinel, a Kansas-based center-right news outlet, who first obtained the email.

KSDE did not tell local media whether they requested the Trump administration’s formal guidance on the controversial policy but says schools are free to sign another nondiscrimination statement that does not include the language.

Dave Trabert, CEO of the Kansas Policy Institute, said his state’s education department used federal funds to impose a left-wing agenda.

“The USDA no longer includes the gender identity language, and a recent court ruling makes clear that the prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of sex do not include gender identity. Parsing words to say they haven’t received ‘written’ guidance from USDA is just another example of KSDE being driven by a political motivation,” said Trabert.

A search of state education websites found numerous states, led by Republicans and Democrats alike, continue to include the outdated language. States which include a “gender identity” provision in the nondiscrimination policy of their school nutrition program include Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, and Indiana, among others.

Barack Obama became the first president who attempted to bend federal civil rights statutes into covering transgenderism. After a four-year interregnum, many of the same Obama administration officials presided over a whole-of-government effort to impose transgender ideology during the Biden-Harris administration. The Democratic administration’s officials issued a May 2022 USDA guidance for schools to add “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” to their nondiscrimination statements. Biden’s USDA threatened to withhold federal school lunch funding from schools that did not allow people who identify as transgender to use the opposite sex’s restrooms, showers, and changing facilities.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) instructed his schools to disregard the president’s directive, and the Sunshine State’s nondiscrimination policy contains neither behavior-based category. Grant Park Christian Academy in Tampa, Florida, successfully sued to overcome those guidelines — which conflicted with their biblical faith — with the assistance of the Alliance Defending Freedom.

The KSDE order appears to conflict with multiple executive and judicial branch precedents.

The Supreme Court struck down the Biden-Harris administration’s attempt to add transgenderism and sexual preference to Title IX educational policy in a 5-4 ruling in last August’s Department of Education v. Louisiana. (Justice Neil Gorsuch, who authored the controversial Bostock opinion, which read “gender identity” discrimination into the women’s protection provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, joined the court’s liberal bloc in dissent.)

President Trump promptly kept his campaign promises to reverse the Democrats’ unpopular LGBTQ agenda. In a flurry of executive orders signed on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which defines sex based on biology beginning “at conception.” It states this definition “shall govern all Executive interpretation of and application of Federal law and administration policy.”

“Agencies shall take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the Federal funding of gender ideology,” it adds.

The U.S. Department of Education issued a “dear colleague” letter on February 4 advising states it would abandoned the Biden-Harris administration’s Title IX changes, noting the policies had been legally enjoined and that the Trump administration “will enforce Title IX under the provisions of the 2020 Title IX Rule.”

Under President Trump, the USDA confronted the state of Maine about its attempts to circumvent federal regulations protecting women’s spaces. “You cannot openly violate federal law against discrimination in education and expect federal funding to continue unabated,” wrote Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins to Governor Janet Mills (D) on April 4. Exactly one week later, U.S. District Judge John Woodcock Jr., a George W. Bush appointee, ordered the funding restored, saying the Trump administration had not followed all necessary procedures before stripping the state of funding for flouting federal law. The USDA reached a settlement with the state to restore funding. “A few months ago, I stood in the White House and when confronted by the president of the United States, I told him I’d see him in court. Well, I did see him in court and we won,” gloated Mills.

A spokesperson for Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) told Patrick Richardson of The Sentinel that the senator had “raised the change in language with USDA and will monitor to make certain it does not impede Kansas schools from participating in this program.”

“While USDA provides funding for school nutrition and summer meal programs, the contract is between the state and the school board,” the spokesperson told journalist Patrick Richardson.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture did not immediately respond to The Washington Stand’s requests for comment.

A representative said former Kansas Governor Sam Brownback was not available to comment on this story.