The Independent Women’s Forum is working to fight a 2023 New Mexico law requiring “public bodies” to protect children’s access to gender transition, encouraging parents to use federal mandates to change liberal gender laws.
New Mexico’s HB7 mandates that public bodies protect access to gender transition, including pediatric gender transition, a concern for Independent Women’s Forum policy analyst Neeraja Deshpande.
“What it means is that teachers, schools, administrators, and school districts they’re technically mandated as public bodies to protect access to gender transition,” Deshpande told the Washington Examiner.
Eight school districts in New Mexico, including Albuquerque, Gadsden Independent, Gallup-McKinley, Las Cruces, Los Alamos, Moriarty Edgewood, Rio Rancho, and Santa Fe, have explicit policies allowing children to transition socially without parental knowledge or consent.
Deshpande said the best way to fight back is to use President Donald Trump’s executive orders to hold these schools accountable.
“There is so much federal leverage right now,” she said. “The Department of Education and Trump have so many executive orders, so many directives saying there are only two sexes. Kids shouldn’t be mutilated. Kids should not be transitioned behind their parents’ backs. With all these federal directives, use them; you have leverage.”
New Mexico codified transgender ideology into law in 2023, but the majority of parents are unaware of the bill and how it is affecting their children, according to a report titled “Identity Crisis: The Disjointed Reality in New Mexico” by Deshpande. The report found that 54% of New Mexicans have never heard of the law, and only 15% feel they are very familiar with the law.
The report also found that almost 90% of New Mexicans oppose minors accessing medical or social transition without parental consent. Nearly 70% don’t believe children 18 years old and under should be allowed to access gender-related treatment; that includes 70% of Hispanics and nearly 60% of Democrats.
Deshpande argued that while schools may only be able to transition children socially, it is still a gateway to medical and surgical transitions.
“Anything social is also psychological,” Deshpande said. “It is still a form of medical transition. It is just psychological as opposed to surgical or hormonal. Psychological can have very, very damaging effects going forward. Social transition fast-tracks kids to medical transition.”
Polling found 77% of voters believe children should not have access to puberty blockers. Ninety-eight percent of children prescribed puberty blockers go on to receive cross-sex hormones.
“If you leave kids alone, if you don’t socially transition them, if you don’t medically transition them, if you affirm them in their biological sex, you know what happens? Sixty-one percent to 98% of them, per official statistics, actually just stay identifying with their biological sex,” Deshpande said.
New Mexico ranks dead last in the country for literacy and third to last when it comes to poverty. Deshpande said she feels an elite few are taking advantage of the voter base.
“Gender ideology is extremely elitist from its inception,” she said. “It really started in the universities, and then it sort of trickled down through the internet to real life. It trickled down from elite circles to, unfortunately, the rest of the population.”
Deshpande encouraged parents to take advantage of the Trump administration’s momentum to prevent an entire generation from being irreversibly harmed by gender transition policies.
“Those federal directives actually really matter,” Deshpande said. “I think the problem is that a lot of people don’t realize that they have to use them. You can say, well, this is what the federal government says, and if you go against this, they will take away your funding. If they’re mutilating kids, if they’re putting kids on the track to mutilation via social transition, the federal government prohibits it.”
This is already happening in other parts of the country. Five northern Virginia school districts were found in violation of Title IX civil rights protections for policies allowing students of the opposite sex access to sports and locker rooms.
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“These school divisions have been violating federal law, deliberately neglecting their responsibility to protect students’ safety, privacy, and dignity, and ignoring parents’ rights,” Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) said. “They got away with this behavior because the Biden administration backed them up. Common sense is back, with biological boys and girls in their own locker rooms and bathrooms, and boys out of girls sports.”
Universities are losing funding for not complying with the Trump administration’s demands. Columbia University lost $400 million in federal grants and contracts for its response to alleged antisemitic protests, and Brown University had $510 million in funding cut for its diversity, equity, and inclusion admissions practices and transgender sports policies.