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After placing last in most New York City mayoral race polls, Mayor Eric Adams has come to the conclusion that championing anti-trans bathroom policies is just what his political career needs.
During an unrelated September 18 news conference tied to the upcoming United Nations General Assembly, a journalist asked Adams to clarify his comments from a press conference the day before, in which he remarked that “I’m not for boys going into the same bathroom as little girls.”
The mayor replied that he would “look at my authority and power to change” New York City’s education department policy requiring that “students must be provided access to facilities consistent with their gender identity asserted at school.”
“We can always respect how one identifies themselves,” Adams said. “But my utmost importance is to ensure that when my children are in school, they’re in there in a safe environment, and I do not believe a safe environment is allowing boys and girls to use the same [bathroom] facility at the same time.”
He added that he plans to “dig into” the city education department’s bathroom policy and “find out from my legal team what’s my authority.”
“If my authority allows me to alter that [policy], I’m going to alter that,” Adams continued.
A spokesperson for New York’s state education department told Gothamist that barring students from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity would violate state human rights law.
“The mayor is well aware of this fact, which was reiterated in joint guidance issued by the Department and Office of the Attorney General earlier this year,” state education department spokesperson J.P. O’Hare told the outlet in a statement.
Zohran Mamdani — the Democratic nominee and current frontrunner in New York City’s mayoral race — condemned Adams’ remarks in a September 18 X post, writing, “Awful and dangerous to hear the Mayor echo the transphobic bigotry coming from the Trump administration. It’s completely at odds with the values of our city and another reason why his single, disgraced term in office cannot end soon enough.”
Adams’ bathroom comments come two days after the Trump administration threatened to withhold over $35 million in federal grant funding from New York City magnet schools over their trans student policies. According to The New York Times, in a letter to city officials, Craig W. Trainor, the U.S. Education Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, claimed that the city education department’s policies violate Title IX, a civil rights law created with the intention of prohibiting schools that receive federal funding from exhibiting sex-based discrimination. The Times reports that the Education Department demanded that, in order to receive the funding, New York City schools implement bathrooms “strictly separated on the basis of sex.”
The Trump administration is making this case in other states, as well. The Education Department placed five school districts in Virginia on “high-risk” status, last month, for their trans-inclusive policies.
In a statement shared to social media on September 19, the New York LGBTQ+ non-profit NEW Pride Agenda called “any attempt to roll back student protections… reckless, cruel, and legally baseless.”
“New York State and New York City law both affirm the rights of all students, including transgender students to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity,” the statement continued. “The mayor does not have the authority to take away those protections — period.”
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