The Delaware Department of Education last month bowed to intense conservative opposition and rewrote an anti-discrimination guideline meant to protect transgender students.

The reintroduced regulation includes a parental notification rule, similar to a controversial bill in the Ohio state legislature, requiring teachers and school administrators to notify parents before recognizing a trans student’s gender identity.

The Trump administration rescinded Obama-era guidelines for transgender students shortly after Inauguration Day, leaving it to the states to create their own procedures for handling trans students and their transitions. What’s unusual about Delaware is that it has a Democratic governor and secretary of education pushing some of the nation’s harshest anti-trans education regulations in a state that’s known for being accepting of transgender people.

As originally written, the anti-discrimination guideline, known as Regulation 225, was a supportive document backed by educators and LGBTQ advocates, containing a framework for facilitating gender transitions at school and supporting the needs of trans school kids.

“The goal of several people on the committee for Regulation 225 was to make all schools in Delaware uniform. That a child’s experience wasn’t based on luck, so that even if at the beginning people were just tolerated and they weren’t accepting, they still had to follow a certain uniform code that the state was putting out.” said Andrea Rashbaum, who has a trans stepdaughter and served on the advisory committee that developed the initial iteration of the regulation.

The rule ran into resistance from religious leaders and parents opposed to an alleged “trans ideology.” The board of the Indian River School District voted unanimously to send a letter to the governor and board of education protesting the proposed regulation. The regulation received 11,000 comments in its public comment period, most in opposition, at which point Delaware Secretary of Education Susan Bunting rewrote the rule.

“It got on the radar on the professional anti-LGBT and trans people organizations and it has turned into a proposal that would actually make it worse for a lot of trans students,” National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) Executive Director Mara Keisling said in an interview with Rewire.News. “It’s our position that we’d better off without it. Delaware is such a positive state and has been a real beacon for [trans-friendly] public policy and this just isn’t.”

Along with the usual handwringing over bathroom and locker room access for trans students, the revised regulation includes a provision that would require school personnel to out trans students to their parents before taking action to recognize their rights, a move that, according to Rashbaum, could put students at risk of homelessness. “The idea [for the initial regulation] was not to usurp parents’ rights or cut parents out of the process in any way shape or form, it was to make sure that a child was safe,” she said. “What the committee talked about was that, especially at the older ages, a lot of kids get thrown out of their home for this. There’s a large a percentage of the homeless population between [age] 16 and 24 which is made up of LGBTQ kids who have been thrown out of their home.”

LGBTQ youth have a 120 percent increased risk of experiencing homelessness compared to youth who identify as heterosexual and cisgender, according to a University of Chicago study. “We didn’t want to be in a position where a junior or senior came to a teacher and was trying to navigate something, [gets thrown out of their home, and isn’t] able to finish high school because they came out to a teacher,” Rashbaum said. Read more via Rewire.news